Thoughts 5 Jan. 2022

 

Dr. (psychiatrist) Iain McGilchrist 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

[T]he core of the contemporary world is the reductionist view that we are – nature is – the earth is – ‘nothing but’ a bundle of senseless particles, pointlessly, helplessly, mindlessly, colliding in a predictable fashion, whose existence is purely material, and whose only value is utility.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Reductionism can mean a number of things, but here I mean quite simply the outlook that assumes that the only way to understand the nature of anything we experience is by looking at the parts of which it appears to be made, and building up from there. By contrast I believe that the whole is never the same as the sum of its ‘parts’, and that, except in the case of machines, there are in fact no ‘parts’ as such, but that they are an artefact of a certain way of looking at the world.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Even if contemporary physics did not demonstrate that this is an impossibility, there is a problem with this kind of argument. Reductionists and determinists unerringly fail to take account of the fact that their own arguments apply to themselves. If my beliefs are ‘nothing but’ the mechanical products of a blind system, so are all views, including those of the reductionist. If everything is already determined, the determinist’s tendency to embrace determinism is also merely determined, and we have no reason to take it seriously (since we are all determined either to believe it or not already).

William Morris

The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make. --William Morris

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

Once men thought Spirit divine, and Matter diabolic. . . . Now science and philosophy recognize the parallelism, the approximation, the unity of the two: how each reflects the other as face answers to face in a glass, nay, how the laws of both are one. . . . We are learning not to fear truth. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Sovereignty of Ethics”

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

The governmental legitimacy of the townships, which was bequeathed to the framers of the Constitution, existed in “the worldly in-between space by which men are mutually related,” and that in-between space fostered what Leo Strauss also valued so highly—simple common sense.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

How could he go to work for a man who, he said, promised to be a “disaster”? Wasn’t this an unworthy, even objectionable use of his talents? What price was one willing to pay to be close to power? What sacrifices of personal honesty would be involved, not to mention personal dignity? Shortly before his meetings with Nixon, Kissinger was already pondering all this, even if nobody else was.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

The writers of The Federalist Papers had praised the notion of pitting interest against interest. In fact, the ideal of balance of power was “as old as political history itself.” In an anarchic world, it was “necessary,” an “essential stabilizing factor.” To Morgenthau, it was an “inevitable” arrangement, a “universal principle.” Over centuries of European history, statesmen pursued a balance of power through constantly shifting alliances.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Throughout its [U.S.] history, the country has had its doubters and naysayers, particularly among pessimistic and sophisticated intellectuals and writers like Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, James [Henry, not William?], [Henry] Adams, and Mencken. Repelled by the country’s ambient, oppressive vulgarity, they “refused to identify themselves with America as they found it.” it.” [Hans] Morgenthau, who yielded to no one in either pessimism or sophistication, was not unsympathetic to them. They were, in one sense, the best of the best. “They uncovered in America the human condition, drastically at variance with the American dream.” He could admire their rejection of America’s often fatuous optimism and philistine materialism, could share their “tragic sense of life.” But he perceived an aura of irresponsible aestheticism in their anti-American stance. He could not go along with the rejection of the American ideal. Without it, he said, the country would lose its internal coherence and fall apart, and he was too appreciative of what his adopted land had given him to accept that.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

Unlike in the West, there was never any question of conflating SARS-CoV-2 with flu. Letting the disease run through the population unchecked in an attempt to achieve “herd immunity” was not entertained as an option. For Beijing—preoccupied as it was with delivering “output legitimacy”—letting “nature take its course” was unthinkable. To their detriment, European and American policymakers found it harder to detach themselves from the cold-blooded calculus of the flu paradigm.

A Guide to the Good Life

William B. Irvine

Stoicism and Zen have certain things in common. They both, for example, stress the importance of  contemplating  the transitory nature of the world around us and the importance of mastering desire, to the extent that it is possible to do so. They also advise us to pursue tranquility and give us advice on how to attain and maintain it. Furthermore, I came to realize that Stoicism was better suited to my analytical nature than Buddhism was. As a result, I found myself, much to my amazement, toying with the idea of becoming, instead of a practicing Zen Buddhist, a practicing Stoic.

Perennial Seller

Ryan Holiday

To be great, one must make great work, and making great work is incredibly hard. It must be our primary focus. We must set out, from the beginning, with complete and total commitment to the idea that our best chance of success starts during the creative process.

Thoughts 10 Dec. 2021

 

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

A.R. Orage, the literary critic and student of the esoteric teacher Gurdjieff, believed with [George Bernard] Shaw that imagination is the propellant of evolution. ‘Evolution is altogether an imaginative process,’ he wrote. ‘You become what you have been led to imagine yourself to be’.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

There are two problems with Keynes’s vision. 

First, we have attained a level of material abundance approximately double the eight-fold increase posited by him as more than sufficient for economic nirvana. Yet we have by no means exited the tunnel of necessity, because economic growth seems inevitably to produce more mouths, more wants, and, above all, more complexity. So the tunnel continuously extends itself before us. In fact, thanks to diminishing returns and an inexorable increase in the cost of complexity, we find ourselves running harder to stay in the same place. Thus growth is a flawed and self-defeating strategy for achieving economic nirvana. 

The second concern was anticipated by Keynes: “If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose.” And this was no small matter: “I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades.” Only the uncommon few “who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself . . . will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.” Hence 

there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.

 

Last Best Hope

George Packer

The narrative of Free America remained as inflexible as any ideology: tax cuts and deregulation = freedom and prosperity. Decade after decade you encountered its mantra, like the rituals of a cargo cult, on the website of the Cato Institute, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, broadcasts of The Rush Limbaugh Show, and the platform of the Republican Party. The facts said otherwise.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

“There exists in our society,” Arendt complained, “a widespread fear of judging.” The genuine statesman had no choice but to judge, and judgment, Kissinger said, demanded “character and courage . . . vision and determination . . . wisdom and foresight.” And where did correct judgment come from? Insofar as policy depended on nonquantifiable choices, there was no avoiding questions of morality. “All political action,” Strauss said, “implies thought of the good.” Kissinger wrote that “the great human achievements must be fused with enhanced powers of human, transcendent and moral judgment.” If artificial intelligence came to dominate or replace human thinking, “What is the role of ethics?”

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

However, we are of the world and not merely in it; we, too, are appearances by virtue of arriving and departing, of appearing and disappearing; and while we come from a nowhere, we arrive well equipped to deal with whatever appears to us and to take part in the play of the world.

The New Leviathan

R. G. Collingwood

Whatever is thus immediately given is removed from the sphere of argument.

What's RGC talking about? Perceptions, such as what we sense or feel.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

If we confine ourselves to certain types of facts, abstracted from the complete circumstances in which they occur, the materialistic assumption expresses these facts to perfection. But when we pass beyond the abstraction, either by more subtle employment of our senses, or by the request for meanings and for coherence of thoughts, the scheme breaks down at once. The narrow efficiency of the scheme was the very cause of its supreme methodological success.

Thoughts: 11 November 2021--Happy Armistice/Veterans Day (really)

 

Henry Adams and the Making of America

Garry Wills

There is much to be learned from the past—but it is better learned from the pragmatists than from the ideologues. Washington would have been the least surprised or disoriented to see what the nation looked like after the Jeffersonians had made it.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

Any attempt to capture the folkways of our local centers has told a story not of participatory democracy but of closed social corporations, the rules of climbing in them quite rigid, the pinnacle of power monopolized by various social and business combines. That situation has gradually been changing; and—is it accidental?—now we hear a lament for the decline of community, a decline which the new politicians would remedy by further atomizing society, “politicizing” each man, urging him to “do his own thing.” They seem to believe that community is merely the sum of individual “own things.”

Compare this observation with Collingwood's distinction between "community" & "society."

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Liberal education, he said, is the effort to establish “an aristocracy within democratic mass society.” Western civilization, as Strauss understood it, was the property of an educated minority. But that didn’t make it unworthy of defense against the nihilistic Nazis. Quite the contrary.

Are liberal educations today acting to protect us from authoritarianism & illiberalism?

Synchronicity

Joseph Jaworski,

I had always thought that we used language to describe the world—now I was seeing that this is not the case. To the contrary, it is through language that we create the world, because it’s nothing until we describe it.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

“There is no animal in nature, excepting Man, that sleeps with the mouth open; and with mankind I believe the habit, which is not natural, is generally confined to civilized communities, where he is nurtured and raised amidst enervating luxuries and unnatural warmth where the habit is easily contracted, but carried and practiced with great danger to life in different latitudes and different climates; and in sudden changes of temperature, even in his own house.”

Remember the Spanish proverb: "En un boca cerrado no entran moscas." ["In a closed mouth enter no flies.']

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

The question is, was anything lost nutritionally in the process of juicing? The answer is an emphatic yes—all of the insoluble fiber is now gone. The soluble fiber alone still has some benefit; orange juice moves the food through the intestine faster (to generate the satiety signal sooner), and the soluble fiber can be converted to short-chain fatty acids. But those benefits pale in comparison to the suppression of the insulin response associated with the combination of the two. Remember, it doesn’t matter where the fructose comes from—fruit, sugar cane, beets—without the fiber, it all has the same metabolic effect on your body.

Thoughts: 28 October 2021

 

Last Best Hope

George Packer

The great danger of equality is atomization. If we’re all side by side on the same level and constantly in motion, there’s no fixed relation between us. “Aristocracy links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain,” Tocqueville wrote. “Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link.” Equal and independent people will satisfy their own desires with no obligation to others outside their narrow circle. The chance to be anything or anyone gives them the idea that they don’t owe anything to anyone. They grow indifferent to the common good and withdraw from others into the pursuit of personal happiness, especially wealth. Tocqueville called this “individualism.” It explains how the American passion for equality can lead to extreme inequality, even a new aristocracy, but one without links between people.

This quote and the following one from William Ophuls direct our attention to the shadow side of democracy, it's inherent defects that must receive our continuing attention and course corrections. Also, consider this quote in light of our failure to take actions for the common good in response to the pandemic.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

As in a Greek tragedy, democracy’s virtue is also a fatal flaw. For it is in the nature of democratic polity to foster increased freedom, and as freedoms compound they eventually produce an unstable, ungovernable society in which anything goes.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

Consider in light of the preceding quotes from Packer & Ophuls. Since Postman published this book in the early 1980s, the American people (never a majority) voted in sufficient numbers to elect an utterly unqualified, undignified rich kid (old at the time, but still . . .) made most famous by "reality" (staged) TV. How prescient--sadly.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

This truth—a-lētheia, that which is disclosed (Heidegger)—can be conceived only as another “appearance,” another phenomenon originally hidden but of a supposedly higher order, thus signifying the lasting predominance of appearance. Our mental apparatus, though it can withdraw from present appearances, remains geared to Appearance. The mind, no less than the senses, in its search—Hegel’s Anstrengung des Begriffs—expects that something will appear to it.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Heidegger’s philosophical vision may have been cogent and powerful, but it was time-bound and partial, and so too was his notion of humanity itself—which [Leo] Strauss called “narrow.” There was neither tenderness to his thought, nor a consideration of love or charity, or any of the other finer impulses in humanity. Heidegger appealed to anyone who embraced a “tragic sense of life” as the only, or at least the most sophisticated, outlook, but he had nothing to say, Strauss observed, about “laughter and the things which deserved to be laughed at.”

One doesn't read Heidegger (if at all) for laughs, for humor, for kindness, or a sense of human warmth. A sound critique from Leo Strauss.

A Brief History of Everything

Ken Wilber

Calculations done by scientists from Fred Hoyle to F. B. Salisbury consistently show that twelve billion years isn’t even enough to produce a single enzyme by chance.

The Enigma of Reason

Hugo Mercier

A simple first-pass way to define intuitions is to say that they are judgments (or decisions, which can also be quite intuitive) that we make and take to be justified without knowledge of the reasons that justifies them. Intuition is often characterized as “knowing without knowing how one knows.” Our conscious train of thought is, to a large extent, a “train of intuitions.” Intuitions play a central role in our personal experience and also in the way we think and talk about the mind in general, our “folk psychology.”

A Short History of Decay

Emil M. Cioran, Richard Howard (Translator), Eugene Thacker (Foreword)

“Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation”

Cioran was a mid-20th century Romanian writer.

The Principles of History and Other Writings in Philosophy of History

R. G. Collingwood, W. H. Dray, and W. J. van der Dussen

The student of historical method will hardly find it worth his while, therefore, to go closely into the rules of evidence, as these are recognized in courts of law. For the historian is under no obligation to make up his mind within any stated time. Nothing matters to him except that his decision, when he reaches it, shall be right: which means, for him, that it shall follow inevitably from the evidence.

So long as this is borne in mind, however, the analogy between legal methods and historical methods is of some value for the understanding of history; of sufficient value, I think, to justify my having put before the reader in outline the above sample of a literary genre which in the absence of any such motive it would, of course, be beneath his dignity to notice.

An intriguing point if one is, like me, a lawyer and a student of history. I find a lot of overlap. Both deal with the past when the lawyer is involved in resolving--as opposed to trying to avoid--disputes.

Thoughts for the Day: 24 August 2021

 

Coming later this year to a bookstore near you! (9 November in the UK)

The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all. At the global level, it is a complex system linked to many of the essential conditions for human life. A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system.

(Location 408)

In recent decades this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon.

(Location 409)

Perhaps the pope should update this in light of the most recent IPCC report. To wit, we can now gauge more accurately the ties between extreme and persistent weather events with human-caused climate change. 

It is true that there are other factors (such as volcanic activity, variations in the earth’s orbit and axis, the solar cycle), yet a number of scientific studies indicate that most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity.

(Location 412)

Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded.

(Location 435)

And now from some other voices: 

"To me, a universe with tendencies towards beauty, complexity, and the rich unfolding of uniqueness is already teleological. It is a verb with many adverbs, not just a matter of nouns chasing nouns."

The Matter with Things (to be published this fall in the UK)

Iain McGichrist

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The beliefs in the unlimited substitutability of resources, in the primacy of economic institutions and policies, and in the exceptionalism of human beings and their modern markets often combine to produce what I can only call unbridled hubris.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Culture is an amorphous concept at best, but the scholars Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson provide the definition I’ve found most succinct and useful: according to them, culture is “information—skills, attitudes, beliefs, values—capable of affecting individuals’ behavior, which they acquire from others by teaching, imitation, and other forms of social learning.”

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

Frederick Douglass, in his once-famous Fifth of July oration, delivered on July 5, 1852, could combine a militant rejection of slavery with a bow to the moral possibilities inherent in the Constitution to annihilate it—and this wasn’t just a rhetorical gambit designed to win support for his cause: “In that instrument, I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither.”

The Road to Unfreedom

Timothy Snyder

What has already happened in Russia is what might happen in America and Europe: the stabilization of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda, the shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity. Russian leaders could invite Europeans and Americans to eternity because Russia got there first. They understood American and European weaknesses, which they had first seen and exploited at home.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

MODERNITY: Condition of society from late eighteenth ceTimntury, marked by rapid growth of population, spread of industrial and then finance capitalism, division of labor, literacy, and mobility. Intellectually, a climate of ideas marked by secularization and enlightened thought. Modernity cut loose natural science from the divine and the supernatural; philosophy from alone explaining the world; morality from the task of human redemption; law from the putative universal order of nature. Modernity entered political thought via Machiavelli and Hobbes, who lifted from rulers any duty beyond ensuring a safe, stable frame for people to flourish in and pursue worldly concerns. To liberals, modernity was a liberation, to conservatives a loss of anchorage and human shelter for which they blamed liberals, hence the term, “liberal modernity.” “Many old works become fragments. Many modern works start out as fragments” (Friedrich Schlegel).

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Like cultural conservatives before him and after, [Carl] Schmitt was also disturbed by the apparent loss of compass and bleak purposelessness in liberal modernity. The oddity, for a conservative, was Schmitt’s looking to politics to fill the gap. A more natural filler—one sought by [John Henry] Newman, for example—was an authoritative religion. Schmitt’s correspondent and interlocutor, Leo Strauss, pointed that out to Schmitt, who acknowledged the religious element in his thinking.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

The contradictory of ‘metaphorical’ is ‘literal’; and if the distinction between literal and metaphorical usages is a genuine distinction, which in one sense it is, both kinds of usage are equally proper. There is another sense in which all language is metaphorical; and in that sense the objection to certain linguistic usages on the ground that they are metaphorical is an objection to language as such, and proceeds from an aspiration towards what Charles Lamb called the uncommunicating muteness of fishes. But this topic belongs to the theory of language, that is, to the science of aesthetic, with which this essay is not concerned.