Thoughts 2 Feb. 2022

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

This division of attention [between the two hemispheres of the brain] works to our advantage when we use both. However, it is a handicap – in fact, it is a catastrophe – when we use only one.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Surely we all use our brains as a whole, not just one hemisphere? Naturally, this is almost invariably the case. My point is a different one: that each hemisphere has inevitably a distinctive ‘take’ on the structure of the world, which is why we have two hemispheres at all. And each ‘take’ appears, when pondered in the abstract, strictly speaking incompatible with the other. They are each internally consistent, but mutually incompossible.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

[I]n 2017, 25 years after the original warning, 15,364 scientists from 184 countries signed World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice. It’s message was blunt: industrial civilization was courting catastrophe and needed a total makeover.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

As [Ivan] Illich warned, industrial man has become a slave to his energy slaves, totally addicted to the industrial production of goods and services and unable to envision any other way of life.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

The essential meaning of entropy for human life was well stated by Carl Jung: “Everything better is purchased at the price of something worse.”

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

Like so many others, I had become preoccupied with the Anthropocene, a transformation driven by capitalist economic growth that puts in question the very separation between natural and human history.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Ockham is now best known for the principle of economy in reasoning known as Ockham’s Razor. This is a misnomer for two reasons. First, he did not originate it; there is the inevitable origin in Aristotle. The phrase “We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypotheses possible” is in Ptolemy. Formulations like “It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer” and “A plurality is not to be posited without necessity” are Scholastic commonplaces from the early thirteenth century. Second, though he does repeat these ideas frequently, Ockham’s own contribution is more to restrict the operation of the principle, in the interests of God’s absolute power: “God does many things by means of more which He could have done by means of fewer, simply because He wishes it, and no other cause is to be sought. From the very fact that He wishes it, it is done suitably, and not in vain.”

The Landscape of History

John Lewis Gaddis

“Historians,” he writes, “instinctively stop the backward search for the ultimate cause at the point where the state of affairs, whose alteration they seek to explain, flourished.”19 This is a rather clumsy way of stating, for history, a principle paleontologists have more elegantly called punctuated equilibrium.

The Gardens of Democracy

Eric Liu, Nick Hanauer

We do not accept a false choice between individual rights and collective responsibility. We say you can have both. You can’t have either unless you have both. And to win, you must have both. With inalienable rights come inalienable responsibilities.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

“Conscious evolution” is a term that can be used in many different ways, but [Barbara Marx] Hubbard captures the broad strokes of its meaning in what she calls “the three C’s:”—new cosmology, new crises, and new capacities.

Personal Knowledge

Michael Polanyi

I have shown that into every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and that this coefficient is no mere imperfection but a vital component of his knowledge.

Henry Adams and the Making of America

Garry Wills

A third group that could object to the forging of a national unity is made up of those who do not want one of the perquisites of that, a strong federal government. These may be the most vociferous of all, since they think of themselves as Jeffersonian in a sense that denies all but local authority. They may feel betrayed, like the crestfallen fan: "Say it ain't so, Joe." Jefferson is not supposed to have done what he did. That was, in fact, John Randolph's refrain much of the time. But Jefferson's large vision could not be contained in the little boxes of his first commitment. The finally liberating thing about Jefferson is that he was not a Jeffersonian in that initial (one may call it that Albert Jay Nock) sense. Like most great figures, he was larger than his devotees would like.

And, one may add, that he was larger than his detractors would like. Jefferson was a very complex and often internally contradictory individual.

Thoughts 15 Jan. 2022

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Some scientists, whether they put it this way or not when they are asked to reflect, still carry on as if there just exists a Reality Out There (ROT), the nature of which is independent of any consciousness of it: naïve realism. These are usually biologists; you won’t find many physicists who would think that.

(Location 278)

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

We desperately need what science can tell us, and postmodern attempts to undermine it should be vigorously resisted. Two important truths, then: science cannot tell us everything; but what science can tell us is pure gold. Any attempt to suppress science (I distinguish science sharply from technology), for whatever reason, is dangerous and wrong.

(Location 282)

The Square and the Tower

Niall Ferguson

“Many historians still tend to assume that the spread of an idea or an ideology is a function of its inherent content in relation to some vaguely specified context. We must now acknowledge, however, that some ideas go viral because of structural features of the network through which they spread. They are least likely to do so in a hierarchical, top-down network, where horizontal peer-to-peer links are prohibited.”

After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre

According to this conventional account—from the Enlightenment through Comte and Mill to Hempel—the aim of the social sciences is to explain specifically social phenomena by supplying law-like generalizations which do not differ in their logical form from those applicable to natural phenomena in general, precisely the kind of law-like generalizations to which the managerial expert would have to appeal.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

A truly value-free openness toward ideas does not, and cannot, exist in the academy, for several reasons. One of them is theoretical: certain ideas cannot be entertained, at least not seriously, because they would of their nature “close the market.” Totalist systems, therefore—revealed religions, philosophies that proclaim an absolute truth, political systems (whether fascist or communist) that proscribe certain kinds of opinion—cannot in theory be advocated at public schools. These are not, notice, excluded because they are false but because they are exclusionary. Their fault is a methodological one, and can be detected and condemned on grounds of procedure, without value-prejudice. The only things that can be excluded are things that would exclude—things that reveal the evil of system. This value-free code of teaching—the concentration on processes for reaching a conclusion, with the taboo against actually reaching conclusions . . . . [F]acts and knowledge of the facts are handed on; the only conclusions allowed are those forced on one by the facts, the teacher having no responsibility for such conclusions. The teacher cannot even teach (only “dissect”), when it is a matter of political, social, or “sectarian” movements (the very term “religion” is too value-laden to pass the committee’s pure lips).

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

The end of a revolution is a new code of laws—or counter-revolution. The terror finds its end when the opposition is destroyed, when nobody dares lift a finger, or when the revolution has exhausted all reserves of strength.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

I have clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now have been attempting to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy with all its categories, as we have known them from their beginning in Greece until today. Such dismantling is possible only on the assumption that the thread of tradition is broken and that we shall not be able to renew it. Historically speaking, what actually has broken down is the Roman trinity that for thousands of years united religion, authority, and tradition. The loss of this trinity does not destroy the past, and the dismantling process itself is not destructive; it only draws conclusions from a loss which is a fact and as such no longer a part of the “history of ideas” but of our political history, the history of our world.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

In this clash between joint, participating action, without which, after all, the events to be judged would never have come into being, and reflecting, observing judgment, there is no doubt for Kant as to which should have the last word. Assuming that history is nothing but the miserable story of mankind’s eternal ups and downs, the spectacle of sound and fury “may perhaps be moving for a while; but the curtain must eventually descend. For in the long run, it becomes a farce. And even if the actors do not tire of it—for they are fools—the spectator does, for any single act will be enough for him if he can reasonably conclude from it that the never-ending play will be of eternal sameness”

Thoughts 3 Jan. 2022

 

Published November 2021

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

This book is an attempt to convey a way of looking at the world quite different from the one that has largely dominated the West for at least three hundred and fifty years – some would say as long as two thousand years.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

We have been seriously misled, I believe, because we have depended on that aspect of our brains that is most adept at manipulating the world in order to bend it to our purposes. The brain is, importantly, divided into two hemispheres: you could say, to sum up a vastly complex matter in a phrase, that the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it – see it all for what it is. The problem is that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

By employing the dialectical insights of polarity theory, the political philosophy I’m arguing for here brings together the polarity of self-interest and greater-than-self-interest with [Charles] Taylor’s polarity of immanence and transcendence. These two polarities are integrated through the following steps of logic: At the micro-level of individual motivation, the pursuit of self-interest, when relatively successful, moves toward forms of self-actualization that can only be found through self-transcendence.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

Fiscal policy was even larger and more prompt. Central bank interventions were even more spectacular. If one married the two in one’s mind—fiscal and monetary policy together—it confirmed the essential insights of economic doctrines once advocated by radical Keynesians and made newly fashionable by doctrines like Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). State finances are not limited like those of a household. If a monetary sovereign treats the question of how to organize financing as anything more than a technical matter, that is itself a political choice.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

That [appreciating the reality of contingencies; the unexpected], not the application of predetermined formulas, was the mark of a great general. But accepting contingency did not mean forsaking planning or reasoned thinking. It simply meant that rationality was no panacea, that one always stood in the middle of life, not outside it, assessing and reassessing based on immediate circumstances and the best knowledge that was available at any given moment. Improvisation should be employed only when improvisation was required, and then rationally. The quality of independent, unsupported thinking that goes by the hard-to-pin-down name of “intuition” was an important element in victory.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

[Arthur] Schlesinger was left with clumsy quantitative tests—it was all right to get involved in Vietnam, but not too far; to bomb, but not too much; to engage in minor warfare but not with major casualties. Yet killing is never minor—there is no minor war, any more than there is minor murder. The question is, Do you kill out of self-defense or not? Is there a real threat to the people’s existence? When that threat becomes actual (not merely possible), we can take the minimum necessary means to preserve ourselves. When the threat ceases, so should our response.

Thoughts New Year's Day 2022 Happy New Year!

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

"The active intellect [Left Hemisphere of the brain] … cannot entertain two images together, it has first one and then the other. [But] … if God prompts you to a good deed … whatever good you can do takes shape and presents itself to you together in a flash [RH=right hemisphere], concentrated in a single point." [Quoting Meister Eckhart.]

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

To be specific, goodness is the essence of the moral dimension of human experience, truth defines the focus of the rational domain, and beauty can be broadly defined as the capstone quality of the aesthetic dimension of value.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

We’ve all seen the map of election results depicted according to this red-blue color scheme. This simplistic bipolar framing is understandable given that our national politics continue to be dominated by a two-party system. But this historically engrained conception of left and right, which is habitually used to characterize our contemporary political condition as a two-way contest taking place along a horizontal continuum, is woefully inadequate to our present situation. America’s political dysfunction is not simply the result of an exacerbated divide between the Democratic and Republican parties. Rather, we are now engaged in a three-way struggle between America’s three major cultural worldviews: the modernist worldview, the traditional worldview, and what can best be described as the “progressive postmodern worldview.”

George Packer adds a fourth group, but the point remains the same.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

It was the Green New Deal that had squarely addressed the urgency of huge environmental challenges and linked it to questions of extreme social inequality.

Whatever one may think of any particular program in the Green New Deal, the need to realistically address both climate change & extreme inequality is real, and getting two birds with one stone is a very attractive potential.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

No European mind since Newton had impressed himself so profoundly on both the political and intellectual development of the world. When the Times wrote Keynes’ obituary, it declared him “the greatest economist since Adam Smith.” But even praise so high as this sold Keynes short, for Keynes was to Smith as Copernicus was to Ptolemy—a thinker who replaced one paradigm with another. In his economic work he fused psychology, history, political theory, and observed financial experience like no economist before or since.

Let's all keep Keynes in mind for this new year!

A Student's Guide to the Study of History

John Lukacs

Let us begin by asserting what is unquestionable: only human beings are historical beings. All other living beings have their own evolution and their life span. But we are the only living beings who know that we live while we live—who know, and not only instinctively feel, that we were born and that we are going to die.

Despite my assessment that Lukacs misreads Collingwood in some ways, in this quote--that humans are "historical beings" --Lukacs echos a key Collingwood theme.

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.

Sounds to me very much like Krishna's counsel to Arjuna.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

If those who escaped from the totalitarian hell have brought back nothing from their experience but the very truisms, moral or otherwise, from which they escaped twenty or thirty years ago—escaped for the very good reason that they had found them no longer sufficient either to explain the world we live in or to offer a guide for action within it—then we may, morally speaking, indeed be caught between pious banalities which have lost their meaning and in which nobody believes any longer and the vulgar banality of homo homini lupus ["man is wolf to man"], which as a guide for human action is also utterly meaningless even though quite a number of people do believe in it as they have always believed in it.

Behold the Spirit

Alan W. Watts

Doubts have a purpose, and by means of them we step backwards to take a better jump.

Henry Adams and the Making of America

Garry Wills

The most practical and realistic of the Founders were Franklin and Washington—and of the two, Washington had the more important role, military and civilian, in the new government. He had the most hands-on experience of the possibilities and difficulties of the people he was dealing with—in the day-to-day efforts of the war, in the resistance to greater central authority, in the pitfalls of setting up a new government and keeping it on course, in the problem of freeing slaves in his will and providing for their support long after he died.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

Kant reflected the two traditions, one upon the other. Kant was a scientist, but the schools derivative from Kant have had but slight effect on the mentality of the scientific world. It should be the task of the philosophical schools of this century to bring together the two streams into an expression of the world-picture derived from science, and thereby end the divorce of science from the affirmations of our aesthetic and ethical experiences.

Moonwalking With Einstein

Joshua Foer

“The general idea with most memory techniques is to change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you’ve seen before that you can’t possibly forget it,”

Thoughts 20 Dec. 2021

 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Economic development as we know it started with Europe’s conquest of the New World, a bonanza of found wealth. Before the conquest, European societies were politically, economically, and socially closed. But once flooded by a surge of new energy from the Americas, they began to open and develop. All the philosophies, institutions, and values characteristic of modern life, above all liberal democracy, slowly emerged. Over time, as the New World bonanza was supplemented and then supplanted by fossil fuels, economic and political development proceeded in tandem to transform the world and to create the luxuries and freedoms we enjoy today. With a return of ecological scarcity, however, what abundance has given will be taken away—to what extent and how rapidly remains to be seen, but we can hardly expect liberal democratic institutions fostered by abundance and predicated on abundance to survive in their current form.

Good Calories, Bad Calories

Gary Taubes

The science of epidemiology evolved to make sense of infectious diseases, not common chronic diseases like heart disease. Though the tools of epidemiology—comparisons of populations with and without the disease—had proved effective in establishing that a disease such as cholera is caused by the presence of micro-organisms in contaminated water, as the British physician John Snow demonstrated in 1854, it is a much more complicated endeavor to employ those same tools to elucidate the subtler causes of chronic disease. They can certainly contribute to the case against the most conspicuous determinants of noninfectious diseases—that cigarettes cause lung cancer, for example.

Still one of my favorite science books.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Think of the macrophage—and, for that matter, the entire diverse assembly of immune cells—as a pack of friendly wolves patrolling the area inside our skin, attacking the things that might hurt us. What happens when those wolves no longer have regular prey? They go stir-crazy. They get bored. And they might turn on themselves.

Following the "wolves" metaphor, part of what I understand to be one of the lethal attributes of the (at least the original) COVID virus is the "storm" of antibodies it triggers. The wolves go too wild, in a manner of speaking. N.B. Here, Carney is referring to autoimmune diseases.

In Europe's Shadow

Robert D. Kaplan

EASTER 2013 IN BUCHAREST also illuminated the work of Patrick Leigh Fermor, that craftsman of irreducible godlike essences whose every sentence belongs in a time capsule—to call him a mere travel writer is to diminish him.

I was tipped off to Patrick Leigh Fermor at the Jaipur Literature Festival (thank you, William Dalrymple). Having read Fermor's work, and having lived in Romania, I heartily concur with Kaplan's appraisal. Great writing!

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

The wealth of religion is a pearl of great price hidden in a field; it is wheat growing among tares. You cannot have the glory and comfort of religion without its superstition, its magic, its brutal hatreds and slavish fears. In the highest and sternest religions these elements are kept in check, but no more. They are always present at the back of the mind, always ready to break out and devastate human life. Religion is always looking forward to the day when it shall be set free from this body of death which, as its own shadow, it perpetually carries with it. That freedom is nothing but the self-revelation of thought, the discovery by the mind of its own nature as a thinking mind.

However abstract and barren may be the first-fruits of this discovery, the discovery itself is an incalculable advance in the history of man. As art and religion lift man above the level of the beasts, science lifts the civilized man above the level of the savage. The material utility of science, its service in feeding and clothing and sheltering us, carrying us from place to place and providing us with comforts, is the least part of its importance. Its real gift is simply the end of dreaming and the promise of a waking life. It sweeps aside with a ruthless hand all mythology, all symbols that are heavy with unrealized meanings and dark with the terrors of dreamland, and bids the mind face the world’s mystery armed with nothing but its five senses and the sling of its wit. What that means, no one knows who has not long and carefully weighed the debt which he owes to the scientific consciousness. But when that is done, he will hardly shrink from praising the founders of science for the gift of spiritual freedom even in the words of the ancient poet.

The Kennedy Imprisonment

Garry Wills

America, we like to think, has been specially “graced.” Set apart. The first child of the Enlightenment, it was “declared” to others as the harbinger of a new order. Yet this rationally founded nation was also deeply devotional, a redeemer nation. Reason and religion, which should have contended near our cradle, conspired instead. If we kept ourself isolated from others, it was to avoid contamination. If we engaged others, we did so from above, to bring light into their darkness. To deal with others as equals would betray our mission.