Thoughts 29 Dec. 2021

 

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Disconfirmation. The system does all sorts of things, but it is tuned for what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, call “institutionalized disconfirmation.” Individuals, of course, work hard to confirm their own viewpoints, and try hard to persuade others. But they understand that their claims will and must be challenged; they anticipate those challenges and respond; they subject their scholarship to peer review and replication, their journalism to editing and fact-checking, their legal briefs to adversarial lawyers, their intelligence to red-team review.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Madison was aware of the general problem, which he knew had sunk democracies of the past. He called it the problem of factions—what today we often call special interests. “By a faction,” he wrote in Federalist No. 10, “I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

What, then, is the best course for the real experts? To help the public understand how their field works, in particular how science works. Most Americans think of science by its endpoints—a discovery or breakthrough or invention. They look at dazzling pictures of galaxies and read of miracle drugs. But science is really all about the process of learning and discovering, with many failures and disappointments.

Last Best Hope

George Packer

But fundamentally Just America ["progressives;" "social justice warriors;" "anti-racists"] is about race. Everything else is adjunct.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

Spread across priorities ranging from childcare to the energy transition, that was far too little to effect a transformation of American society or to put the United States on course to climate stabilization. Especially with regard to the energy transition, they appeared to rest on optimistic assumptions about the private investment that would be triggered by modest public stimulus combined with regulatory change. When it came to long-term policy, Bidenomics was a continuation of the public-private, blended finance, Frankenstein policies that had been so typical of the crisis-fighting in 2020.

Thoughts: 27 October 2021

 

A fall 2021 publication: history of the very recent--and in some sense--ongoing present

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

But two basic elements were missing from the original fascist equation in America in 2020. One is total war. Americans remember the Civil War and imagine future civil wars to come. They have recently engaged in expeditionary wars that have blown back on American society in militarized policing and paramilitary fantasies. But total war reconfigures society in quite a different way. It constitutes a mass body, not the individualized commandos of 2020.

The other missing ingredient in the classic fascist equation, which is more central to this book, is social antagonism, a threat, whether imagined or real, to the social and economic status quo.

I'm skeptical of "Trumpism=fascism" contentions even by some of the more cautious thinkers who've made this assertion. ("Fascism" was a form of illiberalismthat arose in mid-20th century Europe.) And the first element mentioned by Tooze is (happily) missing. Bu the second element, "social antagonism," seems to me to be lurking around us. Threats "real or imagined," abound: immigration, de-industrialization, and changing cultural norms pop to mind But the changes that climate change will force upon us will ratchet-up social pressures and antagonisms, even if we act as wisely and expeditiously as we can. So much change! And if we don't act in a way to avoid the worst and seek the best, won't all hell break loose?

The Human Condition

Hannah Arendt

Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.

The above is the ground of politics: our equality ("we are all the same") and our plurality ("nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live"). Add birth and death, and you have the human condition. Some would do away with politics. Don't let them.

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

Clearly “the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures.”

I will trust that Pope Francis is correct about this. And if not correct, it should be.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Psychologists suspected that the emphasis on feeling safe grew from a parenting culture which increasingly “prepared the road for the child, not the child for the road,” as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argued in their 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind.

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Roman civilisation provides evidence of an advance towards ever more rigidly systematised ways of thinking, suggestive of the left hemisphere working alone. In Greece, the Apollonian was never separate from the Dionysian, though latterly the Apollonian may have got the upper hand.

This contention set off my "overgeneralization!" alarm, but then consider Hannah Arendt's contention that St. Augustine (of the declining empire) was the only true philosopher the Romans ever had. (Sorry you Stoics and Epicureans!)

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

“The one fundamental science” of the Renaissance, according to one authoritative scholar, was “knowledge of the soul.” This was what Ficinian Neoplatonism was all about. (And if this be so, then why, O why, I ask you, my Italian colleagues who have the Renaissance on which all Europe lives to this day, in the blood of your psyche, do you turn to us up north for psychology, to Marxism and Existentialism, to Adorno and Marcuse, to Freud, or even Jung — to say nothing of Mao or the Hindu gurus — all these secondary substitutes, when an extraordinary psychology is buried in your own soil?)

Great question.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

Few recognized it in the spring of 1944, but Hayek’s attack on the political implications of Keynesian economics would be a turning point in twentieth-century thought. Within months of his book tour, Hayek was accepting meetings with deep-pocketed donors eager to defend freedom and seeking guidance for how best to spend their money.

Lesson: never underestimate the power of organized money. In the post-war era, neo-liberals out-spend and our-organized the rest of the pack. The Mount Pellerin Society was not wanting for funds, whatever the quality of its thinkers.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

As Leibniz does later, [Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz was born in Madrid in 1606] regards the flaw in Aristotle as his dealing only in strictly universal propositions. His logic is thus inapplicable to matters of fact in law and ethics, in which universal propositions, like “All men tell the truth,” or “Caramuel never hallucinates,” are not to be had. So he proposes a logic with more quantifiers that treats such propositions as morally universal, or most vehement: for example, “Almost all mothers love their sons”; and ones of usual force: “Around half of mothers love their sons.”

If you doubt this contention by Caramuel, practice trial law.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

His [H.L. Mencken's] sallies relied on more than spleen. He read and wrote a study on his favorite thinker, Nietzsche. Like George Orwell and Victor Klemperer, Mencken grasped the politics of the words we choose. In The American Language (1921), he defended the inventiveness and demotic vitality of American speech against the stuffiness of “proper usage.” Yet Mencken himself threw damaging words about with abandon.

An intriguing figure whom I've never properly explored. Speaking of over-generalizations, it often seems conservatives are more complex and at time paradoxical than champions of liberalism.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 12 August 2021

 

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Somewhat surprisingly to Americans today, [Johan Stuart] Mill held that the most dire threat to freedom comes not from state repression but from social conformity, which leads to a shortage of diversity—diversity of inclination and interest and talent, but especially, he implied, diversity of opinion. “Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.” His stark conclusion: “That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.”

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

[Jonathan] Haidt likens trolling to terrorism, inasmuch as they both exploit the emotional dynamics of outrage, baiting us to overreact. Rationally, we may understand that rising to the bait makes the trolls (or terrorists) more visible and influential. But emotion rules.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Instead of being pluralist, [some on the political left] are purist. Instead of seeking to pit biases against other biases and prejudices against other prejudices, they seek to eliminate bias and prejudice from the get-go—an Augean task which first polices culpable words, then culpable ideas when different words are recruited, and finally culpable minds when bad ideas keep popping back up.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

But Keynesianism was also developed to prevent war, and it remains one of the great tragic ironies of intellectual history that the very catastrophe Keynes had attempted to avert for nearly two decades would be the event that finally demonstrated the viability of his economic ideas on the world stage. Both The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and The Economic Consequences of the Peace achieved their political apotheosis in the same calamity.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

What did Strauss mean by philosophy? Not what it was commonly understood to be. Philosophers were not to be found teaching in colleges and universities around the country because instructors in philosophy departments were no more likely to be true philosophers than instructors in art departments were to be true artists. Philosophy wasn’t an academic discipline or the stepping-stone to a career defined by the structures and customs of higher education. It was a personal commitment, a way of life, inspired by a sense of wonder, much like a religion though without the dogma. Philosophers were devoted to wisdom but didn’t propound doctrines or claim to have discovered the Truth. Their wisdom, like that of the prototype Socrates, consisted of an awareness that they knew nothing. Insofar as they could be said to possess knowledge, it was of the questions, not the answers, and philosophers ceased to be philosophers, Strauss said, when certainty replaced Socratic doubt.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

[Q]uantum leaps, in outlook ala Teilhard de Chardin, occur with a fantastic jump to a new horizon or level of perception. This insight usually comes from a revolutionary overview which realigns or transforms former thinking into a new and more enlightening frame of reference.

Habits of the Heart

Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven M. Tipton

The calling is a crucial link between the individual and the public world. Work in the sense of the calling can never be merely private.

Book by Book

Michael Dirda

(We do tend to forget, as the poet Randall Jarrell quipped, that the people who lived in a golden age probably went around complaining how yellow everything was.)

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

Ultra-nationalism and imperialism were a corollary of this hatred of ineffective democracy, liberal individualism and materialism.

(The ALL NEW) Don't Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff

Be honest: didn't you just picture an elephant?

The ALL-NEW Don't Think of an Elephant:  Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff (2014) is a timely read. Lakoff is a linguist and cognitive scientist who is also a committed political progressive. In this book, he applies his extensive learning in linguistics and in cognitive science to analyze how we think how this knowledge can help progressives better convince voters of their cause. Even for those not interested in politics, the book is instructive because it provides a quick, accessible overview of Lakoff’s work. In essence, Lakoff argues that we think through metaphors, that all of our thinking arises from our body and its nervous system. That is, we're embodied beings whose thinking is conditioned by our body and our physical surroundings. For learning and arguing, this means that we think in schemas (outlines, models, patterns), metaphors, and narratives.

In politics, Lakoff argues that progressives and conservatives have different fundamental models (or metaphors) by which they view the world. Lakoff describes this as the difference between a “strict father” family metaphor and a “nurturant family” metaphor. (I'll discuss the use of this governing dichotomy later in the review). From these fundamentally different worldviews flow political positions that allow seemingly diverse issues to coalesce around central worldviews. For instance, how anti-abortion attitudes are related to pro-gun attitudes in the conservative understanding of the world.

In Lakoff’s view, conservatives, following the strict father metaphor, adhere to very defined in strict hierarchies. As he writes:

Here is the hierarchy: God above man; man above nature; adults above children; Western culture above non-Western culture; our country above other countries. These are general conservative values. But the hierarchy goes on, and it explains the oppressive views of more radical conservatives: men above women, Christians above non-Christians, whites above nonwhites, straights above gays.Kindle Edition 357.  

In the nurturant parent model, progressives are much more empathic and more egalitarian. (Lakoff doesn’t address how progressives deal with hierarchies, as some extreme forms of progressivism tend toward the anarchic and radical egalitarianism.) As to those who might be considered “moderate” or  “middle-of-the-road" in their political opinions,  Lakoff argues that there is no third between his two defining models (or metaphors—Lakoff is unclear about which is the appropriate term to describe this dichotomy). Thus, those in the middle, whom he dubs “biconceptual”, are just that: they entertain both models at once, giving voice to one or the other at various times or regarding various topics. With repetition, however, one voice will often grow stronger than the other. Thus, one might be using a nurturant family metaphor at home yet adhere to the strict father metaphor in the workplace or in forming some political opinions.

In the more functional area political communication, Lakoff argues that progressives have been outfoxed by conservatives. Lakoff argues that conservatives have been driving home their message for decades through the generous funding of institutes, think tanks, and the media that allow them to define – or in Lakoff’s technical term “frame” – the public debate. Thus, we think of (or frame) “tax relief" as if taxes were simply a burden rather than the dues one pays for living in our civilized society. Lakoff also argues that conservatives appeal to values. Progressives keep thinking that facts and policies are what drive voters’ decisions, but Lakoff says that the progressives infatuation with facts does little to persuade. Progressives, he argues, need to promote their values. Lakoff describes these values as rooted in empathy:

Progressive/liberal morality begins with empathy, the ability to understand others and feel what they feel. That is presupposed in responsibility—responsibility for oneself, for protection, for the care of those who need care, and for the community. Kindle 1856.

Lakoff makes a strong argument that progressives need to increase their voice, address values, and refused to enter into the frames established by conservatives. Conservative masterminds, like Frank Luntz, have created a linguistic environment that puts progressives at a disadvantage from the beginning. Thus, the title of Lakoff book and one of the primary takeaways from it: when you tell someone not to think of an elephant, the first thing they will do is think of an elephant! Accordingly, if you frame an issue as one of, for instance, “tax relief", you’re immediately framing taxes as a burden instead of a cost of membership a vital community organization. After all, our tax dollars allow our governments to provide roads, airports, schools, communications systems, scientific research, law enforcement, national defense and so on. Here, Lakoff is certainly correct. The millions of dollars that the Mellon, Scaife, and Koch families have poured into universities, think tanks, and the media have significantly changed the terms of the national debate. Progressives need to get with it and start broadcasting their message in frames that work from their point of view.

On the issue of political communication and messaging, Lakoff makes a persuasive argument. The book intrigues me, and it frustrates me just a little bit on the following particulars.

1. Lakoff uses the strict father versus nurturant family model (or metaphor) as definitive. I'd read some of Lakoff years ago and was put off by this metaphor, but now I want to explore it further. If this dichotomy is “only” a metaphor, it does provide a great deal of explanatory value. But Lakoff seems to be using this distinction as more than a metaphor, and this raises questions. For instance, is the strict father family model a cause or correlation to a conservative outlook? If it is causal, how does one escape it? For instance, I was born in the 1950s into what I would consider a traditional “father knows best" family. I would describe my father is somewhat strict but not abusive and not authoritarian. My parents had fairly traditional gender roles for that time.  I would describe my upbringing as fairly typical for a small-town, white, kid with college-educated parents. Some friends I grew up with had blue collar parents with less education, and an even more traditional strict father family upbringing, and yet me and some of these others are very much political progressives today. I emigrated from a young Republican to a Democrat (in Lakoff’s terms, a progressive). How did this happen? How did my fundamental metaphor change from that of a strict father family to a nurturant family metaphor? How did I and my wife come to practice a nurturant family model in raises our children? How does this change take place? How does this change in fundamental models relate to the larger cultural environment? Thus, while I think that Lakoff’s metaphor (if that's what it's limited to) is instructive and useful, it's thin on explanation. Lakoff’s model has to be compared to the conception of conservatism versus liberalism that Jon Haidt makes in his writings, or the more comprehensive theories of cultural and personal change found in Integral Theory, which adopts the work of Clare Graves and Don Beck in Spiral Dynamics and incorporates that model into the wider Integral Theory established by Ken Wilber. Perhaps because this is a book intended more of a handbook, Lakoff provides answers elsewhere. (He’s also the author of weighty and significant academic works.)
2. Lakoff emphasizes that many of the phenomena he discusses are hard-wired in the brain. Again, I don't want to be too harsh because this is a book intended as a political handbook for progressives, not an academic tome, but much of what he says necessarily raise some of the most challenging and fundamental issues about the relation between the material world and consciousness. In Lakoff’s model, the mind arises out of the body (I’ve no problem with that contention), but it's unclear how a change of consciousness comes into this. His emphasis on neural circuitry shared by many of his colleagues in cognitive sciences provide some interesting insights and accounts, but I sometimes  think it is oversold and may have the effect of wedding us to perspectives that are not justified
3.  Lakoff argues that there is no third position between the strict father family conception and the nurturant family conception. Those who are moderate or in the middle of the road politically he labels biconceptuals. These individuals hold both metaphors in their minds, with one or the other of the two dominant in particular situations. Lakoff’s scheme seems accurate in some sense, but it serves to beg the question. Is it simply the linguistic environment—more conservative or more progressive talk—that tilts the mind one way or the other?  Lakoff classifies conservatives according to different demographics and interests, and he does the same for progressives. His family metaphor doesn't explain those interests or how they are developed and refined within individual contexts or larger political classifications. As someone who migrated from being a young Republican to Democrat, this issue intrigues me. And there are some conservatives (more and more rare) with whom I have some sympathy. Lakoff seems a little too eager to suggest that any conservative position is simply a failure to migrate all the way into one dominant metaphor. For instance, the issue of trade. Trade is a political issue about which I’m conflicted. The basic economics of trade suggest that overall, society can become better off with trade. However, I know that when trade is liberalized and expanded, there are going to be winners and losers. American manufacturing jobs have migrated overseas, and the cost of this migration to many individuals and communities has been devastating. My position on the trade, thus, has shifted from a free trade position to one of very skeptical of further trade agreements that could ship jobs overseas. I don't think I arrived at this the because my family metaphor flipped at some particular moment, but because of my increasing awareness of the evidence that the immediate and local costs of trade begin to outweigh the benefits to the nation as a whole and to posterity. In other words, what may be a progressive position may not be the best view when viewed from a different perspective. In other words, there a lot of facts and nuances and taking a position on something like trade that does family metaphor doesn't account for. It seems that Lakoff with the family model dichotomy creates a Manichean worldview that doesn’t rest comfortably with me. There are more nuanced theories with better explanatory power out there, perhaps some that provide a scale instead of a such a stark dichotomy.
4. Lakoff argues that voters vote values and not interests. True, mostly, but I think that this oversimplifies the topic. Of course, we have the “what’s the matter with Kansas” phenomena to account for, but voters’ motives are complex, an amalgamation of values, beliefs, perceptions, and downright ignorance or faulty logic. So, values, yes, but interests and beliefs (quite dependent on values), too, play more a role greater than what Lakoff suggests.

As the reader can discern from the length of my review, Lakoff’s book has prompted me to think a great deal. By my measure, that always suggests that book was worthwhile. Progressives shouldn’t ignore Lakoff’s  practical political suggestions. Meanwhile, I'll be off trying to explore Lakoff’s understanding of biconceptuals and the role of the family metaphor more closely. But whether further exploration of these issues brings me to a closer agreement with Lakoff or to a greater disagreement with him, Lakoff has performed a valuable service by his work on these crucial and fascinating topics.

For a good introduction introductory summary of Lakoff work and the one that led me to read this book (and that is quite timely in light the politics we’re experiencing right now, read this by Lakoff from Evonomics online magazine (an excellent resource itself).

Emotional Awareness: A Conversation Between the Dalai Lama & Paul Ekman

Leading psychologist Paul Ekman received an invitation to a Mind and Life Conference with the Dalai Lama in 2000. He went because he knew it would it please his daughter, an admirer of the Dalai Lama. Ekman himself had no great knowledge of Buddhism and no religious beliefs or practices of his own. What happened as a result of this initial encounter changed Ekman's life, both personally and professionally. He hit it off with the Dalai Lama, experiencing a warmth and openness that affected him emotionally and that puzzled him as a scientist. And he learned things about the Buddhist tradition that triggered new perspectives and research agendas from him about the emotions and how we humans can learn to better cultivate them. This book records conversations held between Ekman and the Dalai Lama over several years. These transcripts and sidebars become a treasure-trove of insight into this most basic human (and animal) phenomenon that Buddhism has explored more than two millennia via introspection (meditation). Now science is taking a closer look at, especially with the advances in neuroscience and other techniques that provide us new ways of viewing and testing emotions. This book allows any reader can come away with a better understanding of how we live our emotional lives, and how we can cultivate those emotions for our own good and the good of those with whom we live. No small accomplishment.

The first two of the Four Noble Truths espoused by the Buddha state his assessment of the human condition. The First Noble Truth: Life is unsatisfactory. (More often, we see the original Sanskrit or Pali translated as “suffering”, but I agree that this word is perhaps too aggressive in its portrayal of the original insight.) The Second Noble Truth: The cause of suffering [or unsatisfactoriness] is attachment. Attachment, as you learn, can mean craving for something (greed), craving to escape something (aversion, hatred), or ignorance of the situation (delusion). So what has this to do with emotions? Via natural selection, mammals, and especially humans, developed emotions that refined our ability to approach or avoid. Mixed with our hyper-sociability (Jon Haidt), we developed a wide variety of emotions that attract or repel us from various perceived situations. Natural selection armed us over millions of years with these mind tools, but with the advent of civilization (living in cities instead of small hunter-gatherer groups), our array of emotions, such as anger and hatred, for instance, could lead us astray. Robert Wright argues in his course on Buddhism and Modern Psychology (now offered on Coursera) that Buddhism is an antidote to some aspects human behavior instilled in us by natural selection. Instead of acting on our feelings of attachment (“Yum, doughnuts! Let’s feast”) or aversion (“Your rotten SOB”), we learn to get between our emotions—developed for quick perceptions and responses—and our actions. This is a fundamental insight shared between HHDL and Ekman, each coming at the issue from their different traditions but finding a lot of agreement. Ekman calls a pause in our reactions a “refractory period”, which may be micro-moment, or—with cultivation—something much longer. 

After spending time defining emotions—different from moods, we should note—the two discuss how we might learn to tame them (and not, as some think Buddhism suggests, eliminate them). Here we learn of the benefits of meditation as a mechanism for developing awareness, a meta-awareness (B. Alan Wallace) that allows us to observe the development of an emotion within us and thereby make a conscious decision about how we shall (or shan’t) act in response to the impulse. This ability, along with the conscious cultivation of compassion, allows us to take ourselves in happier and more sociable directions than the naturally selected traits of our emotions might push us.

The above is just a taste of what the book covers. In addition to insights into basic and ongoing Western scientific research about the emotions and the Buddhist insights cultivated over 2000 years, we learn about the participants, especially Ekman. Ekman’s insight that he changes over the course of these conversations (estimated at about 39 hours) is really moving. Ekman grew-up with a very difficult father, and Ekman shares insights he gains about himself and that relationship. Ekman’s growth of insight and appreciation gives the book an emotional (in a very good way!) valence that adds spice to the wonderful scientific and Buddhist knowledge and wisdom that we garner through it. 

The emotions are an endlessly fascinating topic. The quality of our lives is a function of our emotions. Much of morality and ethics revolve around our emotions and how we handle them. Indeed, not just Buddhism, but all of the Axial religions and philosophies—later Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Socratic philosophy and its progeny, especially Stoicism, Confucianism, and aspects of Taoism and Hinduism—are efforts to re-direct human conduct from older, more atavistic (and now less well-adapted) traits vested in humans via natural selection. These religions and philosophies (philosophy, that is, “as a way of life”, in the words of Pierre Hadot) developed in response to a very different environment (civilization) than that of the hunter-gatherers from whom we descended. The challenge to us is to use the wisdom of these traditions and refine them (no more required, I suspect) to best fit our contemporary needs. This book goes a long way in forwarding that project. We must thank Dr. Ekman and the Dalai Lama for their courage in reaching across traditions to help us find our way.

P.S. This is a second take on this book. Indeed, blog 5/682 (i.e., near the beginning of my blogging) addresses my listening to this as an audio book. It was definitely worth a second take!