Thoughts: 21 November 2021

 

This 2018 publication becomes more relevant and timely with each passing day

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Bluntly put, when democracy no longer delivers the goods, it will be consigned to the dustbin of history by an angry mob.

January 6, anyone?

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

We face a stark choice. We can expend our waning stocks of fossil fuels, our scarce capital, and our limited political will in a vain attempt to maintain industrial civilization as it exists, or we can use those same resources to effect a necessary transition to a radically different type of civilization. But we cannot do both, and we must choose reasonably soon.

Does anyone contend that we're still not trying to have our cake & eat it, too?

In Europe's Shadow

Robert D. Kaplan

Byzantine art was monotonously sensuous even as it was austere, and with an irresistible splendor that “dumbfounded,” revealing a civilization that encompassed at once stirring liturgies and fierce doctrinal debates over the nature of Christ and the possession of the True Cross.

Having viewed a great deal of Byzantine (Orthodox) art in Romania, Turkey, Venice, and Sicily, I can confirm Kaplan's observation. It is at once simple, patterned, and predictable, but also awesome & inspiring.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

And by reflecting on it we can perhaps detect one more characteristic which art must have, if it is to forgo both, entertainment-value and magical value, and draw a subject-matter from its audience themselves. It must be prophetic.

Most art is either "entertainment-value" or of "magical value" (subtly didactic & conformist), so the prophetic is rare indeed. Examples of "prophetic" art?

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

Imagination is indifferent to the distinction between the real and the unreal.

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

In art, religion, science, and history the true object is always the mind itself it is only the ostensible object that is other than the mind. That is to say, art and the rest are themselves philosophy, but implicit philosophy. Their true nature is to be philosophy, but this nature is concealed beneath an error in self-knowledge whose peculiar character produces the peculiar facies of the artistic or other consciousness. Art and the rest are the unconscious philosophies of a mind nescientis se philosophari; and this ignorance, which is the difference between the artist and the philosopher, is what prevents art, religion, and so forth from consciously studying their real object, the mind, and compels them to believe that their true aim is to contemplate those images and abstractions which are their ostensible objects.

But could the value of art and religion ever lie in the strictly articulate? The mind prefers the articulate, but the soul (psyche) responds to the symbol.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

The professor stood at his lectern and noted that all autoimmune illnesses conform to a similar pattern. They all start with an insult to the body’s sense of homeostasis. That insult could be a virus, bacterial infection, splinter, transplant organ, whole-body hypothermia, fever or allergen that triggers an immune response, and, for reasons we barely understand, that immune response never turns off.

Our understanding of autoimmune disease is indeed limited, yet it is perhaps becoming more common. But then we tend to seek pallatives more eagerly than true cures. (Which would likely require changes in how we live and care for our environment.)

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Until the invention of antibiotics in 1928, Western medicine couldn’t deliver much better results than indigenous medicine anywhere else in the world. In many cases, going to a shaman or witch doctor offered just about the same likelihood of recovery as seeing a Western doctor.

Wait! Didn't life expectancy expand rapidly before this date? Yes, but not so much because of medical practice but because of public health practices (sanitary sewers, potable water, etc.) and improved nutrition.

New Pathways in Psychology

Colin Wilson

A stimulus is nothing else than a suggestion for a mental act (or any other kind of act), and an enriched consciousness contains its own suggestions within itself.

Help!

Oliver Burkeman

We can't control outcomes in any sphere of life. All you can do – and therefore the only responsibility you have – is to put in the time and effort: into relationships, parenting, finding happiness, whatever. The actual result, in a profound sense, is none of your business.

Control? No. But influence? Yes. In the end we must follow the path revealed to Arjuna by Krishna: "“Let your concern (or focus) be on your action, let it not be on the outcome of the action. Do not act only out of expectation of a result, but then do not slip into inactivity.”

Thoughts: 16 Nov. 2021

The Wedge

Scott Carney

We may not always think about our death, but we sense death constantly on a cellular level. Evolution gave us this morbid gift. We are built to propagate the species. Every hormonal response, reflex, sensation and cognitive ability exists to serve this purpose. Every emotion, from fear, love and happiness to sadness, ambivalence and ennui, confers critical information that helps us stay alive.

The push of stayin' alive. But what about the pull? What are we stayin' alive for? To listen to the Bee Gees?

Doom

Niall Ferguson

This is not to dismiss the potential risks that may arise from rising global temperatures, but simply to suggest that obsessive discussion of those risks in 2019 and early 2020 led to myopia. For the average American on the eve of the pandemic, the chance of dying from an overdose was two hundred times greater than the chance of being killed by a cataclysmic storm, and the chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident was fifteen hundred times higher than the chance of being killed by a flood. The threat of climate-related disaster lay in the future; the threat of pandemic was proximate. In 2018, the number of Americans killed by influenza and pneumonia (59,120) was substantially higher than the number who died in car crashes (39,404). 

Per the immediately preceding quote, we have a strong instinct to stay alive, but we're often quite deluded about the relative levels of threat from a wide variety of sources. 

The Enigma of Reason

Hugo Mercier

Does all this suggest that psychological reasons, whether “implicit” or conscious, have no reality whatsoever, that they are a pure construction? No, reasons are indeed constructed, but under two constraints that ensure that they have some degree of both psychological and social reality. The reasons we invoke for justification have to make psychological sense. Talk of reasons need not—in fact, we have argued, cannot—provide an accurate account of what happens in our minds, but it tends to highlight factors that did play a causal role. Reasons are typically constructed out of bits of psychological insight.

Ah, yes, our strength of reason isn't what we'd like to to be, and comes from unreliable places.

Trust and the Competition Delusion - Griffith Review

griffithreview.com

Increasingly, in our current system, the public only gets to choose which oligarchic faction they support. And they’re turning off in droves – that is, when they’re not enraged. By pioneering a life for ourselves beyond the competition delusion, we could make our way once again towards the ancient Athenian vision of democracy as a system in which every citizen takes turns in ruling and being ruled.

Two Essays on Colin Wilson

Gary Lachman

Colin Wilson’s approach lies somewhere between the passive receptivity of the Jungian work and the strenuous super-efforts of Ouspensky. He argues that it is essential to realize that our conscious attitudes have a powerful effect on how we see the world.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

“What’s new?” is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question “What is best?,” a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

The first argument is an argument from experience. Those societies that glorify militarism almost invariably lose wars.

If you get in a lot of fights, you're gonna lose some. Simple. Ask the U.S. military. No one individual or entity is invincible. Ask Michael Jordan.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

There was a pervasive sense that, in the phrase Margaret Thatcher famously used to shut down debate over free-market economics, “there is no alternative.” She used the slogan so much that some of her cabinet colleagues began to call her “TINA.” That phrase captured the spirit of the times, an almost Marxist idea of historical inevitability—except that capitalism, rather than socialism, was the ideology lying at the “end of history.” And it wasn’t just Thatcher.

This line of thinking, of "no alternative," of "invincibility," is deluded when applied to any plan, institution, or ideology. And markets are not the least exception: some work well, some horribly. But all require constant attention and inputs of energy (such as regulation).

Thoughts: 29 October 2021

 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

[T]he gap between infinite human desires and finite biological resources is at root a moral problem—How and where shall we place a controlling power on human will and appetite?—not something that can be bridged by merely technical or material measures. Hence the solution must be spiritual or religious lest it be nakedly political. 

Many will balk at this bald statement, believing along with the Enlightenment philosophes that religion has no place in the political realm. But in fact we do have a guiding myth of eternal progress through technological prowess and a tacit religion in the form of a secular ideology tantamount to a religion—namely, an absolute faith in the efficacy of instrumental rationality. The problem is that this “faith” lacks a moral core—in other words, anything that would moderate human self-seeking or the insatiable quest for more wealth and power. Its credo is that humankind must use rational means to become the master and possessor of nature and then use that power to achieve personal and national wealth. The overly rationalized and morally unrestrained world in which we find ourselves was created by this quasi-religion and cannot be reformed with more of the same, only by metanoia. That is, by a conversion to a radically different metaphysical stance that restores humanity’s relation to the infinite and provides guidance and practical support for living well on the earth without devouring it.

My initial reaction to reading this? To yell "Amen! Amen! Amen!" We can't heal our political divisions until we have a sense of the common good, a morality, a new sense of being in the world. Truly, a "metanoia," a "conversion"--a change in our heart-mind-- is required if we are to survive, let along thrive.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Morris Berman and Stephen E. Toulmin chronicle the development of the modern mindset: Berman sees revived participation as the necessary response to the disenchantment of the world; Toulmin’s revisionist history suggests that we would have done better to ground modern science on Montaigne rather than Descartes, for this would have lead us earlier to an ecological worldview.

Where Western Civ too a wrong turn.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Although it was rarely clearly articulated or even fully realized by the contrarian artists and intellectuals themselves, the liberal values of modernity were deemed unacceptable because they lacked a strong vision of the transcendent—a form of ultimate meaning that is more important than the needs of the individual self.

Compare to the first Ophuls quote above.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Physical energy is the obvious source of power in biological organisms and human economies, but consciousness, and the agreements that constitute human culture, are not physical or material. While the domain of culture is closely connected to physical things and transactions in the exterior objective world, like consciousness itself, culture is largely an interior phenomenon which can only be fully known by participating in the subjective agreements that give it life.

Also compare to the first Ophuls quote. Our culture needs a metanoia.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

If a “community of rational interests and values” existed on the domestic front, then why not in the international community as well?

Because, [Hans] Morgenthau answered, there was no such thing as an international community. Domestic disputes could be resolved—not solved—through discussion and negotiations, or when negotiation failed, by appeals to the sovereignty of the state and the authority of the law. In the relatively benign context of the Western democracies, even those who disagreed with particular outcomes were willing to accept them so that they could live to dispute another day. Only small, knuckle-dragging minorities resorted to violence, and they were vastly outnumbered by the overwhelming law-abiding majority. Consensus was possible because within national borders people agreed to disagree. This was the very meaning of “legitimacy.” “Disputants could not fail to realize that what they had in common was more important than what they were fighting about. They met, indeed, on the common ground of liberal rationality, and their conflicts, since they arose under the conditions and within the framework of the liberal society, could all be settled through the instrumentalities of liberal rationality.”

Query: per this re-statement of Morgenthau's contention, can we say that current American politics, government, and law have lost their legitimacy--at least among Trumpists who are more than ready to overthrow democracy to remain in power?

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

The experience [of losing a great deal of money in the stock market] left a deep impression on Keynes. Financial markets, he had discovered, were very different from the clean, ordered entities economists presented in textbooks. The fluctuations of market prices did not express the accumulated wisdom of rational actors pursuing their own self-interest but the judgments of flawed men attempting to navigate an uncertain future. Market stability depended not so much on supply and demand finding an equilibrium as it did on political power maintaining order, legitimacy, and confidence.

My conclusion: all economics (or at least macroeconomics) is political economics. "The economy" (a major league abstraction) is a function of groups, individuals, mores, interests, beliefs, culture, institutions, etc., and not a neat system of intersecting curves.

The Revenge of Geography

Robert D. Kaplan

Europe, it appears, offered the perfect degree of environmental difficulty, challenging its inhabitants to rise to greater civilizational heights, even as it still lay in the northern temperate zone, fairly proximate to Africa, the Middle East, the Eurasian steppe, and North America; thus its peoples were able to take full advantage of trade patterns as they burgeoned in the course of centuries of technological advancements in navigation and other spheres.

New Pathways in Psychology

Colin Wilson

It comes back, then, to the question of the self-image. Miseries, humiliations, embarrassments, accidents, have the effect of creating partial self-images—self-images which, since they present themselves as complete, are bound to be false.  Consciousness narrows, and my self-image becomes as false and distorted as if I was seeing myself in a trick mirror at a fairground. But a trick mirror at least shows you your whole self, from head to foot; the partial self-image is a pocket-size distorting mirror.

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

I propose that Michael Pollan’s seven words for healthy eating ["Eat food, not too much, mostly plants"] can be re-stipulated into these six words: 1) protect the liver, 2) feed the gut. This includes animals.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 26 July 2021

 

Giannis acting in the moment

“When you focus on the past, that’s your ego. ... When I focus on the future, that's my pride. I try to focus on the present. That's humility.”

— Giannis Antetokounmpo

William Walker Atkinson Premium 7 Book Collection

WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON

Desire is the motivating power behind all actions – it is a natural law of life. Everything from the atom to the monad; from the monad to the insect; from the insect to man; from man to Nature, acts and does things by reason of the power and force of Desire, the Animating Motive.

In Europe's Shadow

Robert D. Kaplan

I refer to understanding the true character of objectivity. For what is taught in journalism schools is an invaluable craft, whereas properly observing the world is a matter of deliberation and serious reading over decades in the fields of history, philosophy, and political science. Journalism actually is not necessarily, whatever the experts of the profession may claim, a traditional subject in its own right. Rather, it is a means to explore and better communicate subjects that are, in fact, traditional areas of study: history and philosophy as I’ve said, but also government, politics, literature, architecture, art, and so on. I’ve never altogether trusted what journalists say about themselves.

Beyond the Robot

Gary Lachman

The ego needs to assume its position as captain of the ship. It is, as Wilson argues, the controller of consciousness, and not, as we have mistakenly believed ever since Freud, a mere puppet of the dark forces within us. As it is now, when we want a change in consciousness we look for some stimulus to trigger it.

Bonds That Make Us Free

C. Terry Warner

We are seeking to understand the source of our troubled, afflicted emotions and attitudes and the way they foul our relationships with others. Here is a clue: those times when we feel most miserable, offended, or angry are invariably the occasions when we’re also most absorbed in ourselves and most anxious or suspicious or fearful, or in some other way concerned about ourselves. Why is this? Why do we get so caught up in ourselves and so ready to take offense at what others do?

Dao De Jing

Roger Ames & David Hall

The processive and synergistic forces at work in way-making render the language of discreteness and closure inappropriate. The road is always under construction, and the hands at work are many. While there is the punctuation of consummatory events that separates the paragraphs of one’s lived experience, still the narrative is coherent and continuous: a never-ending story.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 28 June 2021

 

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Attention, however, intrinsically is a way in which, not a thing: it is intrinsically a relationship, not a brute fact. It is a ‘howness’, a something between, an aspect of consciousness itself, not a ‘whatness’, a thing in itself, an object of consciousness. It brings into being a world and, with it, depending on its nature, a set of values.

“Studies have shown that 90% of error in thinking is due to error in perception. If you can change your perception, you can change your emotion and this can lead to new ideas. Logic will never change emotion or perception.”

--Edward DeBono

“People prefer their sources of information to be highly correlated. Then all the messages you get are consistent with each other and you’re comfortable."

— Daniel Kahneman

One way to spot a poor thinker is to see how many of their decisions boomerang back to them. If poor thinkers make poor decisions it stands to reason those decisions will eventually create more problems. More problems consume more time, leaving them even less time to think about new problems.

The time used to correct poor thinking comes from the time that could be used for good thinking.

Good thinkers understand a simple truth: you can’t make good decisions without good thinking and good thinking requires time.

Good thinking is expensive but poor thinking costs a fortune.

--Farnum Street blog

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

The relevant sense of reasonable, and the phrase reasonable doubt, appeared in the sixteenth-century Scholastic, Suarez, while the reasonable man has an ancestor in the steady man of medieval canon law: If a man and woman are surprised by her father and compelled to marry, the man’s consent is null and the marriage void if the fear inflicted on him is such as would coerce a “steady man.”

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

History is the knowledge of an infinite whole whose parts, repeating the plan of the whole in their structure, are only known by reference to their context. But since this context is always incomplete, we can never know a single part as it actually is.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Most Westerners who travel in India find rickshaws discomforting. Although I have used them a lot over the years, in part because I sometimes feel safer to have company in strange parts of Indian cities, I have always found the experience morally jarring. Westerners tend to be big and heavy compared to Indians, and rickshaw drivers often have to use almost all their strength to move their machines with one of us on board. It seems reprehensible to sit in relative comfort on the back of a rickshaw while a nearly destitute person pedals one around for a few rupees. On the other hand, those rupees are vitally important for the driver, and it seems just as reprehensible to walk to spare oneself guilt.

N.B. This captures my feeling as well. We rarely used human-powered rickshaws, but when we did, I felt both uncomfortable but gratified to have given this man [sic] something (generous] towards his daily bread.

New Pathways in Psychology

Colin Wilson

[Alfred] Adler must be regarded as the fatherfigure of the new generation in psychology: [Victor] Frankl, [Abraham] Maslow, [Medard] Boss. What he called ‘the affirmative unfolding of the organism’ was, in fact, a recognition of the basic evolutionary drive of human beings, that man is an evolutionary animal, and that neurosis is the frustration of this evolutionary drive. In dealing with neurosis, Adler was less concerned to trace its roots in the patient’s childhood than to understand its meaning, what it was driving towards.

An Essay on the 'New' Existentialism

Colin Wilson

Heidegger, like Hemingway, claims that man only knows himself in the face of death or crisis (‘only a bullfighter lives his life all the way up’)—we may recollect, for example, Anna Karenina’s recognition, as she flings herself under a train, that death is the last thing she wants. This is the basis of their negative judgement on human life: that even the most intelligent of us are blinded by triviality until crisis shocks us awake (and by then it is usually too late).

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

The Chilean people had made a mistake in electing Allende—actually only a plurality of Chileans had been mistaken. Given what he knew, what he expected, and what he feared, Henry Kissinger was not going to let the mere fact of a free election stand in his way of dealing with a potential threat to the United States. “I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” The statement looks a lot different if one has the rise of Adolf Hitler in mind.