Thoughts 29 January 2022

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Thus the need to sustain two incompatible ‘takes’ on the world simultaneously explains, I believe (and there is no significant competing theory), the extraordinary fact that the brain is so deeply divided, an otherwise inexplicable waste of potential in an organ that exists only to make connexions, and whose power lies, precisely, in the number of connexions it can make.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Attention is not just another ‘cognitive function’: it is, as I say, the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged.

The Way of Zen

Alan W. Watts

In English the differences between things and actions are clearly, if not always logically, distinguished, but a great number of Chinese words do duty for both nouns and verbs–so that one who thinks in Chinese has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events, that our world is a collection of processes rather than entities.

Consider in light of McGilchrist's take, which I find very similar.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

The GOP’s base of electoral support was heavily recruited from the white working class. If we take education as a proxy for class, the single best predictor other than race for voting for Trump was the lack of a college degree. The result was a party unified around themes of cultural identity and affect and riven with contradictions when it came to policy.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Collingwood distinguishes sharply between human life considered as natural process and human life considered as action. Thus, an individual life is in one aspect a structure of biological events containing ‘all the accidents of animal existence’ (IH 304), and in another, action, self-consciousness or thought. Within each single life, as Collingwood puts it, ‘the tides of thought, his own and others’, flow crosswise, regardless of its structure, like sea-water through a stranded wreck’ (IH 304). Individuals can be both biographical and historical subjects, but the limits set by biography are not those set by history.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The political men of letters in Burke’s picture had griped and exaggerated, without presenting a viable alternative. They had delegitimized one institution after another by sapping public faith in social artifice and ignoring the need for a “veil” of unreflecting custom to cloak destructive natural passions. The financiers in their turn had abetted a perilous financial scheme that brought France a ruinous inflation and wrecked public confidence in the state’s fiscal responsibility.

Metaphors We Live By

George Lakoff, Mark Johnson

Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.

Decoding Jung's Metaphysics

Bernardo Kastrup

God is an obvious psychic and non-physical fact, i.e., a fact that can be established psychically but not physically. (AJ: 133, emphasis added) To assert the “obvious psychic and non-physical fact” of God’s existence is a bold step for the metaphysically reticent Jung. The assertion is particularly significant because it happens in a passage wherein Jung also distances himself from psychologism: given the context, it is impossible to argue that Jung is merely psychologizing the notion of God.

American Republicans & Conservatives Honor Roll

 

Edmund Burke (1729-1797): the father of conservatism in the post-French Revolution world

I've publicly admitted on various occasions that I was a teenage Republican, although I must sheepishly admit that this condition persisted well past my teen years. (However, I've never voted for the Republican nominee for president; i.e., no Nixon or later nominees). But this bout of Republicanism was something that I was born into; my parents were committed, active members of the Republican Party. By the time I was 16 years old, I'd attended two Republican national conventions (San Francisco and Miami) and had met numerous Republican officials and candidates and attended hours of meetings. I also hasten to add for the benefit of any younger readers, that the present-day manifestation of the Republican Party is a far cry from the party of my parents and my youth. The last Republican nominee for public office that I can remember voting for was Rep. Jim Leach (R-IA), which continued even after I affiliated myself with the Democratic Party back in the early 1980s.  Leach was a "moderate" Republican and received a lot of crossover votes until 2006 when the Democrats finally nominated a well-qualified candidate against him (Dave Loebsack), and it was clear that Leach wasn't appreciated by his own party in Congress. I thought of my vote for Loebsak as an act of mercy toward Leech as well as a vote in favor of Loebsack. (N.B. Leach later endorsed Obama for president against McCain, and he penned an editorial in 2021 in favor of the impeachment of Trump based on Trump's role in the attack on the Capital.)  And as mentioned, I've been registered as a Democrat since the early 1980s. That way I can honestly and accurately say that "I'm not a member of any organized political party--I'm a Democrat" (hat-tip to Will Rogers for coining that ditty). 

But while I was raised in the Republican Party, I was born with a cautious, conservative temperament. With age, however, I received a liberal (arts) education; I've lived through a wide-ranging set of experiences that have fostered a pragmatic frame of mind toward action; and I've cultivated a penchant for radical (as in "going to the root of things") perspective. But for all these additions, I am--at least in some ways--still a conservative at heart. 

So what does it mean to be a "conservative" at heart? From my perspective, it implies several things. It means preserving (conserving) what one has that is worth preserving. At the present moment, that would certainly entail democracy and the rule of law. This is not to suggest that either our democracy or our legal system are without flaws. Hardly. Indeed, as to democracy, I'm with Churchill: it's the worst form of political rule except for all the others that have been tried from time to time. And our legal system is too much governed by the Wizard of Id's golden rule: "them's that's got the gold make the rules," among other foibles. But, to continue my string of cliches and well-traveled quotes, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. So, having once been the owner of an old house, I'm all in favor of making repairs to maintain the (mostly) solid structure that we've come to know and value. So with our form of government; better imperfect democracy than authoritarianism and despotism. So, too, with the rule of law; our laws and judicial system are imperfect but far better than most and if laws and judicial system are trashed, we will suffer very ugly consequences. And, I might add, in what is admittedly a bit of a balancing act, I exercise my cautious, conservative impulses in concert with my liberal, pragmatic, and radical dispositions. Thus, of late I've taken to describing myself as a "Burkean radical" or, conversely, a "radical Burkean." An oxymoron? Perhaps, but I like to think of such a designation as a fruitful paradox; a form of "both/and" and not "either/or." Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes (hat-tip to the poet of American democracy, Walt Whitman). 

Thus, my conservative self wants slow, careful change. No storming the barricades. Instead, going to the meetings: talk, persuade, bargain, wheedle, and cajole to realize pragmatic results that benefit the society as a whole and that recognize the interests of all of those legitimately at the table. And yet--we need radical change. Or, rather, radical change is coming, it's only a matter of direction. Climate change and other instances of our "polycrisis" (hat-tip to Adam Tooze for this term) will require many and basic radical changes that will go to the root of our culture. The question won't be whether radical changes occur, but whether we will deliberately choose the changes we should desire (my conservative option) or whether radical changes will be foisted upon us by our failure to act soon enough to avoid the most radical and most disturbing changes. Nature, in some ways, is my model: it conserves life and it also allows--indeed, sometimes requires--radical changes in life. I want to conserve the Nature and the (best of ) the culture and society that we still have and not suffer a wholesale transformation into something utterly alien. 

So how does one make my honor roll of conservatives and Republicans? Simple: one speaks out for democracy and the rule of law; one speaks out in favor of dialectical and not eristic decision-making; in favor of speech and not force. One speaks out against Trump and Trumpism (the most un-conservative force ever to have held the presidency and Congress). One does not endorse Orban (Hungary) (as Trump just did), Boloansaro (Brazil), Duterte (Philippines), Erdogan (Turkey), or Putin (Russia), and other such faux-democrats, demagogues, and despots. “A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!” said the father of post-WWII American conservatism, William F. Buckley. But in our time the tides of history have largely shifted away from liberalism toward illiberalism; away from deliberation and toward force; and away from democracy and toward authoritarianism. The inherent flaw in conservatism is that it tends to leave the powerful in power; it defaults too easily to the status quo. But the strength of conservatism is that it puts principles before power; it seeks to protect the bedrock upon which societies can flourish. 

As we approach the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, and now one year past the Trump presidency, these individuals, all of whom (I believe) either self-identify as "conservative" or "Republican" (or both), have passed the test. Note that precious, precious few are elected officials (sad indeed). Note that I undoubtedly have some serious policy disagreements with them, but all have spoken out against the corruptions (pecuniary, personal, and institutional) of Trump and his ilk, which includes most current Republican elected officials. That these individuals chose democracy and the rule of law over personal gain and personal friendships speaks loudly indeed. I commend them to you. 

1. David Brooks, NYT & The Atlantic.
2. David Frum, The Atlantic & former W. Bush speechwriter. 
3. Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic & former WaPo columnist & historian of  the USSR & Eastern Europe
4. Max Boot, WaPo columnist, and historian
5. Bill Kristol, formerly of The Weekly Standard, The Bulwark founder & editor, and former chief-of-staff to Vice-President Quayle
6. Tom Nichols, a contributor to The Atlantic & former Naval War College prof
7. Andrew Sullivan, podcaster, blogger, & author
8. Charlie Sykes, podcaster and The Bulwark co-founder & contributor
9. George Conway, lawyer, and Republican official, & a Lincoln Project co-founder
10. Steve Schmidt, McCain campaign strategist & Republican political operative
11. Robert Kagan, foreign policy expert
12. Rick Wilson, former Republican political strategist & Lincoln Project co-founder
13. John Weaver, political strategist for McCain campaigns & Lincoln Project co-founder
14. Mona Charen, writer, podcaster, former Reagan administration official, and The Bulwark policy editor
15. Ross Douthat, NYT columnist 
16. David French, commentator, formerly with National Review, & now with The Dispatch
17. Jennifer Rubin, WaPo columnist
18. George Will, WaPo columnist
19. Christine Todd Whitman, former Republican gov NJ & former EPA director in W. Bush administration
20. Evan McMullin, former CIA operative, former House Republican caucus policy director, & now an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate in Utah
21. Brett Stephens, NYT columnist
22. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-WY and vice-chair the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack
23. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-IL was one of ten Republicans to vote in favor of Trump's second impeachment

Also, those associated with The Bulwark and The Lincoln Project whom I haven't mentioned above. 

I invite any nominations to the list or any criticisms of any selection. 

As we go into 2022 and toward 2024, crucial years for the future of democracy and the rule of law in the U.S., we need these folks and a whole lot more like them. 2020 was a success overall, but a large, strong, and perhaps growing cancer continues to infect the American polity, and we need courageous and patriotic Americans to do their part to preserve, protect, and defend our Constitution and the democratic and legal principles that have grown from it. We should not want the failure of the American experiment to fall upon our heads. 

N.B. The list is based on my random recall of whom I recognized and not necessarily in order of any particular merit.

Thoughts for the Day: 28 August 2021

 

We were not meant to be inundated by cement, asphalt, glass and metal, and deprived of physical contact with nature.

(Location 543)

The human environment and the natural environment deteriorate together; we cannot adequately combat environmental degradation unless we attend to causes related to human and social degradation. (Location 564)

“Both everyday experience and scientific research show that the gravest effects of all attacks on the environment are suffered by the poorest.”

(Location 566)

Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. (Loc. 580)

And now for some other voices:

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

What happened in the first years of the seventeenth century was no gradual development, no addition to what had gone before, but a complete break with the past and a radical new beginning.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

This modern belief in reason, with science as its handmaiden, was inherently optimistic; it confidently adhered to the notion of progress. As humankind’s understanding of the universe and its mechanisms increased, so too did its ability to gain control over nature and improve the conditions of human life.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

The Idea of Nature

R. G. Collingwood

The problem of the thing in itself is one of the most puzzling problems in Kant’s philosophy. What makes it so puzzling is the fact that it seems impossible to state the problem without flatly contradicting yourself. The problem is stated in some such way as this: Whatever we know, we know at once intuitively and discursively, that is, by the combined use of our senses and understanding. The only genuine intuition is sensuous intuition, and the only valid use of the understanding is to think about things which we sensuously perceive. The only knowledge, therefore, is an intelligent or thoughtful perception.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

“The point, therefore, is not that ‘complexity’ is a problem entirely unique to our age. It is rather (1) that ‘complexity’ has now become a crucial and perhaps even unavoidable consideration in many of our most pressing questions about the world and (2) that to deal with ‘complexity’ seriously seems to present some extraordinary difficulties for our understanding” (Langdon Winner, “Complexity and the Limits of Human Understanding,” in Organized Social Complexity: Challenge to Politics and Policy, ed. Todd La Porte [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975].

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

The appeal of demagogues lies in their ability to take a generalized discontent, the mood of drift, resentment, disillusionment and economic shakiness, and transform it into a plan for doing something. They make inaction seem morally degrading. And many young men and women become eager to transform their powerlessness into an irrepressible rage to hurt or destroy.

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

Burke’s horrified reaction to the killing of the French king and queen helps point us toward another, far fiercer right-wing critique of liberalism. That assault finds in liberalism a fatal overreliance on reason. It shares Burke’s sense of the chaos that could follow from the belief that society should be remade all at once on the basis of a big idea, with tradition and custom annihilated.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 26 February 2021

 

Everything that you might want to know about conservatism but were afraid to ask. 

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The advice [offfered by contemporary exponents of Burke's thought] focused on the prudent management of unavoidable change in order to limit its social disruptiveness. Less was said about the hard part of identifying which values had to be defended. Burkeanism of this second-order kind is rightly thought of as a historically relative Utilitarianism, cast in negative terms: minimize disruption according to what the standards of the day find disruptive.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

To understand the meaning of totalitarian terror, we have to turn our attention to two noteworthy facts that would appear to be completely unrelated. The first of these is the extreme care that both Nazis and Bolshevists take to isolate concentration camps from the outside world and to treat those who have disappeared into them as if they were already dead.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Gary Lachman

But Kek is not the only god of chaos making an appearance these days. Trump, we’ve seen, is an avatar of this particular state too, or at least of confusion, or, less politely, of a mess. For many on the alt-right, Trump is only the beginning.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 15 February 2021

 

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

The French Revolution and the American Revolution are two of the most important and enduring legacies of the Enlightenment. As [Isaiah] Berlin says, they have almost nothing to do with Romanticism:

…the principles in the name of which the French Revolution was fought were principles of universal reason, of order, of justice, not at all connected with the sense of uniqueness, the profound emotional introspection, the sense of the differences of things, dissimilarities rather than similarities, with which the Romantic movement is usually associated.

(However, as I hope to show later, there is a track that leads direct from the Enlightenment to Romanticism – another case of there being a smooth transition from one hemisphere's agenda to the (in reality quite opposed) agenda of the other hemisphere, which I have argued for in the case of the Reformation.)

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

After the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the first conservatives asked themselves whether the turmoil, suffering, and criminal excess had been due to liberty or to its perversion. Burke mildly and Maistre savagely had blamed modern liberty, that is, liberty understood in the wrong way.

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

In order that there should be chronicle, there must first be history: for chronicle is the body of history from which the spirit has gone; the corpse of history.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

By 1969, the year Johnson left office, the poverty rate was down to 12.1 percent—a reduction of more than 12 million people and more than one-third of the impoverished population at the time Johnson had taken office.

Pebbles of Perception

Laurence Endersen

Start by considering the end. Visualise both the road to personal fulfilment and the destination. Consider what  behaviour  would thwart that fulfilment and do the opposite. Thinking about the route to avoid helps reveal the more rewarding road.

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 23 January 2021

 

2011 publication

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Future historians will probably regard our era as an age of collective folly—a time when large numbers of highly intelligent and influential people fervently believed (despite Adam Smith’s clearly expressed sentiments to the contrary) that society and polity should also be ruled by the same invisible hand that governs a market economy.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

The material abundance of the Gilded Age had sown doubts in Keynes about the supposed scarcity of resources, but it was the ravages of the Depression that made him certain the old order had it wrong. Clearly the trouble was not a shortage of production.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

Keynes’ admiration for Burke was unusual in Bloomsbury. The group understood the French Revolution as the fundamental juncture in modern politics—the great barrier separating conservatism and their own progressive liberalism.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The authorities that conservatives first defended were particular and personal: local squires and judges, clergymen, and teachers, but authority has grown impersonal: the state’s legal authority (to have the final say); the market’s economic authority (to deny those who cannot pay); society’s normative authority (to police ethical and cultural standards).

The Origins of Political Order

Francis Fukuyama

But it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts.

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

This is also the aim of other “dangerous” activities, from sports-car racing and mountain climbing to antisocial behavior like vandalism and shoplifting. The “thrill” each affords comes from “you” pushing the robot aside.

Time Warrior

Steve Chandler

Just as your inability to play a Chopin sonata on the piano is not a personality or character problem. It’s always and only a matter of practice.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 17 January 2021

 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

“No passion,” said Edmund Burke, the English statesman and philosopher, “so effectually robs the mind of all its power of acting and reasoning as fear.”

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Nothing is more frightful than to see ignorance in action.---Goethe.

Apologies to the Grandchldren

William Ophuls

That people can be persuaded by factual or scientific arguments to change their minds is demonstrably false. Confirmation bias—we take in information that supports our existing beliefs and mostly ignore or reject the rest—is only one of the many tricks the human mind plays on itself. Hence we respond to new facts in less-than-rational and often sub-optimal ways.

Buddha Takes No Prisoners

(William) Patrick Ophuls

First, the essential aim of all Buddhist practice is to develop undistracted awareness—that is, to arrive at the state of pure presence that the Buddha-to-be first experienced under the rose-apple tree as a child and that later became the key to his awakening.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Collingwood wishes us to see that history is systematic knowledge. Its purpose is not to provide emotional satisfaction, but ‘to command assent’ (PH 73).

Impeachment

Cass R. Sunstein

At the same time, bad decisions, or politically objectionable decisions, are not sufficient grounds for impeachment, even if much of the nation is up in arms. The United States, unlike some other democracies, does not allow votes of no confidence.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

The history of philosophy transpired in this two-limbed kind of development in both Greece and India, despite the modern idea that Greek thinkers were primarily realistic and logical, while Indian thought was supposedly limited to transcendentalist and intuitive modes. In fact, neither of these ancient cultures was as limited as that. The Greeks quite as much as the Indians had philosophical schools with mystical and transcendentalist orientations; conversely, the various trends of pluralism, naturalism, empiricism, skepticism, and protoscientific rationalism unfolded in the Indian schools as well as in the Greek.