Thoughts of the Day: Monday 21 December 2020

 

Hannah Arendt

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The great political philosopher Hannah Arendt captured the sentiment [the beginning of the Cold War with the threat of nuclear war] brilliantly, with language that resonates eerily today. “Never has our future been more unpredictable,” she declared. “Never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest— forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Eventually, reality does correct such self-indulgence. But this reality hits home hardest not at the top of the capitalist heap, but at the bottom.

Collingwood's The Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Collingwood wishes us to see that history is systematic knowledge. Its purpose is not to provide emotional satisfaction, but ‘to command assent’ (PH 73).

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

Now, if a person acquires the ability to express one kind of emotions and not another, the result will be that he knows the one kind to be in him, but not the other.

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

...as Socrates urged against Glaucon, the individual character considered in isolation from its environment is an abstraction, not a really existing thing. What a man does depends only to a limited extent on what kind of man he is. No one can resist the forces of his environment. Either he conquers the world or the world will conquer him.

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam

It [the "loss" of China to the communists] caught this country [USA] psychologically unprepared. It was natural for a confused country to look for scapegoats and conspiracies; it was easier than admitting that there were things outside your control and that the world was an imperfect place in which to live.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Bluntly put, when democracy no longer delivers the goods, it will be consigned to the dustbin of history by an angry mob.

On Liberty

John Stuart Mill

The practical principle which guides them to their opinions on the regulation of human conduct is the feeling in each person’s mind that everybody should be required to act as he, and those with whom he sympathizes, would like them to act.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 20 December 2020

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The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

It has sometimes been said that what we feel is always something existing here and now, and limited in its existence to the place and time at which it is felt; whereas what we think is always something eternal, something having no special habitation of its own in space and time but existing everywhere and always.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

For every selfish creep, there are many who use business entrepreneurship to make the world better in some way. Also, selfishness can be a good thing. Adam Smith was right that the individual’s pursuit of self-interest can, when directed through a well-functioning market, hugely benefit broader society. Modern market economies are prodigiously creative; and that creativity, when pointed in the right direction, can be an extraordinary force for good.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The fourth principle that should be at the center of any positive vision of the future and worldview is a strong commitment to a shared identity that encompasses not just all of humanity, but in some respects all life on the planet too. This is the matter of who we see as “we.”

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Neuroscientists and lifelong meditators have long known that our minds slip from past to present to pondering the future, often without any obvious connection between reference points.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The important thing about positive feedbacks is that they are inherently unstable: they create self-reinforcing spirals of behavior, and can cause systems to become overextended or unbalanced.

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

Where the new way of knowing demanded that the observer remain detached, isolated from the observed, so as to capture it in complete ‘objectivity’, thereby making what was under observation an ‘object’ – denying it had any ‘inside’ – Goethe knew that such objectivity was impossible. Well before Werner Heisenberg, Goethe had grasped this central truth, that ‘the phenomenon is not detached from the observer, but intertwined and involved with him’.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

“Socrates himself fell victim to the popular prejudice against philosophy.” There was worse. Philosophers needed to be able to think freely and to follow their ideas wherever they might lead. There was a kind of sociopathic madness to their endeavor. They were the ultimate iconoclasts, subversive by their very nature, because social and political activity was based on popular opinion, public dogma, and unexamined tradition, whereas philosophy existed to scrutinize all opinions, dogmas, and traditions.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

The Nazis distributed photographs of Hitler’s hands with the caption, “The Führer’s hands organize his speech.” Memorably, the philosopher Karl Jaspers asked his friend Martin Heidegger, Germany’s most influential philosopher, how he could support a philistine like Hitler. “Culture is of no importance,” Heidegger replied. “Just look at his marvelous hands.” The friendship did not last.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 17 December 2020

 

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

The true artist is ‘original’, not by being shockingly novel, but by reaching to the ‘origin’, the Urphänomen, from which all ‘copies’ arise. It is to awaken our recollection of these that poetry and the other arts exist. They hold before us images that tell us of our lost home. And we know we are recalling it. The assurance of this is the haunting sense of the familiar that overcomes us in its presence. True beauty is nothing strange or alien but achingly familiar, like the taste of Proust’s madeleine, which reminds us of what we already know but have forgotten. All knowledge, Plato tells us, is such remembrance.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

In his illuminating book, Governing with the News, Timothy Cook, a political scientist at Williams College, argues that the goals of American journalists fundamentally diverge from those of the country’s politicians. Whereas journalists want their stories to have concreteness, plot line, color, real people, terseness, and above all “an endless series of conflicts and momentary resolutions,” politicians want to preserve nuance and room to maneuver and compromise. Info-glut exacerbates this divergence.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Langdon Winner, a wonderfully insightful theorist of politics and technology, argues that the world has changed in some fundamental ways to provoke these concerns. “If there is a unique quality to the modern era,” Winner writes, “it is that the conditions of existence have changed to such a degree that something explicitly recognized as ‘complexity’ now continually forces itself into our awareness.”

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Albert Einstein pointed out, “Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.”

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Both in theory and practice, they [liberal polities] depend on reason and self-restraint—that is, on citizens who know the difference between liberty and license and who govern themselves accordingly. But the intrinsic amorality of liberalism first erodes, then corrodes, and finally dissolves these faculties.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Marx’s genius could neither be denied nor his insights into modern economics ignored (here, as on so many other occasions, what Arendt offered to the political right with one hand she took back with the other). But Marx’s influence, whatever his virtues, had been “pernicious” in the long run; he and the disciples who acted in his name were prepared to sacrifice the highest goods, individual freedom and unencumbered thought, for the dead weight of materialism and the stultifying dogma of the dialectic.

Super Consiousness

Colin Wilson

It is vitally important to realize that 'ordinary consciousness' is incomplete. In fact, to put it more emphatically, everyday consciousness is a liar.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 16 December 2020

 

1997 copyright

Despotism may govern without faith, liberty cannot. Religion is much more necessary in the republic which they set forth in glowing colors than in the monarchy which they attack; it is more needed in democratic republics than in others. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral ties not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with the people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the deity?
--Alexi de Tocqueville (29)

[M]arx, as much biblical prophet as political philosopher, brokes decisively with Hobbes and the Enlightenment mainstream by brining religion back into politics. The Marxist sovereign has the duty to . . . end the class domination and social oppression that has marred all previous history. When this overweaning objective is joined to the general enlightenment drive for social perfection, the result is an ideological crusade for an earthly paradise – in effect, a secular religion. By resurrecting the eschatological element that Hobbbes had tried to exclude from politics, Marx unleased a new era of quasireligous warfare, both withing and between states. . . . As a political doctrine, Marxism therefore combines the autoritariansim of Hobbes with the very worst aspect of premodern politics: the religious element that Hobbes tried so hard to get rid of. (42)

The usual way of putting it is to say that women have escaped an anomalous and inferior status to take their rightful place in the modern world. But it would probably be more accurate to say that capitalism has finally succeeded incorporating the last major class to resist the blandishments of the market system. (52 )

New Pathways in Psychology

Colin Wilson

There is an interesting parallel here with the science of economics as developed by Adam Smith, Ricardo and Malthus, which seemed to demonstrate with rigorous logic that the ‘laws of production’ doom our civilisation to final ruin. At this juncture, John Stuart Mill pointed out (in Principles of Political Economy) that although we cannot evade the rigid laws of production—which lead to overpopulation and the ‘rat race’—there is no law of distribution: we can do what we like with the wealth, once it has been created, and use it to build a less self-destructive society.

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

The idea of a creative unity transcending the opposites from which it arises is at the heart of Coleridge’s insights into polarity, something again which he shared with Goethe. Coleridge claimed that if he were granted ‘a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or to find itself in this infinity,’ he could cause ‘the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations’ to rise up before us. Coleridge’s two forces are Goethe’s ‘systole’ and ‘diastole’ and Schelling’s ‘expansion’ and ‘contraction’. They form the centre of what Owen Barfield, who wrote a book devoted exclusively to what Coleridge thought, called ‘polar logic’.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator. In other words, nothing that is, insofar as it appears, exists in the singular; everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody. Not Man but men inhabit this planet. Plurality is the law of the earth.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

There was no escaping decisions based on man’s place among others. “To be conscious of himself, of his fate in the world, is the specifically human quality in human existence.” Or as Arendt put it, “The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself.”

 

Thoughts of the Day: Tuesday 15 December 2020

 

The following three quotes are taken from Requiem for Modern Politics by William Ophuls. 

"The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wrecked the societies in which they occur."--Alfred North Whitehead (xv)

Of course, all political paradigms contain inherent contradictions and therefore generate problems that must be solved.The job of the statesman, as opposed to the mere politician, is to preserve the paradigm by dealing effectively with these problems. However, if political wisdom and skill are lacking or if the contradictions are very deep, small problems eventually coalesce into a large problemmatique that challenges the old paradigm. At this point, more reform, however well conceived, no longer suffices and may even make matters worse, so pressure builds up for a fundamental change in regime. (26)

The challenge is to find a way of going beyond a moral individualism without losing the individual along the way. (27)

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.… None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. " [Thoreau]

In short, “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”  [Thoreau]

 

An Autobiography

R. G. Collingwood

Natural science as it exists to-day, and has existed for the best part of a century, does not include the idea of purpose among its working categories. 

Breath

James Nestor

Slower, longer exhales, of course, mean higher carbon dioxide levels. With that bonus carbon dioxide, we gain a higher aerobic endurance. This measurement of highest oxygen consumption, called VO2 max, is the best gauge of cardiorespiratory fitness. Training the body to breathe less actually increases VO2 max, which can not only boost athletic stamina but also help us live longer and healthier lives.

Sapiens

Yuval Noah Harari

If you tried to bunch together thousands of chimpanzees into Tiananmen Square, Wall Street, the Vatican or the headquarters of the United Nations, the result would be pandemonium. By contrast, Sapiens regularly gather by the thousands in such places. Together, they create orderly patterns – such as trade networks, mass celebrations and political institutions – that they could never have created in isolation. The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue has made us the masters of creation.

The Revenge of Geography

Robert D. Kaplan

Europe, it appears, offered the perfect degree of environmental difficulty, challenging its inhabitants to rise to greater civilizational heights, even as it still lay in the northern temperate zone, fairly proximate to Africa, the Middle East, the Eurasian steppe, and North America; thus its peoples were able to take full advantage of trade patterns as they burgeoned in the course of centuries of technological advancements in navigation and other spheres.

Thoughts for the Day: 14 December 2020

 

The Way of Zen

Alan W. Watts

Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Sometimes components in a highly connected system are tightly coupled. This means that a change in one component has rapid, multiple effects on other components of the system. The change branches out through the web of components, producing distant and often unexpected results.

The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Gary Lachman

C. D. Broad, who had paraphrased Bergson’s ideas about the eliminative function of the brain. Broad had written that “Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.” Were the brain not to reduce or “edit” this universal awareness—or “cosmic consciousness,” as the psychologist R. M. Bucke, a little known secret teacher, called it—we would be swamped, Broad said, with a “mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge.” As it is, our inner editor does a very good job of providing us with only that very small selection of reality “which is likely to be practically useful.”

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[C]ompared to even a few decades ago, our species now has a much greater ability to innovate in answer to our problems. That’s because human social systems— whether community associations, municipal councils, societies, or planet-spanning institutions and corporations— are all instances of what scientists call “complex adaptive systems.” They learn and adapt by exploiting the power of combination— a power that’s essential, as we’ve seen, to our recursive imaginations— as they join together bits and pieces of existing ideas, institutions, technologies, and practices in new ways to meet new challenges.

Our modern global connectivity gives us the potential to supercharge this “combinatorial innovation.”

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Thus my first problem was how to write historically about something—totalitarianism—which I did not want to conserve but, on the contrary, felt engaged to destroy. My way of solving this problem has given rise to the reproach that the book was lacking in unity. What I did—and what I might have done anyway because of my previous training and the way of my thinking—was to discover the chief elements of totalitarianism and to analyze them in historical terms, tracing these elements back in history as far as I deemed proper and necessary. That is, I did not write a history of totalitarianism but an analysis in terms of history; I did not write a history of anti-Semitism or of imperialism, but analyzed the element of Jew-hatred and the element of expansion insofar as these elements were still clearly visible and played a decisive role in the totalitarian phenomenon itself.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Inference in history proceeds not from data given in advance, but from secure answers to productive questions.

Thoughts of the Day: Sunday 13 December 2020

Ol' Nic: Machiavelli

Apologies to the Grandchldren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences

William Ophuls

Niccolò Machiavelli:

Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who have ever been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

Current deficiencies of character, both as an idea and in behavior, result from epistemology, the study of how we know. If the character of the knower is irrelevant to knowing, or even interferes with truest knowing, then character does not belong within philosophy’s purview. Then knowledge and the methods of gaining knowledge can proceed unhampered by the character of the knower and by issues of value that are inescapably implied by the idea of character. Result: knowledge without value; valueless knowledge, which is euphemistically dubbed “objectivity.” 

When philosophy ignores the relevance of character for the value of knowledge, moral decline follows, and moral resurrection depends on philosophical correction. The righteous and the right who complain of moral decline in society look to “the family” for cause and cure. They should perform their postmortems more incisively. Then they would take their laments to philosophy and cut the overburdened, guilt-plagued families some slack. 

The epistemological fault, in brief, is this. To know the world “out there,” philosophy constructed a knowing subject “in here.” As the world was conceived to be, ultimately, a characterless abstraction of space, time, and motion, so the knower had to be equally transcendent and objectified, that is, shorn of characteristics. The method of knowing the world had to be purified; otherwise our human observations would be all-too-human, qualified by individual subjectivity, merely anecdotal, therefore unreliable, therefore untrue. The ideal human as knower of truth must be a vacant mirror of purified consciousness. Some thinkers would discard “consciousness” altogether. They call it the ghost in the machine; they assert that the relation between consciousness and brain is an insoluble problem, or that the problem results from the wrong question. They are right—so long as consciousness is undefiled by qualities, a sheer abstraction. To conceive of consciousness as energy aware of itself makes matters worse. It defines the one abstraction by means of three others: energy, awareness, and self.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

If you want to make a convincing argument for just about anything, the best tactic usually relies on triggering visceral and emotional details rather than employing logic and abstract reasoning. In other words, I’m much more likely to capture your attention if I start a chapter of my book with an anecdote about a minefield in India or someone swimming with sharks than with a drab academic summary of neurological vocabulary.

New Pathways in Psychology

Colin Wilson

Man controls his physical environment by means of his physical powers. He controls his inner world by means of his mental powers—‘intentions’. His future evolution depends upon increased ability to use ‘intentions’, these mental pseudopodia that determine his thoughts, moods, ideas, emotions, insights. The intentions do not create ideas or insights; they only uncover meaning. They could be compared to the blind man’s fingers that wander over Braille. But this image fails to bring out the most important aspect of the intentions: their power to penetrate into meaning.

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.