Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 25 February 2021

 

A ground-breaking book

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Language, a principally left-hemisphere function, tends, as Nietzsche said, to ‘make the uncommon common’: the general currency of vocabulary returns the vibrant multiplicity of experience to the same few, worn coins.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers,” as a famously clever screenwriter/director/journalist named Ben Hecht once wrote, “is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.”

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

With the possible exception of the Scandinavians, no European citizenry has the political maturity of Americans, for whom a certain amount of responsibility, i.e., of moderation in the pursuit of self-interest, is almost a matter of course.

N.B. This was written sometime between the end of the Second World War and 1954, and what may have been true then seems not at all true now. (And I'd be delighted to be proved wrong about this.)

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Until the invention of antibiotics in 1928, Western medicine couldn’t deliver much better results than indigenous medicine anywhere else in the world. In many cases, going to a shaman or witch doctor offered just about the same likelihood of recovery as seeing a Western doctor.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

But in truth the U.S. government simply had no interest in creating an international order that would diminish American power. The Roosevelt administration was clear-eyed about raw-power realpolitik considerations, but FDR and many of his top diplomats were also influenced by misunderstandings about the causes of the Great Depression and infused with a righteous Wilsonian sense of national destiny.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

In a world of appearances, filled with error and semblance, reality is guaranteed by this three-fold commonness: the five senses, utterly different from each other, have the same object in common; members of the same species have the context in common that endows every single object with its particular meaning; and all other sense-endowed beings, though perceiving this object from utterly different perspectives, agree on its identity. Out of this threefold commonness arises the sensation of reality.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

The author Parag Khanna notes that economically, America has really turned into a collection of interlinked metro regions that he dubs, “The United City-States of America.” Big, developed cities are beginning to think of themselves as independent actors on the world stage.

Thoughts of the Day: Saturday 11 December 2020

 

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

We moderns are just as religious as our premodern ancestors, but we have chosen to worship two savage gods—Moloch and Mammon.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Nature Resilient was the next mental model—one that, [C.J. "Buzz"] Holling argues, dominates ecology today and represents a major step forward. An eco-system is resilient, in this view, if the relationships among its organisms persist even in the face of sharp shocks from outside.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

[S]ince it’s impossible to separate economics from modern medicine, it’s also important to note that Western treatment for chronic illnesses often requires that patients continue to take expensive medicine their whole lives. In these cases, the disease is much more profitable than a cure.

Diplomacy

Henry Kissinger

Because British foreign policy grew out of open debates, the British people displayed extraordinary unity in times of war. On the other hand, so openly partisan a foreign policy made it possible—though highly unusual—for foreign policy to be reversed when a prime minister was replaced.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

C.G. Jung

We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives.

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

The perfect concreteness of pure justice, of absolute right, is unattainable in the sphere of law, for law regarded as an objective reality over against the individual already shows the mark of that last abstraction which divides subject from object. Society, as distinct from the individual, is already an abstraction, and as such cannot have that claim upon the individual which is possessed only by an absolutely concrete principle. Law is not the will of the individual himself; it is a command laid upon him from without, and therefore his obedience to it is always tainted with utilitarianism. Hence all those utilitarian degradations of law to which we have referred are in a sense inevitable. For law—and the same, we shall see, is true of history as a whole—is an incomplete realization of concrete thought: it is essentially a step, but an imperfect step, from abstract to concrete, from utility to responsibility. The very externality of law to the agent binds it down to the world of abstract or scientific thought, and necessitates a contradiction by which, on the one hand, the law itself claims to embody right, while on the other the individual conscience claims to defy the law in the name of right.