Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 29 December 2020

 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Basins of attraction are places of local stability or equilibrium where the system in question is more likely to settle and remain, because less energy is needed to keep the system there. In the state-space model, the basins are locations in the state space where large numbers of people don’t have to invest a lot of cognitive energy— they don’t have to think much— to maintain their political ideologies, because (among other reasons) the ideologies at those locations align with their temperaments and moral intuitions. Psychologists can measure people’s investment of cognitive energy by using methods such as the implicit association test, which captures the degree of subconscious association between mental representations in a person’s mind. Generally, the more conscious an association, the more cognitive energy is invested in making the association.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Buzz Holling practically despairs on this score. “Because we are only now beginning to understand the changing reality,” he writes, “there is consequently no limit to the ability of good scientists to invent compelling lines of causal explanation that inexorably support their particular beliefs. How can even the best-intentioned politician possibly be expected to deal with that? How can even the most reflective of the public?”

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

Psychology is not history but science, a science constructed on naturalistic principles.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

The ideal of equality in freedom could never be static, frozen in time, because in truth it could never be realized; each generation had to define the concept anew. And so the American Revolution was “an endless process rather than an isolated act,” and the ongoing effort to achieve the ideal constituted “a restless and dynamic search for a state of society that could at best be approximated, never fully attained.” It was a Sisyphean task, but no less real or desirable for that.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

One of the more telling examples [of criticism of Hannah Arendt's political ideals] came from the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who lamented what he called Arendt’s “curious perspective.” She imagined “a state,” he said, “which is relieved of the administrative processing of social problems; a politics which is cleansed of socioeconomic issues; an institutionalization of public liberty which is independent of the organization of public wealth; a radical democracy which inhibits its liberating efficacy just at the boundaries where political oppression ceases and social repression begins—this path is unimaginable for any modern society.”

Agree.

Thoughts of the Day: Saturday 11 December 2020

 

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

We moderns are just as religious as our premodern ancestors, but we have chosen to worship two savage gods—Moloch and Mammon.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Nature Resilient was the next mental model—one that, [C.J. "Buzz"] Holling argues, dominates ecology today and represents a major step forward. An eco-system is resilient, in this view, if the relationships among its organisms persist even in the face of sharp shocks from outside.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

[S]ince it’s impossible to separate economics from modern medicine, it’s also important to note that Western treatment for chronic illnesses often requires that patients continue to take expensive medicine their whole lives. In these cases, the disease is much more profitable than a cure.

Diplomacy

Henry Kissinger

Because British foreign policy grew out of open debates, the British people displayed extraordinary unity in times of war. On the other hand, so openly partisan a foreign policy made it possible—though highly unusual—for foreign policy to be reversed when a prime minister was replaced.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

C.G. Jung

We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives.

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

The perfect concreteness of pure justice, of absolute right, is unattainable in the sphere of law, for law regarded as an objective reality over against the individual already shows the mark of that last abstraction which divides subject from object. Society, as distinct from the individual, is already an abstraction, and as such cannot have that claim upon the individual which is possessed only by an absolutely concrete principle. Law is not the will of the individual himself; it is a command laid upon him from without, and therefore his obedience to it is always tainted with utilitarianism. Hence all those utilitarian degradations of law to which we have referred are in a sense inevitable. For law—and the same, we shall see, is true of history as a whole—is an incomplete realization of concrete thought: it is essentially a step, but an imperfect step, from abstract to concrete, from utility to responsibility. The very externality of law to the agent binds it down to the world of abstract or scientific thought, and necessitates a contradiction by which, on the one hand, the law itself claims to embody right, while on the other the individual conscience claims to defy the law in the name of right.