Thoughts 13 Jan. 2022

 

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

At times we see an obsession with denying any pre-eminence to the human person; more zeal is shown in protecting other species than in defending the dignity which all human beings share in equal measure. Certainly, we should be concerned lest other living beings be treated irresponsibly. But we should be particularly indignant at the enormous inequalities in our midst, whereby we continue to tolerate some considering themselves more worthy than others. We fail to see that some are mired in desperate and degrading poverty, with no way out, while others have not the faintest idea of what to do with their possessions, vainly showing off their supposed superiority and leaving behind them so much waste which, if it were the case everywhere, would destroy the planet. In practice, we continue to tolerate that some consider themselves more human than others, as if they had been born with greater rights.

Priority for people, especially the human & poor.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

My aim is to show the reader the magnitude of the error [in our over-reliance on "the emissary" (L-brain) and concurrent under-appreciation of "the master" (R-brain], and its consequences. I say ‘show’, because I cannot, any more than anyone else, prove anything finally and irrefutably – the material with which we are dealing makes that impossible; but rather I wish to take my reader by degrees to a new vantage point, one built upon science and philosophy, from which, in all likelihood, the view will appear at the same time unfamiliar, and yet in no way alien – indeed rather the opposite. More like a home-coming. From there the reader must, of course, make up his mind for himself.

(Location 193)

Applies to almost all inquiries, doesn't it, other than simple math and logical tautologies?

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

On the matter of God, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it rather clearly: To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

We have vainly and foolishly tried to be civilized in opposition to nature—not only to the natural world that is the matrix of human life but also to our own savage nature within. We must therefore create a civilization that transcends savagery without opposing it.

The Machiavellians

James Burnham

An even greater obstacle to understanding derives from the fact that we have a powerful non-logical impulse to make our own and other human actions seem logical.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Liberals, to schematize, embraced capitalist modernity. Conservatives responded by opposing the liberal embrace.

After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre

Thus it would generally be a decisive refutation of a moral philosophy to show that moral agency on its own account of the matter could never be socially embodied; and it also follows that we have not yet fully understood the claims of any moral philosophy until we have spelled out what its social embodiment would be.

Thoughts 14 Dec. 2021

 

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

The principle of the subordination of private property to the universal destination of goods, and thus the right of everyone to their use, is a golden rule of social conduct and “the first principle of the whole ethical and social order.” The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property. Saint John Paul II forcefully reaffirmed this teaching, stating that “God gave the earth to the whole human race for the sustenance of all its members, without excluding or favouring anyone.”

OMG! This guy must be kidding. Questioning the sanctity and inviolability of private property? Un-American! [#irong, #sarcasm].

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

Seen globally, the story of the last decades is one of considerable advance in reducing death from diseases of poverty—communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases.

Thank you public health!

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

“The choice is not between legality and illegality, but between political wisdom and political stupidity.”

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Take China, the fastest-growing economy on the planet over the last twenty years—indeed the fastest-growing major economy in history. That country followed its own particular mix of capitalism, state planning, openness, and dictatorship. Its economy grew, but so did its political controls. (The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof described it as “Market-Leninism.”)

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Steven Pinker

Across time and space, the more peaceable societies also tend to be richer, healthier, better educated, better governed, more respectful of their women, and more likely to engage in trade.

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: Sunday 19 September 2021

 

93. Whether believers or not, we are agreed today that the earth is essentially a shared inheritance, whose fruits are meant to benefit everyone. For believers, this becomes a question of fidelity to the Creator, since God created the world for everyone. Hence every ecological approach needs to incorporate a social perspective which takes into account the fundamental rights of the poor and the underprivileged. The principle of the subordination of private property to the universal destination of goods, and thus the right of everyone to their use, is a golden rule of social conduct and “the first principle of the whole ethical and social order.” The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property.

95. The natural environment is a collective good, the patrimony of all humanity and the responsibility of everyone. If we make something our own, it is only to administer it for the good of all. If we do not, we burden our consciences with the weight of having denied the existence of others. That is why the New Zealand bishops asked what the commandment “Thou shall not kill” means when “twenty percent of the world’s population consumes resources at a rate that robs the poor nations and future generations of what they need to survive.”

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

As the late, renowned American psychologist Charles R. Snyder summarized, even on a personal basis, “high-hope persons consistently fare better than their low-hope counterparts in the arenas of academics, athletics, physical health, psychological adjustment, and psychotherapy.”

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Oxfam estimated that the wealth of just sixty-one people equaled all the wealth of humanity’s poorest half, nearly four billion people.

Biography

Hermione Lee

Richard Holmes, the ‘romantic’ biographer of Coleridge and Shelley, put it memorably when he described biography as a broken bridge into the past: You stood at the end of the broken bridge and looked across carefully, objectively, into the unattainable past on the other side … For me, it was to become a kind of pursuit … You would never catch them; no, you would never quite catch them. But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present.

Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation

Frank R. Ankersmit

The philosophy of history now has its home in the Anglophone world, thanks mainly to Collingwood, who acted as a kind of trait d’union between German (and Italian) philosophy of history on the one hand and its contemporary practitioners in the Anglophone world on the other. Without Collingwood the discipline might well be dead by now and we should be profoundly grateful to him for having prevented the discipline’s premature death. Nevertheless, a price had to be paid for this. Not being able to read German, Collingwood had an only rudimentary grasp of what had been achieved by German philosophers of history. And since most Anglophone philosophers of history have come to the discipline via Collingwood, several of the latter’s blind spots were unfortunately passed on to the contemporary Anglophone philosophy of history. Above all because Collingwood’s writings are the Anglophone philosopher of history’s customary introduction to the discipline’s main problems.

I question Ankersmit's contention that Collingwood was not able to read German. The article in The New World Encyclopedia indicates that he read German, and this comports with my memory from other sources (that I won't take the time to check now). Ditto with the contention that RGC had "only a rudimentary grasp of what had been achieved by the German philosophers of history." Has Ankersmit read The Idea of History?

The Wedge

Scott Carney

On a neurological level, the anticipation of failure is stress.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

The boundaries of the reality-based community are fuzzy and frothy, not hard and distinct, and the same is true of knowledge itself. What has and has not been validated? Who qualifies as an expert reviewer? Who is doing good science or journalism, who is doing bad science or journalism, and who is not doing science or journalism at all? Distinguishing science from pseudoscience and real news from fake news and knowledge from opinion will never be cut and dried.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

With the rise of postmodern values comes a rejection of what are seen as the stale materialistic values of modernism and the chauvinistic and oppressive values of traditionalism.

Rudolf Steiner

Gary Lachman

“Truth, for Goethe, is “a revelation emerging at the point where the inner world of man meets external reality.... It is a synthesis of world and mind, yielding the happiest assurance of the eternal harmony of existence.”

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 15 September 2021

Back to our journey through this important work. 

First, let's catch up with Pope Francis from his encyclical Laudato Si about climate change, environmental degradation, and justice:

We are free to apply our intelligence towards things evolving positively, or towards adding new ills, new causes of suffering and real setbacks. This is what makes for the excitement and drama of human history, in which freedom, growth, salvation and love can blossom, or lead towards decadence and mutual destruction. The work of the Church seeks not only to remind everyone of the duty to care for nature, but at the same time “she must above all protect mankind from self-destruction.”

(Location 818)

81. Human beings, even if we postulate a process of evolution, also possess a uniqueness which cannot be fully explained by the evolution of other open systems. Each of us has his or her own personal identity and is capable of entering into dialogue with others and with God himself. Our capacity to reason, to develop arguments, to be inventive, to interpret reality and to create art, along with other not yet discovered capacities, are signs of a uniqueness which transcends the spheres of physics and biology.

82. Yet it would also be mistaken to view other living beings as mere objects subjected to arbitrary human domination. When nature is viewed solely as a source of profit and gain, this has serious consequences for society.

(Location 840)

And now for some other voices: 

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

Personality is an entirely different matter. It is very hard to grasp and perhaps most closely resembles the Greek daimon, the guardian spirit which accompanies every man throughout his life, but is always only looking over his shoulder, with the result that it is more easily recognized by everyone a man meets than by himself. This daimon—which has nothing demonic about it—this personal element in a man, can only appear where a public space exists; that is the deeper significance of the public realm, which extends far beyond what we ordinarily mean by political life. To the extent that this public space is also a spiritual realm, there is manifest in it what the Romans called humanitas.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

The originality of totalitarianism is horrible, not because some new “idea” came into the world, but because its very actions constitute a break with all our traditions; they have clearly exploded our categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgment.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

If there is one message this book seeks to impart, that is it. Individuals talking to each other, no matter how big the network, are just people gabbing. Even truth-seeking individuals who cherish rigor and accuracy are likely to go unheard amid the din. The reality-based network’s institutional nodes—its filtering and pumping stations—are what give the system its positive epistemic valence.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

To [Joan] Robinson the point of The General Theory had been to restore human agency to economic theory. Keynes, she argued, forced economists to grapple with “life lived in time.” Systems didn’t immediately snap to equilibrium. People made choices based on expectations about an uncertain future. Decisions like whether to save or spend, or whether to buy new factory equipment or lay off workers, were never obviously rational or irrational in the moment, because long-term consequences could not be predicted.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

The United States was “a distinct moral, social and political entity,” [Hans] Morgenthau declared in the introduction of The Purpose of American Politics. All other countries defined themselves by their “ethnic affinities and historic traditions,” but the United States defined itself by an idea, with “a particular purpose in mind.” That idea, that purpose, was what Morgenthau called “equality in freedom.” Admittedly, this was a vague concept, even contradictory, or in Morgenthau’s words “intangible, shapeless and procedural,” as the principles of equality and freedom often came into conflict with each other. Pursued for its own sake, freedom became libertarianism, which necessarily undermined equality because, as Morgenthau said, there was a “natural inequality of man.” And equality by itself led to a repressive “equalitarianism,” or the denial of individual freedom. The two principles had to be forcibly yoked together to avoid extremes and the destruction of the American purpose.

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

There’s a big difference between soil and dirt. Soil has carbon, nitrogen, and bacteria. Dirt, on the other hand, is just dirt. It’s dead. There’s only so much carbon, nitrogen, and bacteria in the ground, and we have to replenish it or we get dirt. More people means more extrication of those elements.

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 11 September 2021

 

These ancient stories, full of symbolism, bear witness to a conviction which we today share, that everything is interconnected, and that genuine care for our own lives and our relationships with nature is inseparable from fraternity, justice and faithfulness to others.

(Location 758)

All it takes is one good person to restore hope!

(Location 762)

78. . . . Judaeo-Christian thought demythologized nature. While continuing to admire its grandeur and immensity, it no longer saw nature as divine. In doing so, it emphasizes all the more our human responsibility for nature. This rediscovery of nature can never be at the cost of the freedom and responsibility of human beings who, as part of the world, have the duty to cultivate their abilities in order to protect it and develop its potential. If we acknowledge the value and the fragility of nature and, at the same time, our God-given abilities, we can finally leave behind the modern myth of unlimited material progress. A fragile world, entrusted by God to human care, challenges us to devise intelligent ways of directing, developing and limiting our power.

(Location 810)

79. In this universe, shaped by open and intercommunicating systems, we can discern countless forms of relationship and participation.

(Location 816)

One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draftsman and a disgusting human being. . . .The first thing we demand of a wall is that it stand up. If it stands up, it was a good wall , and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it's around the concentration camp.

George Orwell

 William Ophus, sage

From his Requiem for Modern Politics: 

More participation, for example, is often put forward as the panacea for our political ills. But this is a singularly inappropriate remedy – unless those who participate do so in a responsible and public-spirited fashion, which is less and less the case. 68

Our myth, of course, is that in partisan debate "the marketplace of ideas" will result in good ideas driving out bad. But the actuality seems to be that all marketplaces, including those including that of political discourse, are dominated by Gresham's law. So slogans and symbols have driven out reasoned discussion; and systemic mendacity has largely preempted reasonable argument. Public discourse in a hyper pluralistic polity therefore generates heat, not light. In fact, that is the real purpose, for the winners of the political struggle are those who build the hottest fires under the politicians feet. 69-70

In effect, politics is now a spectator sport: the moral and social vacuum left by the decay of Lockean society has been filled by an ersatz media community. 78

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

In the age of Pythagoras, the unconscious Paganism, with its traditional clothing of beautiful ritual and of magical rites, was passing into a new phase under two influences. There were waves of religious enthusiasm, seeking direct enlightenment into the secret depths of being; and at the opposite pole, there was the awakening of critical analytical thought, probing with cool dispassionateness into ultimate meanings. In both influences, so diverse in their outcome, there was one common element—an awakened curiosity, and a movement towards the reconstruction of traditional ways.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Critical persuasion is not the same as political compromise, of course. Physicists did not sit across a bargaining table and make a deal over Planck’s constant.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Wikipedia figured out how to bring the Constitution of Knowledge online. It made itself a microcosm of the reality-based community, and it embodied the community’s commitments. Fallibilism: anyone can always be corrected and no entry in the matrix of knowledge is final. Objectivity: truth is public, not individual; it is what we persuade each other we know, not what you or I claim to know. Disconfirmation: we hunt for truth by correcting errors. Accountability: we answer to others and must justify our claims.

The Science Is Clear. The Economy Is an Organism - Evonomics

evonomics.com

[T]he concept of society as an organism (again, including but not restricted to economies) functions well as a story that anyone can understand.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Since these abilities [to consider probabilities] are acquired even before infants have learned to speak, it is clear that humans have pre-linguistic abilities to respond to and reason about probabilities, confirming the view of The Science of Conjecture that the story of probability is one of bringing to consciousness existing but implicit probabilistic knowledge.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The captain of that ill-fated aircraft [that crash-landed in Sioux City, IA in the 1980s], Al Haynes, has since identified several factors that contributed to the relative success of the crash-landing, in particular luck, communications, preparation, and cooperation.

Seems that these factors might be useful in other emergencies as well, don't you think?