Thoughts 14 Feb. 2022

 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Would a panel of the wise—Confucius, Gautama Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, Lao Tzu, Rumi, and Socrates—conceivably approve of our current way of life?

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

[W]e have a wide latitude of choice within the limits set by the flow of solar energy. It is possible in principle to create an agricultural civilization founded on yeoman farmers instead of exploited peasants or slaves—that is, the kind of small-hold, egalitarian, salt-of-the-earth farming society that Thomas Jefferson envisioned for the United States. I have imagined such an agrarian civilization, which I call “Bali with electronics.” In short, we can have benign and culturally rich societies without energy slavery. True, these societies may not offer the kinds of permissive freedoms that many enjoy today; individuals will have to find their freedom within the prevailing moral framework, not apart from it. But in return they will get back the autonomy, agency, and integrity that were lost in societies given over to distraction and consumption.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

‘But aren’t you dichotomising?’ I have not invented that hateful thing, a dichotomy. Some people are just against what they call ‘dichotomising’, feeling it is ‘simplistic’. But such a view is itself simplistic. There are, after all, different types of dichotomies. Some are inevitable, such as between plants and animals – even though there exist microscopic life forms that defy such categorisation. Some are entirely spurious. Elsewhere I have quoted whoever it was who said that ‘there are two types of people in this world: those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don’t’. Dichotomising has its problems.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

Given the scale of the fiscal interventions in 2020, if the political will had been there, it would not have been unreasonable to talk about a new or at least a renewed social contract. There were elements in the giant flow of money that were undoubtedly novel.

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

For “to commit a crime against the natural world is a sin against ourselves and a sin against God.”

The Wedge

Scott Carney

The three main building blocks of human experience are time, emotion and sensation. The brain must account for all three factors in order to encode information from the outside world.

William Walker Atkinson Premium 7 Book Collection

WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON

The muscles, bones, ligaments, feet, hands and nerves, etc., are agents for carrying out the mandates of the mind.

Powerful Hypnosis - Revealing Confessions of a  Rogue Hypnotist

The Rogue Hypnotist

If someone firmly believes ‘I am a smoker,’ they will not be able to stop smoking. If they lack self-belief that they can stop smoking, they may or may not succeed in the long term.

Thoughts 23 Jan 2022

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

But truth, like reality, is an encounter. It is in the nature of an encounter that more than one element is involved. And what I find in whatever-it-is does not pre-exist my encounter with it. There must be a potential, true enough, but it is actualised only in my encounter with it. The encounter is genuinely creative. The whole universe is constantly creative – but not out of nowhere.

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

[T]his culture of care must include not just those of us alive today, but also future generations—a point the pope makes more than once, in both economic and moral terms. Our current economic models literally dis-count the future, insofar as damage in the future is counted as costing less than damage today, but what sort of a calculus is it that concludes that our needs are greater than our children’s? The notion of the common good, the pope concludes, also extends to future generations: “We can no longer speak of sustainable development apart from intergenerational solidarity …" [Naomi Oreskes writing in the Introduction.]

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

In general, the net effect of tax and welfare systems in all countries is to reduce inequality at least to some degree. However, welfare can also serve a conservative function. Indeed, the historic purpose of the welfare state as it emerged in Bismarckian Germany in the 1880s was precisely that—to preserve the social status hierarchy across the vicissitudes of sickness, old age, and, eventually, unemployment.34 That was the principal logic of spending in 2020. The crisis affected the entire economy. No one was to blame. Everyone should be made whole. So the range of potential claimants on state support exploded.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Our minds don’t have direct control over every autonomic process. We can’t just think the word “adrenaline” and trigger the hormonal release we want. But we can put ourselves in situations that trigger that same predictable hormonal release. When we choose stressors, we choose our biological reactions. The same goes for the immune system: We can’t think it into action, but we can certainly change the environment that the immune system responds and reacts to.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

The meta-programming circuit — known as the “soul” in Gnosticism, the “no-mind” (wu-hsin) in China, the White Light of the Void in Tibetan Buddhism, Shiva-darshana in Hinduism, the True Intellectual Center in Gurdjieff — simply represents the brain becoming aware of itself.

Time and Narrative, Volume 3

Paul Ricoeur, trans. by Kathleen Blamey, and David Pellauer

[F]rom an Augustinian point of view, the future and the past exist only in relation to a present, that is, to an instant indicated by the utterance designating it. The past is before and the future after only with respect to this present possessing the relation of self-reference, attested to by the very act of uttering something.

Immoderate Greatness

William Ophuls

Unfortunately, although naturally clever, human beings are not innately wise, especially in crowds.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

Emerson begins his essay “Character” with four paragraphs on morals, three of them opening with that very word. “The will constitutes the man,” he writes. In this Emerson is little different from the most influential of all Victorian philosophers, John Stuart Mill: “A character is a completely fashioned will.”

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 8 Dec 2021

 

Last Best Hope

George Packer

When Trump ran for president, the party of Free America collapsed into its own hollowness. The mass of Republicans were not constitutional originalists, libertarian free traders, members of the Federalist Society, or devout readers of The Wall Street Journal. They wanted government to do things that benefited them—not the undeserving classes below and above them. Party elites were too remote from Trump’s supporters and lulled by their own stale rhetoric to grasp what was happening.

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

Francis helps us to see that an integral ecology calls for openness to categories which transcend the language of mathematics and biology, and take us to the heart of what it is to be human.

American Philosophy

John Kaag

“He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity,” [William] James wrote, “loses the prize as surely as if he had tried and failed.”

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

What you’ve got here, really, are two realities, one of immediate artistic appearance and one of underlying scientific explanation, and they don’t match and they don’t fit and they don’t really have much of anything to do with one another. That’s quite a situation. You might say there’s a little problem here.

"The determining factor in the self is consciousness; i.e., self – consciousness. The more consciousness the more self; the more consciousness the more will, the more will the more self. . . . The self is the conscious synthesis of the limited and the unlimited which is related to itself and the task of which is to become a self, a task which can be realized only in relation to God. To become a self means to become concrete. But to become concrete means to be neither limited nor unlimited, for that which must becomes concrete is a synthesis. Therefore development consists in this: that in the eternalization of the self one escapes the self endlessly and in the temporization of the self one endlessly returns to the self."

Kierkegaard, quoted in Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: Vol. 1 Human Nature.

[T]he nation is a corporate unity held together much more by force and emotion than by mind. Since there can be no ethical action without self-criticism and no self-criticism without the rational capacity for self-transcendence, it is natural that national attitudes can hardly approximate the ethical.

Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 88.