Thoughts for the Day: Friday 5 March 2021

 

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

If such a human nature were to exist, it would be a natural phenomenon, and to call behavior in accordance with it “human” would assume that human and natural behavior are one and the same. In the eighteenth century the greatest and historically the most effective advocate of this kind of humanity was Rousseau, for whom the human nature common to all men was manifested not in reason but in compassion, in an innate repugnance, as he put it, to see a fellow human being suffering.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Restoration in Europe appears today in the form of three fundamental concepts. First there arose the concept of collective security, which is in reality not a new concept but one taken over from the happy times of the Holy Alliance; it was revived after the last war in the hope that it would serve as a check on nationalistic aspirations and aggression. If this system went to pieces, however, it was not because of such aggression but because of the intervention of ideological factors.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Montesquieu’s moving and guiding principles—virtue, honor, fear—are principles insofar as they rule both the actions of the government and the actions of the governed.

Collingwood's The Idea of History

Peter Johnson

However, not all of past life is historically reclaimable. What cannot be re-enacted cannot be known. And what cannot be known, for Collingwood, includes the immediacy of the past, an immediacy that is essential to sensation and to feelings, and which is to some degree present in thought, too. Historical blunders, failures of various kinds, even accidents and strokes of luck can be rethought so long as they can be related to the agent’s aims and purposes.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Mainstream conservatives organized themselves in parties of the center-right. They were flanked by two kinds of dissent from within the right: conservatives on the party fringes who refused to compromise with the liberal-democratic status quo, and conservative critics, outside party politics and often indifferent to policy, who found ugly or unethical the liberal-modern world that political conservatives were helping to create.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[T]he economic optimists’ view implies that the human species is biologically exceptional and that our modern economies are historically exceptional.

Time Warrior

Steve Chandler

The main reason people have a problem with procrastination is that they don’t see the connection between completing something and having new, fresh energy come out of that.

The Way of Zen

Alan W. Watts

It is fundamental to every school of Buddhism that there is no ego, no enduring entity which is the constant subject of our changing experiences. For the ego exists in an abstract sense alone, being an abstraction from memory, somewhat like the illusory circle of fire made by a whirling torch.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 3 March 2021

 

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Readers will wait in vain for a clearly stated claim or carefully reasoned conclusion [from Sloterdijk]. Never wholly lost is a preoccupying question Sloterdijk that shares with Scruton: what in the ethico-cultural turmoil of the present is a thoughtful person to shelter and preserve?

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

[The American journalist H.L.] Mencken was a deep, uncritical admirer of Nietzsche’s writings on morality. As a moral skeptic, Nietzsche’s problem was that to knock down morality, you needed to leave some of it standing. As a conservative oppositionist, Mencken always seemed to know which opinions were wrong. But he rarely, if ever, could say which were right.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

Being a philosopher is a way of leading one’s own life consciously, giving it pull, form, and direction through constant, probing questioning.

Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt

What Kierkegaard wanted was to assert the dignity of faith against modern reason and reasoning, as Marx desired to assert again the dignity of human action against modern historical contemplation and relativization, and as Nietzsche wanted to assert the dignity of human life against the impotence of modern man. The traditional oppositions of fides and intellectus, and of theory and practice, took their respective revenges upon Kierkegaard and Marx, just as the opposition between the transcendent and the sensuously given took its revenge upon Nietzsche, not because these oppositions still had roots in valid human experience, but, on the contrary, because they had become mere concepts, outside of which, however, no comprehensive thought seemed possible at all.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

The past, then, does not come to us as light from a distant star. Without the historian’s critical engagement the past could not come alive at all, but critical engagement with what? If the answer is with decisions as actually arrived at and made, then history is going to be a rather lifeless affair. If, on the other hand, it is with what may have happened as well as what did happen, then Collingwood seems to be giving historians the freedom to say what they like. In fact, Collingwood strikes a persuasive course in addressing these questions. The political historian trying to understand the actions of, say, Lloyd George during the munitions crisis in the First World War will re-enact his intentions and the situation he faced. This will include ‘possible ways of dealing with it’ (The Idea of History 215) as well as the policy he actually followed. Does this make history too conjectural? Not at all, so as long as the alternatives which the historian re-enacts are those that were considered by the agent at the time. But does this mean alternatives that actually were considered or those that could have been considered? Once again Collingwood is permissive. The historian in re-enacting past thought, both theoretical and practical, subjects it to criticism, ‘forms his own judgment of its value, corrects whatever errors he can discern in it’ (IH 214). It would be a poor sort of historian, Collingwood suggests, who treats the past as immune from revision, even if the revision takes place in the historical imagination and the historical imagination takes place in the present. Re-enactment, in other words, includes counter-factual discussion as well as the delineation of what actually occurred.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Economists have their own version of this idea, the “policy trilemma,” which posits that countries can have two of the following three: free-flowing capital, independent central banks, and a fixed exchange rate. They’re a bit wonkish, but all these trilemmas get at a simple notion—if everything is open and fast-moving, the system can spin dangerously out of control.

The War of Art

Steven Pressfield

I'm keenly aware of the Principle of Priority, which states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what's important first.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 2 March 2021

 

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

If the New Deal was, as the historian Ira Katznelson has suggested, a project comparable only to the French Revolution in its enduring political significance, then [FDR's] the Four Freedoms address was its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

[John Kenneth] Galbraith’s portrait [in his 1958 The Affluent Society] of the cheerful but discontent overconsumer was a portrait not of America but of white America . And even white Americans still struggled on the farm, where 40 percent of families remained impoverished. Yet [Gunnar] Myrdal’s critique only underscored Galbraith’s broader point about democracy, markets, and mathematics. The economic system could run at full capacity—or at least at what politicians accepted as full capacity—while still leaving out a tremendous swath of society.

Trust and the Competition Delusion - Griffith Review

griffithreview.com

There’s even an online engine enabling you to find your very own bogus correlation at whatever statistical significance you’d like, such as that between mozzarella-cheese consumption and civil engineering doctorates.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

Thinking, willing, and judging are the three basic mental activities; they cannot be derived from each other and though they have certain common characteristics they cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

No mental act, and least of all the act of thinking, is content with its object as it is given to it. It always transcends the sheer givenness of whatever may have aroused its attention and transforms it into what Petrus Johannis Olivi, the thirteenth-century Franciscan philosopher of the Will, called an experimentum suitatis, an experiment of the self with itself. Since plurality is one of the basic existential conditions of human life on earth—so that inter homines esse, to be among men, was to the Romans the sign of being alive, aware of the realness of world and self, and inter homines esse desinere, to cease to be among men, a synonym for dying—to be by myself and to have intercourse with myself is the outstanding characteristic of the life of the mind. The mind can be said to have a life of its own only to the extent that it actualizes this intercourse in which, existentially speaking, plurality is reduced to the duality already implied in the fact and the word “consciousness,” or syneidenai—to know with myself.

After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre

What then the conjunction of philosophical and historical argument reveals is that either one must follow through the aspirations and the collapse of the different versions of the Enlightenment project until there remains only the Nietzschean diagnosis and the Nietzschean problematic or one must hold that the Enlightenment project was not only mistaken, but should never have been commenced in the first place. There is no third alternative and more particularly there is no alternative provided by those thinkers at the heart of the contemporary conventional curriculum in moral philosophy, Hume, Kant and Mill. It is no wonder that the teaching of ethics is so often destructive and skeptical in its effects upon the minds of those taught.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 1 March 2021

 

Raffa

“One lesson I’ve learned is that if the job I do were easy, I wouldn’t derive so much satisfaction from it. The thrill of winning is in direct proportion to the effort I put in before. I also know, from long experience, that if you make an effort in training when you don’t especially feel like making it, the payoff is that you will win games when you are not feeling your best. That is how you win championships, that is what separates the great player from the merely good player. The difference lies in how well you’ve prepared.”

— Rafael Nadal in Rafa (p. 287) % Farnum Street blog

The right solution is expensive. The wrong one costs a fortune.

--Farnum Street blog

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Without the capacity to imagine things as they once were, history would be impossible.

Self-Reliance & Other Essays

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans.

N.B. I disagree.

Breath

James Nestor

Fast-forward to the early 1900s, when a Belgian-French anarchist and former opera singer was making her way up to Tibet with soot on her face, yak fur woven into her hair, and a red belt around her head. Her name was Alexandra David-Néel, and she was in her mid-40s traveling alone through India—unheard-of at the time for a Western woman.

Breath

James Nestor

First up, I want to know why the body heats up during Tummo [Tibetan breathing technique that keeps practitioners warm even in freezing temperatures] and other Breathing+ practices. The heavy dose of stress hormones could blunt the pain of cold, but it can’t stop damage to the skin, tissues, and the rest of the body. Nobody knows how Maurice Daubard, Wim Hof, and their followers can sit naked in the snow for hours and not get hypothermia or frostbite.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

What do you call something that makes people change for the better and heals illness? For much of my life, I didn’t understand the way that Native Americans used the word “medicine.”

Dark Star Rising

Gary Lachman

Charismatic political leaders often take on a quasi-religious character. And if we look at the careers of other charismatic individuals, we find many similarities between the two. Gurus and demagogues have much in common, and both share certain characteristics with magicians like Aleister Crowley, who was also a guru and who had clear political views, some of which exhibit a strange similarity with those making the news in our post-truth time.

Anyone thinking of (painted) golden idols at CPAC right now?

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 28 February 2021

 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

We know the truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart. ---Blaise Pascal

Two Essays on Colin Wilson

Gary Lachman

“Life failure” is the central problem for Wilson. We are all familiar with it. Its most common form is boredom, which, Wilson tells us, is essentially a kind of drooping of intentionality.

Beyond the Robot

Gary Lachman

If our attention is like a hand, it can only grasp something in one way at a time.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Without a patrician center, there are no standards, and so people increasingly go their own ways or take their cues from below, not above. And the society breaks down into fractions that passionately pursue their partial interest at the expense of the larger whole. Hence the moral confusion and political dysfunction that now afflicts the United States.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Our immune system is the best weapon we have to root out the source of most illness.

N.B. Indeed. So use it. Get vaccinated!

In Europe's Shadow

Robert D. Kaplan

Realism emerges from the tension between moral philosophy and area expertise. The weight of history and landscape limit what can be accomplished in any particular terrain, even as the possibilities for improvement must always exist.

The Kennedy Imprisonment

Garry Wills

Nixon’s attacks on Kennedy seemed half-envious, never contemptuous. Murray Kempton observed at the time: “Mr. Nixon is cursed by the illusion that he is playing dirty with his betters.” Like Johnson, Nixon felt compelled to mimic where he could not scorn—the Nixon inaugural address was slavishly imitative of Kennedy’s more successful one.

N.B. It's this depth of insight that earned Wills a place on Nixon's enemies list.

Thoughts of the Day: Saturday 27 February 2021

 

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Against geopolitical threats made by nonliberal competitors and planetary threats created by liberal modernity itself, the intellectual complaints of the unreconciled right looked more like a local nuisance than a source of serious concern. It was replaying themes and postures familiar since the 1890s, ever revived, ever discredited: an apocalyptic vision of Western decline, a false contrast of people and elites, inattention to government or policy, and a bootstrapping attempt to break out of liberal orthodoxy that found itself back in despite grand-sounding projects such as the pursuit of “metapolitics.”

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Was society one community or composed itself of subcommunities? That is, was society unicellular or multicellular? Gierke thought society was multicellular. Together with the modern state and its laws, a national society had emerged out of many independent and long-standing communities.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

I argued with people; I am not particularly agreeable, nor am I very polite; I say what I think. But somehow things were set straight again with a lot of people.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

Reactionary Keynesianism would dominate the governing philosophies of Harry Truman, Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan and inform successive campaigns of mass death that would outlast even the Cold War.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 26 February 2021

 

Everything that you might want to know about conservatism but were afraid to ask. 

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The advice [offfered by contemporary exponents of Burke's thought] focused on the prudent management of unavoidable change in order to limit its social disruptiveness. Less was said about the hard part of identifying which values had to be defended. Burkeanism of this second-order kind is rightly thought of as a historically relative Utilitarianism, cast in negative terms: minimize disruption according to what the standards of the day find disruptive.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

To understand the meaning of totalitarian terror, we have to turn our attention to two noteworthy facts that would appear to be completely unrelated. The first of these is the extreme care that both Nazis and Bolshevists take to isolate concentration camps from the outside world and to treat those who have disappeared into them as if they were already dead.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Gary Lachman

But Kek is not the only god of chaos making an appearance these days. Trump, we’ve seen, is an avatar of this particular state too, or at least of confusion, or, less politely, of a mess. For many on the alt-right, Trump is only the beginning.