Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 9 March 2021

 

The Wedge

Scott Carney

How we resolve the tension between risk and reward defines who we are. And fear is a guidepost for how we use the Wedge. It is as much an involuntary response to a prediction of the future as it is a sensation that immobilizes our biology and stops us from taking action. Mastering fear doesn’t mean ignoring danger, but rather finding a reason that makes danger worth it—separating the stimulus from the response.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

At present, a postindustrial hollowing out in society, a financial crash, failed wars, and geostrategic fears have shaken voters’ faith in the conservative claim to prudence and superior understanding. With increasing pace during the 2010s, a broadly liberal-minded center-right found itself on the defensive against a confident, disruptive hard right.

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

Freedom always implies freedom of dissent. No ruler before Stalin and Hitler contested the freedom to say yes—Hitler excluding Jews and gypsies from the right to consent and Stalin having been the only dictator who chopped off the heads of his most enthusiastic supporters, perhaps because he figured that whoever says yes can also say no. No tyrant before them went that far—and that did not pay off either.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Karl Polanyi’s description of modern political economy’s painful birth warns of the difficulty ahead as we try to create an ecological civilization.

Kinds of Power

James Hillman

In contrast with the simple notions [of power] are the difficult definitions proposed by philosophers, for instance: “Power is the compulsion of composition” (A. N. Whitehead); “[Power is] the production of intended effects” (B. Russell); “[Power is] the difference in probability of an event, given certain actions by A, and the probability of the event given no such actions by A” (R. A. Dahl); “Inherent in power, therefore, as opposed to force, is a certain extension in space and time” (E. Canetti); “By virtue and power I mean the same thing; that is, virtue, insofar as it is referred to man, is a man’s nature or essence” (Spinoza).

God's Debris

Scott Adams

Likewise, it is not belief to say God exists and then continue sinning and hoarding your wealth while innocent people die of starvation. When belief does not control your most important decisions, it is not belief in the underlying reality, it is belief in the usefulness of believing."

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 8 March 2021

Trust and the Competition Delusion - Griffith Review

griffithreview.com

[E]conomists’ vision of ‘perfect competition’ – in which the social role of virtue in serving the public economic interest is rendered redundant by the incentives competition generates in a market – might work tolerably in the market for vegetables. But it doesn’t in more sophisticated markets like those for knowledge and expertise.

--Nicholas Gruen, economist (@NGruen1)

Dark Star Rising

Gary Lachman

It is also important to present a powerful image, to conjure a “glamour” of success. “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular,” and Trump’s job is to tell them it is. They will do the rest. He conveys this message by surrounding himself with symbols of the fantasy life he is selling.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

But things are not quite so simple as that. To begin with, people may have a motive for deceiving themselves and each other. Where certain things which may happen in people’s minds are conventionally regarded with disapproval, the lengths to which people in whose minds they actually do happen will go, in order to persuade themselves and others that they do not happen, are most remarkable.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

The only way to eat a satiating meal while minimizing insulin secretion is to add fat. It’s the one macronutrient that does not stimulate an insulin response.

The Machiavellians

James Burnham

The masses can never successfully revolt until they acquire a leadership, which is always made up in part of able and ambitious individuals from their own ranks who cannot gain entrance into the governing élite, and in part of disgruntled members of the existing élite (members of the nobility, for example, in the opening stages of the French Revolution, or dissatisfied intellectuals and middle-class persons in the Russian Revolution). So long, therefore, as the governing élite is both willing and in a position to destroy or to assimilate all such individuals, it has a virtual guarantee against internal revolution.

The Fellowship

Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski

“The scientists who discovered the forces of electricity,” Barfield contends, “actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller  consciousness  of their relationship with one another.”

The Science of Conjecture: Evidence & Probability Before Pascal by James Franklin

 

                                                                           2015 edition

If the title of this book seems daunting to you, well, then, your instincts are sound. This is not a book for the faint of heart. However, if you're up for an amazing intellectual trek through the high-country (and some low country) of the mind, then you'll find this book a genuinely rewarding experience. I came to the book via a recommendation from Nassim Taleb, and the praise that Taleb expressed for the book proved more than accurate. 

Author James Franklin

Author James Franklin is an Australian mathematician-philosopher, but this description sells him short. The breadth of learning displayed in this volume is truly astonishing. Reading it, you might guess him a linguist, a lawyer, a rhetorician, a medievalist, a scientist, and so on. As the title lets you know, his topics are broad--"evidence" and "probability"--and his account runs from the dawn of Western civ in Egypt and Mesopotamia up to the early modern period of Pascal. (Would that someone write a similar history of Indian and Chinese thought!) Pascal, along with Fermat and Huygens, and a few lesser-known figures, marked a change in thinking about probability when they developed mathematical models and algorithms for calculating the odds (probabilities) involved in stochastic games of chance, such as dice. But as Franklin notes from the beginning of this book, most thinking about probability throughout Western history, including the period after Pascal, addresses probability (and chance) by the use of ordinary language. We see this demonstrated in terms such as "more likely than not," "a preponderance of the evidence," and "beyond reasonable doubt" to give examples of common phrases still used today by lawyers, judges, and juries.

Franklin traces ideas about evidence and probability through the domain of law, which proves the most significant domain for delineating issues of evidence in general and probabilities in particular. But Franklin also addresses developments about these topics in rhetoric, philosophy, theology, moral theology and philosophy (such as the casuistry of the Jesuits), insurance and business law, and natural science. Thinking about issues of evidence and probability has its roots in Greek and Roman thought, but perhaps more noteworthy is the fact that medieval thought and practice analyzed and advanced these concepts greatly. Franklin argues adamantly against many calumnies hurled against medieval thought by modern critics. Many post-classical, pre-Renaissance thinkers receive attention and implicit praise from Franklin for their groundbreaking insights: names like Baldus, Orseme, Duns Scotus, Buridan, Ockham, John of Salisbury, and Nicholas of Autrecourt, and so on. Many of these thinkers and sources were new or only vaguely familiar to me. 

There are times, I must admit, when I found the going a bit slow, although only in the relatively small section on Pascal and his peers did Franklin delve much into math as such. However, I'm quick to forgive Franklin for going a bit deep into the weeds at some points because of the importance of his overall message. Indeed, if you're pressed for time or just want to dip your toe in the get the feel, just read his prefaces (original and 2015), Conclusion, and Epilogue and you will have received a valuable reward for your time. Issues of evidence and the challenge of probabilities are as important and vital to our well-being today as they have been at any time throughout history. Indeed, given the extraordinary human powers that now threaten the entire planet and the continued well-being and survival of humankind as a species, we'd do well to do all we can to educate ourselves about these principles and thereby promote sound decision-making involving issues of evidence and probability. These terms were a part of my everyday concerns as a lawyer who practiced before trial and appellate courts (and administrative tribunals). But issues of evidence and probability have application quite as much (albeit less explicitly so) in our everyday lives. We experience these issues as individuals and as members of groups, for instance, as members of political entities that make decisions that affect our well-being from the level of our neighborhoods to the level of our nation and even now involving our entire world. For instance, we see these issues raised and discussed in great depth and with great concern in our thinking about how to best address climate change,.

Conclusion: The Science of Conjecture is quite an amazing book as a work of scholarship and as a prompt to thought. I would compare in its comprehensiveness and depth to Thomas McEllivey's The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. High praise indeed! 

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 7 March 2021

 

My favorite book about Romania

In Europe's Shadow

Robert D. Kaplan

I refer to understanding the true character of objectivity. For what is taught in journalism schools is an invaluable craft, whereas properly observing the world is a matter of deliberation and serious reading over decades in the fields of history, philosophy, and political science. Journalism actually is not necessarily, whatever the experts of the profession may claim, a traditional subject in its own right. Rather, it is a means to explore and better communicate subjects that are, in fact, traditional areas of study: history and philosophy as I’ve said, but also government, politics, literature, architecture, art, and so on. I’ve never altogether trusted what journalists say about themselves.

The Culture Code

Clotaire Rapaille

But we don’t expect our presidents to be ideal humans touched by a divine hand, like the biblical Moses. We don’t want our presidents to be perfect—most important, we don’t want them to consider themselves perfect. As we’ve already seen, Americans have strong apprehensions about perfection. We are culturally adolescent, and we expect our president to be adolescent as well. We expect him to be connected to the American soul, and that means rarely doing things right the first time. Instead, we expect him to make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and be better for it. Clinton’s presidency was riddled with mistakes (from the botched national health plan to Whitewater to the Monica Lewinsky scandal), but, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll, his approval ratings at the end of his second term were higher than those of any post–World War II president, including Ronald Reagan.

Vernacular Eloquence

Peter Elbow

Because of the power and prestige that Oxford and Cambridge had down through the centuries (graduates were given, in effect, two votes in national elections until 1935), a large portion of prominent politicians, scholars, and leaders of society up till recent times had undergone three years of this weekly ritual: writing essays that they had to read aloud and that were evaluated entirely on the basis of hearing. I think this may explain something I’ve noticed till recently about English scholarly and political writing: it seems more accessible, spoken, and free of jargon than the same genres in German and U.S. academic writing.

Collingwood's The Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Collingwood explains it himself, ‘for the philosopher, the fact demanding attention is neither the past by itself, as it is for the historian, nor the historian’s thought about it by itself, as it is for the psychologist, but the two things in their mutual relation’.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

No serious writer or speaker ever utters a thought unless he thinks it worth uttering. What makes it worth uttering is not its truth (the fact that something is true is never a sufficient reason for saying it), but the fact of its being the one truth which is important in the present situation.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

From the ecological perspective, elevating the individual over the community makes no sense, intellectually or practically. Individuals should have civil rights, but civic duties and responsibilities must have at least equal weight if we wish to preserve the integrity of the system over the long term.

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 6 March 2021

1986 publication, still more than relevant
 

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

On such matters of evidence, the Lombard commentators already show the characteristic medieval tendency to generalize much more than the Roman lawyers and to inquire into abstract principles. How can a law legislate against those who plot against the king’s life, when only God can know anyone’s thought? “[The question] is solved in this way: it is known through indications, for example if someone is discovered in the king’s chambers after hours having a naked sword under his cloak, or with a knife in his sleeve, or if the cupbearer of the king while near him is seen to prepare poison.”

My most recently completed book.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Despite having lost its original theoretical basis, an outmoded mechanical worldview still prevails.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

He had this in common with the kids; he wears a Nixon mask.

N.B. The "he" is Nixon.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Unless we treat politics as a zero-sum game in which the whole field is to be won and held by one side, recognition of an enduring left-right divide across the field reflects, in rough terms, an acceptance of politics as unending argument amid diversity. It reflects acceptance, in short, of a core element in liberal democracy: the acknowledgement of unsettleable social conflict, fought over politically by the right and the left.

N.B. This is what U.S. politics has lost, at least for those who have adopted the Trumpist line, which now seems a majority of the (what retains the brand) of the Republican Party.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

And this speaking in analogies, in metaphorical language, according to Kant, is the only way through which speculative reason, which we here call thinking, can manifest itself. The metaphor provides the “abstract,” imageless thought with an intuition drawn from the world of appearances whose function it is “to establish the reality of our concepts” and thus undo, as it were, the withdrawal from the world of appearances that is the precondition of mental activities.

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.