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 11 Feb. 2022

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

[T]here are emergent phenomena from the whole interconnected system at the hemisphere level, and neuroscience increasingly recognises that we should think in terms of complex widespread networks.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

The hemispheres are massively more intraconnected within themselves than they are connected to one another. So, as in life, science needs both narrow focus and broad vision.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

This book is about what goes on at a higher level than that of intrahemispheric regions alone – though a very significant intrahemispheric distinction that will emerge regards the inhibitory effect of the frontal region of each hemisphere on its own posterior cortex. Nonetheless, this should not be thought of in purely antagonistic terms, but in dialectical terms, whereby something new is brought about through their joint action.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

[T]oday’s world population of 7.6 billion is far too large to be supported by the flow of solar energy, so a benign future depends upon a radical reduction in numbers. In addition, agrarian civilizations are no paradise.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Jean-Jacques Rousseau pinpointed the fundamental contradiction of a life devoted to consumption by saying, ”For the impulse of appetite alone is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom.”

Doom

Niall Ferguson

The disaster [Chernobyl] had both active and latent causes, some of which were undoubtedly of a uniquely Soviet nature. The reactor’s operators took excessive risks in a way that exemplified the “We can do it no matter what” mentality instilled by Soviet propaganda since 1917, and especially in the late Stalin and Khrushchev eras, the formative years of the key actors. The design flaws of the reactor itself, and the operators’ unawareness of its potential instability, were also consequences of the peculiar political economy of the planned economy. Yet in some respects, as we shall see, Chernobyl could have happened anywhere.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

Too much chaos doesn’t lead to higher order, just more chaos and disorder.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

If, as I suggested before, the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to “demand” its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be.

Thoughts 11 Feb. 2022

 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

We are hurtling toward a day of ecological reckoning. We should have acted many years ago to contain the damage and build a bridge to a different kind of civilization. Now we are faced with an increased population, worse pollution, dwindling resources, progressive biological destruction, much greater complexity, compounding debt, and enormous inertia in the system—a nexus of problems that have no separate solutions, only an aggregate solution requiring a total revolution in our way of life.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

As generals have learned, even the best war plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy, but having planned is essential, because it forces you to imagine different scenarios and to prepare for the worst. In other words, planning is an inoculation against stupefaction and panic, so when things do not go according to plan, you are less likely to lose your head and quicker to make the necessary adjustments.

Immoderate Greatness

William Ophuls

Gibbon: it was “the loss of freedom, of virtue, and of honour,” not the barbarian invasions, that doomed the [Roman] empire of the West.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

I frequently emphasise that both hemispheres are involved in absolutely everything we do. It cannot, however, be an argument against hemisphere differences.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

[T]here are emergent phenomena from the whole interconnected system at the hemisphere level, and neuroscience increasingly recognises that we should think in terms of complex widespread networks.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

[James] Fowler’s work examines religion, in the broadest sense of that complex term, as the way in which we think about and relate to the ultimate nature of existence. Under that definition, even many forms of modern atheism and naturalism are really better classified as modernist forms of religious expression (Stage Four in Fowler’s construction). After all, they often represent strong conclusions about the ultimate nature of being upon which whole systems of cultural rules, norms, and ethics are constructed.

Last Best Hope

George Packer

It will be a long time before we know whether the protests of 2020 can come anywhere close to fulfilling their ambitions—not just to change policing and criminal justice in America, but also to bring full equality to Black Americans. Because structures of oppression are much too big for any one of us to budge, in a sense white people are, as usual, off the hook. Systemic criticism produces gestural politics. During the pandemic the San Francisco Board of Education took on the project of changing the names of Abraham Lincoln High School, Franklin D. Roosevelt Middle School, and dozens of other “problematically” named schools, while keeping isolated and demoralized children out of all schools, whatever their names. Mastheads and tables of contents changed, pictures and statues were taken down, glass ceilings shattered, but no one honestly expected to do much about the material conditions of misery.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Before Montesquieu’s discovery, the only principle of change connected with forms of government was change for the worse, the perversion that would transform an aristocracy (the government of the best) into an oligarchy (the government of a clique for the interest of the clique), or overturn a democracy that had degenerated into ochlocracy (mob rule) into tyranny.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

The doctrine which I am maintaining is that the whole concept of materialism only applies to very abstract entities, the products of logical discernment. The concrete enduring entities are organisms, so that the plan of the whole influences the very characters of the various subordinate organisms which enter into it.

The Great Leveler

Walter Scheidel

Four different kinds of violent ruptures have flattened inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics.

Thoughts 8 Feb. 2022

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Understanding the structure of the brain and how it functions can help us see the constraints on consciousness, much as, to use another metaphor, the banks of a river constrain its flow and are integral to its being a river at all, without themselves being sufficient to cause the river, or being themselves the river, or explaining it away. All experience in this life as we know it (and this applies whether we conceive the brain as the originator, or as a transducer, of consciousness) comes to us through the brain, and is therefore inevitably constrained, and shaped, by it.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

It is not the changes in the brain itself that matter, but the way in which we use it. An analogy might be with a radio set: to begin with you try different channels, but after a while you begin to tune into only one. The other channels are still there – it’s just that you are no longer listening to them.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Even if we avoid oblivion, the result would be a dark age whose darkness would be roughly proportional to the extent of the overshoot. To avoid such a fate, humanity must either achieve a total technological mastery over nature via the perfection of artificial intelligence and robotics, an outcome that has been dubbed the Singularity, or make a relatively fast transition to a high-level agrarian civilization, precisely the options posited many years ago by Harrison Brown.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

[A] state of total technological mastery is probably not achievable owing to basic physical and biological laws, such as the Entropy Law and the Law of the Minimum. Technology cannot sustain a “machine civilization” or even a “digital civilization” out of thin air.9 In addition, as noted by Brown, the Singularity would be a regimented, collectivized dystopia. (The digital panopticon of today is but the merest harbinger of such a future.)

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

According to John Rawls, for example, pursuing our own interests may be necessary, but only those acts that are motivated purely for the interests of others can be recognized as intrinsically moral.

The Art of Learning

Josh Waitzkin

Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible,  unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential.

The Way of Zen

Alan W. Watts

This is not a philosophy of not looking where one is going; it is a philosophy of not making where one is going so much more important than where one is that there will be no point in going.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

As informed physical trainers will tell their clients, you cannot outrun a bad diet.

Thoughts 7 Feb. 2022

 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

[C]rowds are moved by simple ideas, striking images, and repeated slogans that drive out deeper thought. To make matters worse, the anonymity of crowds induces individuals to behave viscerally, discarding both prudence and morality. In addition, because crowds are moved by images that are not logically connected or rooted in fact, members of crowds have a hard time distinguishing between reality and illusion. Thus, said [Gustave] Le Bon, Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilization involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture—all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realizing.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Thomas Hobbes became the author of modern political economy by abandoning virtue as the purpose of politics and making economic development into the end of government.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

I do not attempt to ‘explain’ experience at all in the causative sense. Nor do I invoke the brain in order to tell us what experience ‘really is’, which it never could, but to illuminate the constraints on our understanding, which it can.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

The point is that we shouldn’t allow the ongoing work of overcoming modernism’s pathologies to alienate us from the real transcendence that modernist values continue to offer.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Here are two criteria [for choosing a path into the future:] any path we choose should take us towards a future that’s likely, as best we can judge, to be enough to genuinely reduce the danger humanity faces; and, second, the path should also be feasible, in the sense that it gives us a good chance of reaching that desirable future, which means surmounting or bypassing likely political, economic, social, or technological roadblocks along the way. These criteria are often at odds, leaving us trapped in what I call the enough vs. feasible dilemma.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

The emerging infectious diseases paradigm, proposed by scientists from the 1970s onward, was, like the models of climate change and earth systems ecology that emerged at the same moment, a profound critique of our modern way of life, our economy, and the social system built on it.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

Hayek assembled a ferocious, scholarly attack on Keynes and the New Deal, not as an empirical analysis or a work of economic theory but as a political treatise. The book, titled The Road to Serfdom, would in time be recognized as a foundational text of modern conservatism, though Hayek resisted the label all his life. To Hayek the word conservative connoted the “paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies”4 of British Tories. He preferred to think of himself as a “classical liberal” inspired by Locke, Hume, and Smith—many of the same figures who animated Keynes. Keynes had tried to redefine liberalism for the twentieth century with The End of Laissez-Faire, sketching ideas that came to fruition in the New Deal; Hayek wanted to offer an alternative liberal vision.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

While I would never discount the great achievements that Western medicine has given overall to human health, if we spent half as much money and time trying to invent a better placebo—or, maybe more accurately, better ways to train our immune system to protect our bodies—we’d likely discover entirely new ways to treat disease. This is, of course, where it’s beneficial to consider the relationship between the environment and human physiology as a wedge to help control and strengthen the immune system itself.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

[Aby] Warburg’s theory of culture, which was based primarily on the medium of the image and pictorial representation, the human urge to give symbolic expression to our deepest and most existential anxieties—to give them a solid form and by doing so to make them amenable to innovation or treatment—is actually the source of all culture and learning. Even in its most sublime and abstract achievements, in art and science, the human mind can never entirely overcome culture’s origins, the feeling of existential anxiety and of being subject to the overwhelming forces of nature that, we suppose, surround us and overpower us.