Thoughts for the Day: Friday 23 April 2021

 

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

My answer is that history is ‘for’ human self-knowledge. It is generally thought to be of importance to man that he should know himself: where knowing himself means knowing not his merely personal peculiarities, the things that distinguish him from other men, but his nature as man. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a man; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of man you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the man you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what he can do until he tries, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

The historian’s business is with fact; and there are no future facts. The whole past and present universe is the field of history, to its remotest parts and in its most distant beginnings. Over this field the historian is absolutely free to range in whatever direction he will, limited not by his ‘authorities’ but by his own pleasure. For the maturity of historical thought is the explicit consciousness of the truth that what matters is not an historian’s sources but the use he makes of them.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

PROP. 1. Every statement that anybody ever makes is made in answer to a question.

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.

Choosing Survival

John Kemp

What is a highly adaptive society? It is a nation-state that has acquired and developed a stable set of five key institutions: a representative form of government, a market-oriented economy, a growing scientific and technical enterprise, a universal system of education, and a system of religious practice which becomes progressively more disentangled from government and progressively more tolerant of diverse beliefs.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

The history of philosophy transpired in this two-limbed kind of development in both Greece and India, despite the modern idea that Greek thinkers were primarily realistic and logical, while Indian thought was supposedly limited to transcendentalist and intuitive modes. In fact, neither of these ancient cultures was as limited as that. The Greeks quite as much as the Indians had philosophical schools with mystical and transcendentalist orientations; conversely, the various trends of pluralism, naturalism, empiricism, skepticism, and protoscientific rationalism unfolded in the Indian schools as well as in the Greek.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

There are other subjects that are well seen in terms of the gradual coming to explicitness of implicit knowledge. The point of view of Auerbach’s Mimesis, for example, is that much of the history of literature consists in a gradual colonizing of human experience of life, both inner and outer, as a possible subject for literary treatment. Ancient literature, for example, was able to represent the life of ordinary people only in the comic mode, but later literature gradually learned to express the heroic and tragic in ordinary life.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Conservatism is a struggle for tradition in both senses: a taxing search for what to preserve amid the creative destruction of capitalism, and a fight among conservatives for ownership of their common tradition.

The Great Leveler

Walter Scheidel

For thousands of years, civilization did not lend itself to peaceful equalization. Across a wide range of societies and different levels of development, stability favored economic inequality.

Thoughts of the Day: Thursday 22 April 2021

 

2020 novel of ideas about addressing climate change & other forms of environmental degradation

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

The current rate of extinctions compared to the geological norm is now several thousandfold faster, making this the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history, and thus the start of the Anthropocene in its clearest demarcation.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

Some who need to lose a dozen pounds to attain what they perceive as their ideal weight and health might do fine just by cutting back on the more obviously fattening foods and the carbohydrates they contain—for instance, sugary beverages, beer (“shun beer as if it were the plague,” wrote Brillat-Savarin), desserts, and sweet snacks. These folks will do fine eating slow carbs, with their complement of fiber to slow digestion and absorption and keep insulin levels low. Rigid abstinence will not be necessary for them.

Revolutionaries of the Soul

Gary Lachman

The first step in developing our capacity for Faculty X [Colin Wilson's concept of a melding right & left brain functions for a more complete appreciation of reality], then, is to create a sense of optimism—not about anything in particular, but a general sense that life means well by us, what Jean Gebser called “primal trust.” And this leads naturally to the next step, developing a sense of purpose. After we stop sending our right brain messages of doom, the next step is to foster a sense of interest. Mystics and poets tell us that we live in a fascinating universe, a cosmos of such complexity that it seems unthinkable anyone could be bored in it. Yet this is exactly what happens.

Language and Myth

Ernst Cassirer

The same may be said of any symbolic form, of language, art, or myth, in that each of these is a particular way of seeing, and carries within itself its particular and proper source of light. The function of envisagement, the dawn of a conceptual enlightenment can never be realistically derived from things themselves or understood through the nature of its objective contents. For it is not a question of what we see in a certain perspective, but of the perspective itself.

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

What really did happen? [Referring to altruistic student movements in the 60s and early 70s for social welfare & in politics.] As I see it, for the first time in a very long while a spontaneous political movement arose which not only did not simply carry on propaganda, but acted, and, moreover, acted almost exclusively from moral motives. Together with this moral factor, quite rare in what is usually considered a mere power or interest play, another experience new for our time entered the game of politics: It turned out that acting is fun. This generation discovered what the eighteenth century had called “public happiness,” which means that when man takes part in public life he opens up for himself a dimension of human experience that otherwise remains closed to him and that in some way constitutes a part of complete “happiness.”

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

Psychology, depth psychology or psychoanalysis, discovers no more than the ever-changing moods, the ups and downs of our psychic life, and its results and discoveries are neither particularly appealing nor very meaningful in themselves. “Individual psychology,” on the other hand, the prerogative of fiction, the novel and the drama, can never be a science; as a science it is a contradiction in terms.

The Lessons of History

Will Durant and Ariel Durant

It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 21 April 2021

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

Why, for instance, do men and women fatten differently, and in very different places? Why do boys gain muscle and lose fat when they go through puberty while girls gain fat and do so in specific places (hips, buttocks, breasts)? Why do women gain fat as they go through menopause, the experience Newburgh and his followers wrote off to bonbons, bridge parties, and self-indulgence? Why do people get fat in some places (double chins, love handles) and not others? What about fatty tumors known as lipomas? Why do these benign fat deposits hold on to their fat even during starvation?

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

It is well known in the psychological literature that humans have great difficulty with “if” in an abstract setting. A simple conditional like “If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other” tends to make the human mind seize up, when questions are asked as to what evidence is relevant to the truth of the conditional. It is found, however, that performance miraculously improves if the conditional is cast in a semilegal context, or permission schema, like “If a letter is sealed, it must carry a 20-cent stamp.”

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

“The memorable events of history,” said [Gustav] Le Bon, “are the visible effects of the invisible changes in human thought.”

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

A final factor in conservatives’ success was the law. In the nation-building period between the Civil War and the New Deal, American law served the large purposes of protecting the freedom of businesses to expand the economy and spread prosperity, creating a national market by removing internal barriers, aligning state laws, and easing the progress of transport, notably railways, and insulating the states of the South from federal intrusions that might threaten their legal subordination of black Southerners.

Natural Born Heroes

Christopher McDougall

Heroism isn’t some mysterious inner virtue, the Greeks believed; it’s a collection of skills that every man and woman can master so that in a pinch, they can become a Protector.

The Antidote

Oliver Burkeman

The startling conclusion at which they had all arrived, in different ways, was this: that the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative –  insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness – that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Western experts at first overlooked the mounting evidence that in East Asian countries “universal masking” was a key component of their successful response. Even if the data on their efficacy was not entirely clear, the public narrative about mask-wearing from the US government was fundamentally disingenuous. Officials actively discouraged the use of masks, claiming both that they were ineffective at protecting ordinary people and that they should be reserved for doctors and nurses. But if the true purpose was to avoid the hoarding of surgical masks, couldn’t the government at least have encouraged the public to make simple cloth masks at home, when no more was needed than a T-shirt and scissors?

Wilding: Returning Nature to Our Farm by Isabella Tree

2018 publication about a venture in the UK. Lots of good photos!

One can make an argument that the internet is the enemy of books and reading. And there is little doubt that in our world we receive most of our information and entertainment visually, through television in my lifetime, and now more and more through various streaming services. I mention this not to bemoan a loss but to see that at least on one occasion that most seductive of media, YouTube, led me a to a book. Of course, how I got the YouTube site evades my memory; probably, like most such discoveries, I stumbled into it. But I must admit that I have a predilection for nature videos (wolves are a favorite). In any event, I stumbled upon a YouTube clip on Knepp Farms in the UK. Perhaps it was this one,  or this one, or this one, or this one. From there I came across the fact that Isabella Tree, along with her husband, Charlie Burrell, were in charge of this rather amazing story. The YouTube videos provide a peak, but Tree's book provides an in-depth tour and one well worth the time and effort as we continue to negotiate our way through the Anthropocene world. 

The story in a nutshell arises from Burrell's inheritance of Knepp farm, a large estate located in Sussex. Burrell had received a degree in agronomy and seemed a fine heir indeed to take the helm of the enterprise, aided by his wife Isabella. But after 17 years of farming, Burrell and Tree realized that they weren't making enough money to justify the enterprise despite following the standard advice. Much of the land was consisted of a clay base and had been farmed to the bone. So, in 2001, they decided to chuck it all and re-wild. 

Re-wild? Or wilding? Both terms may be new to most readers, but I hope that they become commonplace. In short, Charlie and Isabella decided to turn the property back to nature and to end their tenure as farmers. This is the story told by Tree's book. 

The account Tree provides is detailed and (for the most part) enthralling. (My only hesitation is that she identifies so many species of bugs, beetles, and butterflies; worms; mammals; flowers, trees and shrubs; and birds--to mention only some of the life forms that come to her attention at Knepp. Sometimes I felt overwhelmed by all the mentions.) Tree also provides accounts of the responses of neighbors (skeptical when not our-right hostile), the conservation folks, and government bureaucrats. In our world, a piece of the UK doesn't simply go wild without a great deal of hubbub. Nature may have her way in the end, but for Knepp to go wild required a great deal of persistence and cajoling by Tree and Burrell and their supporters. Tree provides this account without rancor and with a modicum of sympathy for the various human impediments that they encounter. 

But while I found her account of their struggles with human impediments instructive, it's the other fauna and flora that steal the show. One of the first things Burrell and Tree did was to introduce some large herbivores to the land, including three species of deer, wild horses, longhorn cattle, and a breed of pigs that were as close as they believed that they could come to imitating wild boars. (Boar and beaver introductions are on their wish list.) While one can't identify with precision at what point an ecology can be most dramatically changed, the Knepp experience (and others) suggests that large herbivores have profound and unexpected effects upon a local ecology. All the newly introduced and mostly untended large grazers thrived, and as they thrived, so did the trees, shrubs, grasses, and the soil--along with all the creatures dependent on these plants. 

Tree also writes a lot about trees. Oaks and others. She dispels the myth that the UK was once a great forest where the canopy ran for the far north to the sea. Instead, what she discovered at Knepp (among their very many discoveries) was the existence and prominence of "wood pasture" in the British environment. This is a topic about which I knew nothing coming in (except that I'd read somewhere the tale of the squirrel who could travel from the north to the sea without ever leaving the canopy), but the dispelling the fable of the unbroken canopy, along with other of the accounts and observations in the book, demonstrate for me the limits of our knowledge. And Tree mentions neglected treasures left by her Victorian ancestors who cataloged the natural world. She also reveals the value of generations of husbandmen and farmers who observed and built upon the ways of the natural world and whose knowledge we've lost or ignored to our detriment. 

Roxana Robinson's blurb for the book on the edition I read (the NYRB edition)  is worth quoting because I agree with it wholeheartedly: 

As a writer, Tree is both elegant and deeply informed, and the story is full of poetic awareness and scientific foundations. 

Indeed, Tree goes on at length about the scientific study of what they're doing, but she also recognizes the soul of the endeavor as well. Neither is she afraid to challenge prevailing opinions. In discussing the management (to the extent they must) of the large herbivores (Exmoor ponies, cattle, and deer), she sings the praises of the quality of the beef and the healthiness of the fats (loaded with omega-3 fatty acids compared to other beef). And in the face of a thriving pony herd that must be controlled by humans (there are no large predators), this means either selling the horses at a financial loss and condemning them to (shall we say) an uncertain future, or culling the herd and considering the virtues of horse meat for human consumption (no kidding). It's refreshing to read someone who's knowledgeable about the value of meat raised under optimum conditions that benefit the animals as well as humans. Vegans and vegetarians may not be happy about such frank considerations, but Tree doesn't allow readers to shy away from the realities of the situation. 

Tree ends the book with a consideration of the uncertainties and hopes she and Burrell and their supporters have for Knepp. Brexit, for instance, means that the European farm subsidy system will end and the British will have to make some consequential decisions about agricultural and conservation policies. She makes some suggestions about what should be adopted. The Knepp project also has hopes for the introduction of new species, both through Nature's course and through human choices (as I mentioned above, boars and beavers seem to top the list). 

Tree's book was a delight to read. One pervasive thought that I've held for some time is that we humans are--must be--gardeners. And as gardeners we must work with Nature, bending and trimming as we may but knowing that Nature in its grandeur and magnificence and wisdom will always have the final say. Instead, we've too often treated Nature like a mine that we will strip as fast and as forcefully as we can until it's worthless, totally spent. You can imagine--and now observe--how such as attitude must end. But Tree points the way down a garden path that we all should tread. 

 

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 20 April 2021

 

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

The one side effect of LCHF/ketogenic eating that may be lasting is the one that is likely to make physicians most anxious. This is the effect on LDL cholesterol, the “bad” cholesterol, as it’s known in the conventional thinking. As discussed earlier, the common wisdom on a healthy diet is driven disproportionately by thinking about this single number—LDL cholesterol—and the unwarranted belief that it is a strong predictor of heart disease risk.

Eat Move Sleep

Tom Rath

Reducing this chronic inactivity is even more essential than brief periods of vigorous exercise.

Civilization

Niall Ferguson

Finally, and most important to Tocqueville, the French put equality above liberty. In sum, they chose Rousseau over Locke.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

The West, says Joseph Needham, locates reality in substance, whereas the East finds it in relationship.

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

It follows that the subject-matter of history is not the past as such, but the past for which we possess historical evidence. Much of the past has perished, in the sense that we have no documents for reconstructing it.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Delos’s brilliant analyses of the development of nationalism into totalitarianism overlook its equally intimate connection with imperialism—which is mentioned only in a footnote. And neither the racism of modern nationalism nor the power-craziness of the modern state can be explained without a proper understanding of the structure of imperialism.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 19 April 2021

 

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

[Henri] Bergson, we remember, argued that the brain's function was essentially eliminative, and by the brain he meant by and large the cerebral cortex.

Language and Myth

Ernst Cassirer

Furthermore, the mythic consciousness does not see human personality as something fixed and unchanging, but conceives every phase of a man’s life as a new personality, a new self; and this metamorphosis is first of all made manifest in the changes which his name undergoes. At puberty a boy receives a new name, because, by virtue of the magical rites accompanying his initiation, he has ceased to exist as a boy, and has been reborn as a man, the reincarnation of one of his ancestors.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

The goal of ethical philosophy must be to bring personal preferences and aversions into harmony with those of the ruling principle of the universe, variously called “Zeus,” “Reason” (Logos), and “Nature.” As Cleanthes wrote in his “Hymn to Zeus,” “Zeus leads the willing person, the unwilling he drags.”

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

In his ambitious two-volume work, Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama writes that the fundamental question for every human society is simple: How do you get to Denmark? “By this I mean less the actual country Denmark,” he writes, “than an imagined society that is prosperous, democratic, secure, and well governed, and experiences low levels of corruption.”

The Idea of Nature

R. G. Collingwood

Kant’s view, then, comes to this: the proper object of scientific knowledge is not God or mind or things in themselves, but nature; the proper method, of scientific knowledge is a combination of sensation with understanding; and since nature is that which we know by this method, it follows that nature is mere phenomenon, a world of things as they appear to us, scientifically knowable because their ways of appearing are perfectly regular and predictable, but existing only in so far as we take up the point of view from which things have that appearance.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

What we have called the “bourgeois” is the modern man of the masses, not in his exalted moments of collective excitement, but in the security (today one should say the insecurity) of his own private domain. He has driven the dichotomy of private and public functions, of family and occupation, so far that he can no longer find in his own person any connection between the two. When his occupation forces him to murder people he does not regard himself as a murderer because he has not done it out of inclination but in his professional capacity. Out of sheer passion he would never do harm to a fly.

On Writing

Stephen King

 Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story. The only possible exceptions to this rule that I can think of are allegories like George Orwell’s Animal Farm (and I have a sneaking suspicion that with Animal Farm the story idea may indeed have come first; if I see Orwell in the afterlife, I mean to ask him).