Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 1 July 2021

 

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

Because we’re unaccustomed to it, we don’t usually see that there’s a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We don’t even have a term for it, so I’ll have to use the Japanese mu. Mu means “no thing.” Like “Quality” it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, “No class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no.” It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. “Unask the question” is what it says.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

More knowledge, more material goods, and more leisure did not, [Georges Sorel] wrote at the end of Illusions of Progress, reliably make people happier. The mistake of thinking that they did was inherited from enlightened eighteenth -century reformers. It arose from a soft “ethic of consumption.” Happiness, Sorel suggested in a brief passage that echoed Mill’s own bow to immemorial wisdom on the topic, depended heavily on being active and having satisfying work.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

[T]he paralysis induced by thinking is twofold: it is inherent in the stop and think, the interruption of all other activities—psychologically, one may indeed define a “problem” as a “situation which for some reason appreciably holds up an organism in its effort to reach a goal”—and it also may have a dazing after-effect, when you come out of it, feeling unsure of what seemed to you beyond doubt while you were unthinkingly engaged in whatever you were doing.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

In the totalitarian interpretation, all laws become . . . laws of movement. Nature and History are no longer stabilizing sources of authority for laws governing the actions of mortal men, but are themselves movements. Their laws, therefore, though one might need intelligence to perceive or understand them, have nothing to do with reason or permanence.

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

Of the hedonic substances found in food, only alcohol, caffeine, and sugar are addictive—and these are food additives, not foods in themselves.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

The first principle” of science, as the Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman put it so aptly, “is that you must not fool yourself and you’re the easiest person to fool.”)

Thoughts for the Day: 15 June 2021

 

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Sorel wrote prolifically, but he is remembered chiefly for Réflexions sur la violence (Reflections on Violence, 1906) and Illusions du progrès (Illusions of Progress, 1908). The first was a collection of essays on liberalism and socialism, the second a history of progress as a political idea. They shared powerful common themes: politically, the derision of liberal-democratic trust in public reason, elections, and parliamentary government; and socially, the castigation of middle-class flabbiness on which liberal-democratic politics rested. In the hostility of the working class, Sorel saw both a means for unmasking the liberal-democratic sham and an energy-source to reinvigorate a decadent society.

N.B. This received a highlight because I wrote two undergrad papers about Sorel, one of which was a comparison of him and Frantz Fanon (of Wretched of the Earth fame). Both saw violence as a means of purgation, cleansing, & energizing. The 20th century displayed how well that plan worked. (#irony, #sarcasm).

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Another way of dealing with a tangled problem is simply to do nothing, or at least nothing large, centralized, and carefully planned.

And how well does this work? (Not that THD is endorsing it.)

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Capitalists had to listen to clerics during sermons, and courts could find a loan usurious and declare that it need not be repaid. The many deathbed “restitutions” of profits show at least a partial acceptance of the content of the sermons. It is a further question whether the usury laws impeded or assisted the economy. A number of the many discussions of this topic have been vitiated by the assumption that any attempts to restrict business for moral reasons must impede the development of capitalism. Plainly this is not so in general: if everything is for sale, then bribery, slavery, the sale of judicial decisions, of industrial secrets and misinformation, and so on, will flourish, none of which is likely to encourage economic growth.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

[Addressed to Arendt's teacher & friend Karl Jaspters] What I have personally never forgotten is your attitude—so difficult to describe—of listening, your tolerance that is constantly ready to offer criticism but is as far removed from skepticism as it is from fanaticism; ultimately, it is simply the realization of the fact that all human beings are rational but that no human being’s rationality is infallible.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

The Stoic system overall is like a miniature version of Brahminical Hinduism. Still, there are differences: The Stoics did not teach reincarnation; their successive cycles of manifestation, unlike those of India, are exact repetitions; they did not teach a period of quiescence exactly equal in length to the period of cosmic activity (for when the cosmos ends, in the Stoic view, there is no longer anything to measure); finally, and most importantly, the Stoics seem no more than other Greek schools to have taught meditation and bodily discipline in anything like the Indian yogic manner.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

The parallelism between these traditions in Greece and in India is intimate and thoroughgoing. The cumulative heritage of seven hundred years of Greek dialectic was summed up in handbooks in and before the time of Sextus, and the contents of such a handbook, or their equivalent, may all be found in the Madhyamika texts.

Happiness

Matthieu Ricard and Daniel Goleman

Wealth, pleasures, rank, and power are all sought for the sake of happiness. But as we strive, we forget the goal and spend our time pursuing the means for their own sake. In so doing, we miss the point and remain deeply unsatisfied. This substitution of means for ends is one of the main traps lying across the pursuit of a meaningful life.

“Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.”
— Anton Chekhov

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 12 February 2021

 

Essay on contemporary issues published in 1972 

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

Something else, however, which became fully manifest only in the decades after [George] Sorel’s and [Alfredo] Pareto’s death, was incomparably more disastrous to this view. The enormous growth of productivity in the modern world was by no means due to an increase in the workers’ productivity, but exclusively the development of technology, and this depended neither on the working class nor on the bourgeoisie, but on the scientists. The “intellectuals,” much despised by Sorel and Pareto, suddenly ceased to be a marginal social group and emerged as a new elite, whose work, having changed the conditions of human life almost beyond recognition in a few decades, has remained essential for the functioning of society.

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

In the aleatory compositions of John Cage, the ‘active confusion’ of the intellectual demagogue, Marshall McLuhan, who abandoned meaningful content with his dictum that the ‘medium was the message’, and the sensory barrage of ‘multi-media’ overload – siphoning off aspects of ‘Scientism’ for artistic purposes – [Erich] Kahler saw at work a deliberate attempt to undermine the whole conception of coherence in a misguided movement to break free of what it considered the restrictions of outworn, outmoded sensibilities. One of the main driving forces behind this demolition work, Kahler believed, was the increasing technological character of modern life.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

The core accusation that [Walter] Benjamin levels at the tragedy of the whole of the modern age and its philosophy is “objectification”—of nature and, in particular, of humanity.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Self-organizing systems are therefore relatively autonomous, stable, and enduring, whereas artificial systems are intrinsically dependant, unstable, and transient.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

So three processes produce greater complexity in our world: competition and interdependence among entities creates niches that new entities can fill; this competitive environment also encourages individual entities to breach performance limits by adding new subsystems; and large systems of entities can capture or task simpler systems, adapting and building on the grammar of these simpler systems to boost performance.

Putting Man Before Descartes - The American Scholar

John Lukacs

Of course a danger is a potentiality, not an actuality. Of course some of these developments may not happen. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but the road to heaven may be paved with bad intentions that have not matured into acts. That is our saving grace, our hope. But we must recognize that the source of the new and enormous danger is not outside but inside this world, inside the minds of men, including scientists and those who support and cheer them on.

Time Warrior

Steve Chandler

Sadness, depression, frustration, upset, and anxiety can only be produced by seeing a situation and then producing an interpretation of it and then believing that interpretation.

Collingwood's "Man Goes Mad" with commentary, Pt. 3

Some shared perspectives between Orwell & Collingwood

From "Man Goes Mad:"

War is the ultimate end of the modern state. All the forces that go to make up the modern state combine to drive its activity in the direction of warfare. On the other hand, war is readily becoming more and more destructive, and has now reached a point in its development where it cannot be waged at all, on any considerable scale, without involving the destruction of civilization over the entire field of conflict. . . .  [T]he traditional politics which in England is called democracy, and on the Continent liberalism, is here out of date. It thinks of war as an instrument which statesman are free to use or not to use in pursuit of their ends, whereas it is in reality a monster which, having invoked it, they not cannot exorcise. What began as a means to an end beyond itself has lost that character: it has become a thing that must be used, whatever comes of it. . . . Much of what has happened in militarist countries within the last few years suggests that in those countries what we call civilization is no longer valued. Freedom of thought and speech, personal liberty, and many other features of what we should call civilized life, have been deliberately repudiated with the avowed aim of rendering the nation a more docile and responsive fighting-machine. For the militarist, the incompatibility of civilization and war is only a nail in the coffin of civilization. The only corporate activity which he recognizes as desirable in a nation is warfare itself. [310]

"War is the ultimate end of the modern state." My first reaction is to consider this an overstatement. The modern state, in addition to its more traditional functions (law enforcement, provision of public goods) has added economic and social welfare to its portfolio. And, of course, the state has always been involved in defense of territory (and often it seeks the addition of territory). But in my lifetime (from near the beginning of the Cold War), the military function has grown remarkably in the U.S., whereas before WWII, the military had been surprisingly limited in its role. We Americans began to refer to the president as our "commander-in-chief," which he isn't unless we're members of the active duty military. All of this demonstrates the indisputable fact that war and democracy are inimical to one another. War will inevitably seek to strangle democracy as a threat to its powers. Democracy as an expression of the will of most people will seek to avoid war. (N.B. This last contention needs qualification. I believe that avoidance of war is a popular default position among non-elites; however, this default position of the demos is easily transposed into supporting war by propaganda appealing to nationalist or retaliatory sentiment.) 

In reviewing the latter part of the quote, I noted how Collingwood anticipates Orwell, who published 1984 in 1949, seven years after Collingwood's death and 13 years after Collingwood penned this essay. Recall Oceania's perpetual state of war with Eurasia and Eastasia, each mega-state controlled by an ideology that extols and supports war. 

Think also of Stephen Bannon and some of the thinkers whom he has favorably cited, such as the Italian fascist Julius Evola. These and other thinkers, for instance, Georges Sorel in fin de siecle France, argue that violence and war are a necessary tonic for peoples and nations. Indeed, WWI began with many on both sides of the fight believing that a war would alleviate the malaise felt in many parts of European society during the period leading up to the war. One would think such notions would have perished in the ashes and graveyards that the war created, and while this was true of many, a committed few concluded that an increase of dosage was required. Mussolini and Hitler are only the two most well known of that latter sort. I have not doubt that Collingwood was thinking of these two as he wrote this about the "militarists." And it's not difficult today to identify those who hold this militarist attitude. 

The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom by James Burnham

James Burnham's The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943, 305 p.) came into my possession in 2001 upon purchase from Great Expectations Bookstore in Evanston, Illinois. It languished--or should I say waited for me--on my shelves until last summer, when it made the cut to India. It proved its merit, and I can only regret the wait. 

Burnham, better known for his The Managerial Revolution and then later as a writer at William F. Buckley's National Review, writes at a midway point in his odyssey from Trotskyite to Buckleyite. In this work, Burnham, starts by dismissing the claims of Dante's De Monarchia as anything other than at attempt to cover a naked political agenda. After dismissing Dante, he moves into a discussion of Dante’s fellow Florentine, political realist, Niccolo Machiavelli. Burnham argues that only by knowing politics as it's actually practiced, and not how we might wish it practiced, can we obtain and hold a measure of freedom. 

After discussing Machiavelli, Burnham moves forward a several centuries to discuss lesser known political thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, names familiar but not often read: Mosca (theory of the ruling class), Sorel (myth and violence), Michaels (iron law of oligarchy), and Pareto (famous for several things, but here about elites and beliefs). Each of these thinkers, early practitioners of political science as a discipline, looks at the stark realities of politics. For instance, the dominance of elites, the role of political parties (and elites within those parties), and beliefs based on something other than empirical science. In other words, how politics, even in nascent democracies, works. 

Burnham's argues that only by understanding how politics actually works can we preserve a measure of freedom, and his point convinces. Naive understandings of our political system only lead to frustration and failure. These individuals and their successors, the men and women who have studied politics since this was written (and even earlier, as Pareto is the most recent thinker considered) give us greater insight into our ways of practicing politics. Of course, ideas and even ideals are important, and perhaps Burnham undervalues these, but they do not overcome many hard realities. Machiavelli, ever the fascinating character, sets the tone not as a purveyor of evil, as the naive suppose him to be, but the consummate realist. Burnham and his thinkers add to this tradition, and by doing so can help us become wiser about the political world in which we live.