Thoughts 4 Feb. 2022

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

I do not suggest that the brain originates anything. I do not know that the brain ‘causes’ consciousness: it might or might not. For example, it might transduce, or otherwise mediate, consciousness. I have my own view on that, which I will come to in a later chapter. But it is a matter of likelihoods: I know of no way of proving the point one way or the other, since the observable facts would look the same whether it gave rise to, or simply mediated, consciousness: just as an alien could not tell merely by looking in the back of the TV set whether it gave rise to, or transmitted, the material it shows.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

[I]f you ask me why I robbed an old lady, I could reply: ‘I needed the money’, ‘I had just watched a violent video’, ‘I inherited my dad’s psychopathic tendencies’, ‘I was high on crystal meth’, ‘I heard a voice tell me to do it’, ‘I was brought up in a subculture where it was considered normal to steal’, ‘the government cut my welfare payments’, ‘my serotonin levels were depleted’, and so on. What counts as a possible cause depends on the context of the question.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Sadly, this patent reality [of climate change, environmental degradation, & the limits to industrial civilization] continues to be mostly denied in societies made up largely of the passively uninformed and the passionately misinformed.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Unfortunately, rational behavior is not characteristic of addicts and ignoramuses, so the warning signs of overshoot are denied or rationalized away by a divided, distracted, and deluded populace, and this would not change even if 100 percent of the world’s scientists were to issue a warning to humanity. So far from trying to solve our problems, we persist in the behavior that makes them worse.

But we're not at 100% of qualified experts agreeing on the reality of climate change. According to climate change expert Professor Jerry Schnoor of the University of Iowa, we're only at 99.9%. (#sarcasm)

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Once our hope is focused on a story about the future that’s anchored in clear-eyed realism, we need to perform a bit of magic— to turn our hope “water” into hope “wine,” so to speak.

Fear Itself

Ira Katznelson

Intense uncertainty, the kind that makes the usual sense of the term status quo virtually irrelevant, became a source of fear. No one quite knew whether the era’s constellation of crises indicated “a state of greater or lesser permanence, as in a longer or shorter transition towards something better or worse or towards something altogether different.”

Thoughts 19 Jan. 2022

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

The flow of the universe is always creative, though it has order, and is not random or chaotic; the world is always a matter of responsiveness, though it is equally not a free-for-all. It is a process of creative collaboration, of co-creation.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Whatever-it-is-that-exists-apart-from-ourselves creates us, but we also take part in creating whatever-it-is. By this I do not only mean the common sense view that I have an impact on the world, as the world has an impact on me: that I leave my footprints. That would lead immediately to the reflection that I am very small in relation to the world, and so effectively my impact is so small that for all intents and purposes it can be ignored. There is, it might seem, an inexpressibly vast universe and an inexpressibly tiny individual consciousness (I’d say that this is the left hemisphere’s attempt to represent spatially and quantify something that is experiential and developed in time, but I hope that will be more comprehensible when we come to the discussion of time and space in Part III). Such a reflection seems to posit an objective position – the view outside of history or geography, time or space – a view from nowhere, in which all can be measured and compared. It implies a Measurer of all the measurers, measuring the other scales and putting each part in its place according to its overall worth. But though that cannot be, the alternative is not just a merely subjective position, either: this very polarity – subjective/ objective – is misleading. In the fado, in the raga, in jazz, it is what it is because of me, and I am what I am because of it. I will have much more to say about the crucial issue of the subjective/ objective ‘divide’ throughout this book.

Four Quartets

T. S. Eliot

A people without history

Is not redeemed from time,

for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

[Don Beck of Spiral Dynamics fame] realized a surprising truth—one that might have seemed nonsensical to the uninitiated but represented a radically different perspective on the political tensions of the country [South Africa]. “Oh my God,” he realized. “This is not about race.” To most South Africans, the societal fault lines were clear. It was black versus white, African versus European. But for Beck, it wasn’t so simple. This struggle really masked a deeper conflict, one between value systems.

Doom

Niall Ferguson

Xi’s panopticon is actually more akin to the dystopia imagined in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1920s novel We.

Fear Itself

Ira Katznelson

IN FACT, the entire New Deal period, lasting until the inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, reflects an unremitting sense of fragility. From the Great Depression to the blood-filled battlefields in Korea, persistent, nearly unremitting anxiety conditioned the era’s “normal politics” of voting, public opinion, pressure groups, federalism, and the separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government.

The Science of Likability

Patrick King

When people subconsciously begin to associate you with positive moods and emotions, you are going to be the bell that makes people smile without realizing why.

Thoughts 28 Nov 2021

Feel like you're sleeping too soundly, too comfortably with too many sweet dreams? Then read this book. 

The Uninhabitable Earth

David Wallace-Wells

When it comes to global warming, the models are just as good, but the key input is a mystery: What will we do? The lessons there are unfortunately bleak. Three-quarters of a century since global warming was first recognized as a problem, we have made no meaningful adjustment to our production or consumption of energy to account for it and protect ourselves.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

All media present an abstract and selective version of reality, but compared to print television is not an informative medium at all, but a dramatic one: it transmits images, not ideas; it evokes emotions, not thoughts; and it arouses passion, not deliberation. Indeed, at its worst, it is frankly inflammatory. . . . [At best], because it portrays the world in ever small “bites” of sound and image, television creates what is tantamount to a cartoon of reality.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

[C]rowds are moved by simple ideas, striking images, and repeated slogans that drive out deeper thought. To make matters worse, the anonymity of crowds induces individuals to behave viscerally, discarding both prudence and morality. In addition, because crowds are moved by images that are not logically connected or rooted in fact, members of crowds have a hard time distinguishing between reality and illusion. Thus, said Le Bon, crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture—all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realizing.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[I]t’s life’s metaphysical edges that really intrigue me, like those between what we know, more or less, and what we don’t really know at all; between the past, present, and future; between events inside our minds and outside; and between the impossible and the inevitable.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

In his ambitious two-volume work, Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama writes that the fundamental question for every human society is simple: How do you get to Denmark? “By this I mean less the actual country Denmark,” he writes, “than an imagined society that is prosperous, democratic, secure, and well governed, and experiences low levels of corruption.”

Fear Itself

Ira Katznelson

Although the United States provided the globe’s only major example of a liberal democracy successfully experimenting and resisting radical tyranny, it did not—indeed, could not—remain unaffected by its associations with totalitarian governments or domestic racism.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

It is only when a man’s historical consciousness has reached a certain point of maturity that he realizes how very different have been the ways in which different sets of people have thought. When a man first begins looking into absolute presuppositions it is likely that he will begin by looking into those which are made in his own time by his own countrymen, or at any rate by persons belonging to some group of which he is a member. This, of course, is already an historical inquiry. But various prejudices current at various times which I will not here enumerate have tended to deceive such inquirers into thinking that the conclusions they have reached will hold good far beyond the limits of that group and that time. They may even imagine that an absolute presupposition discovered within these limits can be more or less safely ascribed to all human beings everywhere and always.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don’t prove anything one way or another.

The Culture Code

Clotaire Rapaille

Ask most people why they work and they’re likely to answer “To make money.” The Culture Code shows us that this isn’t actually true, but there is a very strong connection between work and money in this culture.

Vernacular Eloquence

Peter Elbow

Because of the power and prestige that Oxford and Cambridge had down through the centuries (graduates were given, in effect, two votes in national elections until 1935), a large portion of prominent politicians, scholars, and leaders of society up till recent times had undergone three years of this weekly ritual: writing essays that they had to read aloud and that were evaluated entirely on the basis of hearing. I think this may explain something I’ve noticed till recently about English scholarly and political writing: it seems more accessible, spoken, and free of jargon than the same genres in German and U.S. academic writing.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 30 August 2021

 

Pope Francis issued his encyclical Laudato Si in 2015. Are we ready to listen, to discuss? 

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years.

(Location 620)

People may well have a growing ecological sensitivity but it has not succeeded in changing their harmful habits of consumption which, rather than decreasing, appear to be growing all the more. A simple example is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning. The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand. An outsider looking at our world would be amazed at such behaviour, which at times appears self-destructive.

(Location 634)

[E]conomic powers continue to justify the current global system where priority tends to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain, which fail to take the context into account, let alone the effects on human dignity and the natural environment. Here we see how environmental deterioration and human and ethical degradation are closely linked.

(Location 638)

“whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenceless before the interests of a deified market…"

(Location 641)

57. It is foreseeable that, once certain resources have been depleted, the scene will be set for new wars, albeit under the guise of noble claims. War always does grave harm to the environment and to the cultural riches of peoples, risks which are magnified when one considers nuclear and biological weapons.

(Location 643)

And now for some other voices:

“There are some people whose confidence outweighs their knowledge, and they’re happy to say things which are wrong. And then there are other people who probably have all the knowledge but keep quiet because they’re scared of saying things.”

— Helen Jenkins, on the problem of communicating scientific uncertainty. (%Farnum Street) 

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

As one of the best students of the area [southern California], Joan Didion, says: “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

But neither science nor even “scientificality,” neither scholars nor charlatans, supplied the ideas and techniques that operated the death factories. The ideas came from politicians who took power-politics seriously, and the techniques came from modern mob-men who were not afraid of consistency.

Fear Itself

Ira Katznelson

Fear about warfare and global violence became a permanent condition. It became an inextricable part of American consciousness, helping to produce an obsession with national security, one that risked political repression.

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

We went on to religion [from art]. Here again we found that the ostensible object, God, was not the real object. The mythology of religion does not say what it means. It points beyond itself, even more unmistakably than the work of art, to a concealed mystery, a truth which is not stated. The real object of religion is not grasped by religion itself.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Policy involves seeing a problem in all its dimensions, examining the pros and cons of different strategies (something neither Kennedy nor Johnson did), trying to estimate the consequences of any given decision (again a point neglected by Kennedy and Johnson), standing in the immediate present with no illusions or preconceived formulas, and trying to calculate the best path to follow, while taking into account Morgenthau’s admonition that in foreign policy, there are no good choices, only less bad ones.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Like Morgenthau, he reluctantly voted for Nixon—or so he says. In any case, Kissinger’s political double-dealing contributed to his winning the trust of the pathologically untrusting Nixon and landing the position of national security adviser with the new administration. Humphrey later said that if he had won the presidency he too would have appointed Kissinger national security adviser, suggesting two things: first, that Kissinger’s deviousness had paid off; second, that America’s Vietnam policy would not have been very different if Humphrey had been in the White House instead of Nixon.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 9 August 2021

 

A Secret History of Christianity

Mark Vernon

The soul’s “imaginary sight” may see more than the empirical ever can. As Shakespeare famously elsewhere put it: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” From a first possibly distorted sense of something, the imagination may show a truth that is gradually revealed over time. It led Shakespeare to present the imagination as an intermediate zone. It’s somewhere between the subjective and the objective. It hovers at an edge, on a threshold. It’s the domain we enter into when we hear a play, a poem, a parable. It’s a region of revelation.

N.B. My review of this book is here.

Fear Itself

Ira Katznelson

MUCH OF this volume is devoted to examining how this national state got fashioned. This task leads to Congress, the fulcrum of the book. One cannot understand the New Deal without appreciating the activist lawmaking that resulted from many bouts of arguing, bargaining, and voting in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. These policy achievements demonstrably challenged the period’s common claim that national legislatures had become incapable and obsolete.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

There is much here that accords with later theories of probability: the various grades of probability, the high degree of probability that provides a good criterion for action, the increase in probability through the coherence of different pieces of evidence. What is unique about Carneades’ theory is that his probability is a property of perception rather than of propositions or beliefs and is genuinely equated with appearance of truth or likeness to truth.

Doom

Niall Ferguson

A catastrophe divides us all up into three groups: the prematurely dead, the lucky survivors, and the permanently wounded or traumatized. A catastrophe also separates the fragile from the resilient and the antifragile—Nassim Taleb’s wonderful word to describe something that gains strength under stress. (Remember Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”) Some cities, corporations, states, and empires collapse under the force of the shock. Others survive, though weakened. But a third, Nietzschean category emerges stronger.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

First, Socrates is a gadfly: he knows how to sting the citizens who, without him, will “sleep on undisturbed for the rest of their lives” unless somebody comes along to arouse them. And what does he arouse them to? To thinking and examination, an activity without which life, in his view, was not only not worth much but was not fully alive.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

To bring the matter down to earth, a system of education that prepares people for “careers” rather than for life in all its dimensions, especially its tragic dimension, will readily lead its graduates into Thoreau’s trap of “improved means to an unimproved end.”