Thoughts 9 December 2022

 

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

Fresh drinking water is an issue of primary importance, since it is indispensable for human life and for supporting terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.

This may seem a trite observation--dah! But for those living in the Mountain West and many other places around the globe, it's becoming an existential issue.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Economists have shown, through detailed research, that profit opportunities created by market demand are the usual motive for technological innovation. (But they are not the only motive: social idealism, the quest for power, and the desire to achieve intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction also drive technological innovation.)

Last Best Hope

George Packer

There’s a strain of class prejudice in Just America. “A hairdresser has to go to school for longer than you do!” a shirtless young man taunted a line of police officers during a protest in New York.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Allowing for national differences, four general things may be said about the hard right. First, it had a common character. The hard right combined economic libertarians and aggrieved nation-firsters, united in opposition, as they saw things, to self-serving, out-of-touch elites that had perverted true conservatism. The hard right showed a radical willingness, where in power, to upset familiar norms and arrangements all at once. In or out of power, the hard right used a shared repertoire of rhetorical appeals that skillfully disguised its inner tensions.

Why Nations Fail

Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

This book will show that while economic institutions are critical for determining whether a country is poor or prosperous, it is politics and political institutions that determine what economic institutions a country has.

Perennial Philosophy

Arthur Versluis

But intellect participates in that which it perceives; intellection is participation. Although from a limited sensory perspective, it appears that we perceive objects separate from ourselves, this is true only at the outermost level of experience. As our attention is turned inward and our consciousness ascends, if we may so put it, we also begin to recognize that we participate in beings and beings participate in us; intellection of the intelligible is recognition of what is within us and of what we must be able to recognize as in the continuum of our own field of knowing.

If you've read Bernardo Kastrup, compare this to what Kastrup argues.

After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre

The Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition of the virtues is, like some, although not all other moral traditions, a tradition of enquiry. It is characteristic of traditions of enquiry that they claim truth for their central theses and soundness for their central arguments.

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

This curious phenomenon of permeability, this fact that the human mind is always subject to influences, invasions, inspirations, that it is distracted from its purposes, washed over and windswept by all sorts of flotsam and scraps — fantasies, voices, spirits and angels — seems its basic condition.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 11 March 2021

 

An American classic originally published in 1974

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.

Too bad that the recently defeated president didn't get this message; but then he'd have to read.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Maurras’s following in the monarchist “street” cared less for winning arguments than for making trouble. Maurras cared for both. He stirred up right-wing street fighters with violent prose in the newspaper he edited, Action Française, and then disclaimed responsibility for the damage they caused. In 1934, for example, right-wing rioters egged on by Action Française attempted to storm the parliament in Paris.

Seem familiar?

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

Where the new way of knowing required that the observer remain passive, so as not to taint what he was observing with his ‘subjectivity’ – Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s ‘bulldog’, advises us to ‘sit down before fact like a little child’ – Goethe, as we’ve seen, took a more active approach. Like Schwaller de Lubicz’s ‘intelligence of the heart’, Goethe wants to get inside phenomena, not behind them to some ‘really real’ world, whether of elementary particles or Kant’s ding-an-sich, the ‘thing-in-itself’ forever barred from our cognition by the ‘categories’ of thought.

Query: How does Goethe's intention to "get inside phenomena" compare with Barfield's idea of "participation?"

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

Science is a plant of slow growth. It will not grow (and for a plant the end of growth is the end of life) except where the scientist as the priest of truth is not only supported but revered as a priest-king by a people that shares his faith. When scientists are no longer kings, there will be (to adapt a famous saying of Plato’s) no end to the evils undergone by the society that has dethroned them until it perishes physically for sheer lack of sustenance.

Is this observation relevant to today? (To borrow a 60s cliche.)

The Idea of Nature

R. G. Collingwood

The shorter our standard time-phase for an historical event, the more our history will consist of destructions, catastrophes, battle, murder, and sudden death. But destruction implies the existence of something to destroy; and as this type of history cannot describe how such a thing came into existence, for the process of its coming into existence was a process too long to be conceived as an event by this type of history, its existence must be presupposed as given, ready-made, miraculously established by some force outside history.

The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt

In other words, the profit motive, whose importance for imperialist policies was frequently overrated even in the past, has now completely disappeared; only very rich and very powerful countries can afford to take the huge losses involved in imperialism.

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Since Dasein is ‘to be there’ in the world – the literal, actual, concrete, daily world – to be human at all is to be immersed in the earth, and the quotidian matter-of-factness of the world.

Why Nations Fail

Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

We call such institutions, which have opposite properties to those we call inclusive, extractive economic institutions-extractive because such institutions are designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset.

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 16 January 2021

 

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Nothing I say here should be construed as approving a dictatorial remaking of our civilization. We do not need a Lenin or even an Ataturk. We require a new moral, legal, and political order that cannot be imposed from the top down but that must instead percolate up as the consequence of an intellectual and moral reformation.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

The scientifically enlightened modern age, with its foundational belief in the unconstrained power of natural laws, from which it imagined everything that was, is, and could be causally explained and even predicted, was based on a conceptual self-deception. It lay in an inability to distinguish between the concepts of “logical necessity” and “the necessity of natural laws.” Confronted with the same problems that preoccupied Heidegger, Cassirer, and Benjamin, Wittgenstein might be said to have been concerned more than anything with clarifying the relationship between “guilt” and “fate,” “freedom” and “necessity,” “faith” and “knowledge,” “being there” and “being like this” as the central concepts of any truly mature life.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence. If we were responsive to this claim all the time, we would soon be exhausted; Eichmann differed from the rest of us only in that he clearly knew of no such claim at all.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The liberal side of Burkeanism could eventually come to terms with that picture of politics as argument. To the Maistrian side, the liberal picture was wrong in whole and part. No reconciliation was possible. Maistre has appealed to the rejectionist element in conservatism and to its authoritarian fringe, as well as to cultural anti-moderns like Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, and their descendants, who relished his mocking disdain.

The New Leviathan

R. G. Collingwood

The council or ‘state’ or ‘sovereign’ is a permanent society because its work is never done.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

“One characteristic that most people suffering from depression share is that they run higher temperatures than non-depressed folks. And if you treat their depression, their temperature returns to normal. Not only that, but depressed people typically don’t sweat,” he says. It’s a bombshell of a statement, because if it’s true, then Raison is essentially arguing that depression stems from bad thermoregulation as much as from any other factor. I have to admit, it’s a statement that I have some trouble accepting on face value.

Why Nations Fail

Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Economic institutions shape economic incentives: the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. It is the political process that determines what economic institutions people live under, and it is the political institutions that determine how this process works.

Recipe for The Hunger Games Movie

Mix the following ingredients:

1. A serving of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery;
2. Add a hint of Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game
3. Season with some Wizard of Oz (an Emerald City and those city folk in their funky dress;
4. Add some Spartacus: Roman names and a Roman-style spectacle in a bread & circuses atmosphere;
5. Throw in a Harry Potter train ride;
6. Mix in some Last of the Mohicans (Daniel Day-Lewis version with the American woodlands & a mercy killing to save a rival from cruel and lingering slow death);
7. A healthy dose of the faux-reality of American "reality" television;
8. A equal amount of talk show faux-intimacy;
9. Some Walker Evans scenes of Appalachian poverty;
10. A Twilight love-triangle (I've not seen any of them, but the previews sure suggest it);
11.Some old Western gun-slinger life;
11. And just a hint of Acemegulu & Robinson's Why Nations Fail (an the extractive elite and the exploited, politically weak majority).

Did I forget anything? Well, probably. This was quite a mash-up, almost a never-ending homage. Yet, despite the mulligan stew of elements, I really rather enjoyed it. Predictable, indeed familiar in many senses, but nevertheless compelling. The acting didn't go over the top. Ms. Lawrence presented a pleasant but not overwhelming presence (she is not knock-out gorgeous, which was actually refreshing).