Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 11 August 2021

 

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

I’ve been saying since the beginning that liberal humanism is a whole, and it is. But it is a whole because we have made it a whole, and it can only continue to be a whole if we go on doing it. That’s the liberal task, the liberal project, the liberal preoccupation. Humanism may historically precede liberalism—but liberalism can’t mechanically produce humanism. It’s a task of mental effort, adjusted to new circumstances. The reality of science doesn’t guarantee the primacy of love. What science shows us is the world as it is. We choose to make the world as we want it.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Like the civil discourse approach, this psychological-rhetorical persuasion strategy for building political agreement is also well-meaning. But in practice it can quickly become condescendingly manipulative and even disturbingly Orwellian in its implications. Because of its inherent deviousness, this approach is ultimately misguided. Increasing sympathy for a wider spectrum of values requires a persuasion strategy that is fundamentally transparent and sincere.

N.B. I find this too pejorative toward the rhetorical tradition. Rhetoric, to succeed, depends on building bridges, via logos, ethos, and pathos. It can be unethical, but not necessarily so.

Doom

Niall Ferguson

The population of the Eternal City itself fell by three quarters in the space of just five decades. Archaeological evidence from the rest of Western Europe—inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle—suggests that “the end of civilization” came within the span of a single generation.99 And all this was long before the Plague of Justinian, in the mid-sixth century.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

With similar suspicion Wittgenstein may have heard, by the time of his stay in Vienna on holiday in August 1923, that his Tractatus was now also beginning to inspire seminars and discussion groups (later known as the “Vienna Circle”) at the city’s university. The Vienna group wanted to save and heal society by adhering to a strictly scientific view of the world. This certainly did not correspond to Wittgenstein’s approach, since he saw the purely scientific worldview as yet another wrong track that his era had placed itself upon, and one that was, in its supposedly value-free and enlightened clarity, based on particularly stubborn misunderstandings.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Each generation has to learn anew the importance of Aristotle and the Scholastics in the history of ideas. Each generation is as surprised as the one before, for everyone approaches the Aristotelians through certain myths. Even now, the only factoid “known” to many people about the medieval theologians is that they debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Because, Morgenthau answered, there was no such thing as an international community. Domestic disputes could be resolved—not solved—through discussion and negotiations, or when negotiation failed, by appeals to the sovereignty of the state and the authority of the law.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

In every human case, identity turns out to be porous and inconsistent rather than fixed and discrete; and prone to get confused and lost in the play of mirrors. The cross-currents of ideas and inspirations – the Nazi reverence for Atatürk, a gay French philosopher’s denunciation of the modern West and sympathy for the Iranian Revolution [Foucault], or the varied ideological inspirations for Iran’s Islamic Revolution (Zionism, Existentialism, Bolshevism and revolutionary Shiism) – reveal that the picture of a planet defined by civilizations closed off from one another and defined by religion (or lack thereof) is a puerile cartoon.

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Grove Press edition, 1968, p. 61. I am using this work because of its great influence on the present student generation. Fanon himself, however, is much more doubtful about violence than his admirers. It seems that only the book’s first chapter, “Concerning Violence,” has been widely read. Fanon knows of the “unmixed and total brutality [which], if not immediately combatted, invariably leads to the defeat of the movement within a few weeks”

Developmental Politics: How America Can Grow into a Better Version of Itself by Steve McIntosh

 

2020 publication

I have to admit that it took some internal prodding to get me to finally read this book. I'd been aware of it from around the time it was published in March 2020 and back in 2015 I'd read and appreciated his The Presence of the Infinite: The Spiritual Experience of  Beauty, Truth, and Goodness (2015). But perhaps like a good many of us, I've suffered from a bit of burnout from trying to understand and to promote a cure for the current fever in American politics and culture. But then I realize that if we don't properly diagnose and cure this raging fever, then the American experiment in democracy, self-government, and the rule of law probably won't survive. Also, I know well that life, politics, history wait for no one; politics is an ongoing endeavor that involves a constant struggle to arrive at decisions and to take the actions needed to maintain a functioning democratic polity. In times like these, one can better understand the temptation of authoritarianism, the destruction of politics. But I also know that such thoughts put one on the road to perdition, if not plain-old hell. One must continue to fight the good fight.

I was also promoted to read this book now by learning that McIntosh, along with his confederates Jeff Salzmann (of the Daily Evolver podcast) and Carter Phipps (author of the book Evolutionaries that I've read), were launching a new endeavor through their organization The Institute for Cultural Evolution. The new endeavor, labeled "The Post-Progressive Project" via its website provided a guide to what these three and others had in mind as a political project. I like what I read, and decided to dig deeper. I'm glad that I did. 

I should also say that I might have been a little skeptical of McIntosh's aspirations in this book because of my having read The Presence of the Infinite: The Spiritual Experience of  Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. After all, one doesn't usually identify American politics with beauty, goodness, or truth. But then, on the other hand, I contend that we do sometimes find--or should I say generate--diamonds in the muck. I knew that McIntosh's first three books dealt with evolutionary thought, metaphysics, and other high-altitude topics through the lens of integral philosophy as re-incarnated in its contemporary American form starting with the project of Ken Wilber. (I say reincarnated in deference to the earlier project of integral philosophy espoused by Sri Aurobindo.) So my concern upon embarking upon this book was whether McIntosh could successfully shift from high-altitude reconnaissance flights to serving as a ground-level scout who can accurately report on the fighting ongoing in the jungle of American politics. The answer is "yes," and he does so not by abandoning his high-flying ideas, but by incorporating them into his ground-level observations and recommendations. Indeed, given McIntosh's appreciation of dialectics and polarities, I should have expected nothing less. 

One insight that McIntosh identifies early in the book is a key point that many "modernists" (in McIntosh's terminology, or more broadly, I'd say "liberals") don't appreciate. That is, that all politics lies downstream from culture. Modernists, including both contemporary liberals and Marxists, tend to believe that all politics lies downstream from economics--or at least it should be this way if only the "traditionalists" (McIntosh's term) weren't so indifferent to their economic self-interest. ("What's the matter with Kansas?") Contemporary American conservatives have known this for a long time--and they have exploited this insight--to create the culture wars that keep Republican candidates afloat even as their economic program favors the wealthiest. (Traditionalist-"conservatives" are abetted in this by the apparent ignorance of so many modernists about this insight.) A large share of American voters favor the policies and programs of the Democrats but they love the culture of the conservatives and Trumpists. (Not all conservatives should be tarred with the Trumpist brush, thank goodness.) With this insight in hand, McIntosh identifies three bundles of cultural "worldviews" currently dominant on the American scene, which he labels "traditionalist," "modernist," and "postmodern." Each of these groups holds a distinct (although not always conflicting) set of values. Each group has certain strengths (good values if you will) and certain negative "values." McIntosh argues that each of these groups can be seen on a developmental continuum. Within such a developmental continuum one would ideally see the incorporation of positive values from one level to the next. Hence, a liberal society depends on the more fundamental--shall we say conservative--values of loyalty to family, group, and country, as observers from Tocqueville to David Brooks and Patrick Deneen have argued. The "post-moderns" (political "progressives") tend to scorn the "modernists" (liberals) for the emphasis liberals place on tolerance, open debate, the use of markets, and adherence to institutions and rules. Such critics don't appreciate that these modern, liberal, democratic doctrines and values undergird the economic, legal, and political institutions that allow a postmodern, progressive perspective to receive a hearing. Without these liberal institutions, we can expect that the rise of illiberal regimes similar to those that scarred 20th-century Europe and Asia. Not a happy precedent. The program that McIntosh presents here is the try to end the culture wars in American politics (or at least take it down several notches) by recognizing and incorporating the positive values from each perspective while jettisoning the unique negatives that each worldview entails. Needless to say, this is easier said than done, but McIntosh is on the right track. 

Here's how I would describe the gist of McIntosh's prescription: (Spoiler Alert!): The only way of out is up. That is, the only way out of our current political dysfunction is by taking our value system "up" a notch. This path would retain what's worth keeping among the values entailed in each of the three worldviews while disposing of the junk. McIntosh dubs this new level of consciousness "integral consciousness" as in the integral philosophy that I referenced above. 

McIntosh's program presents us with a daunting challenge. As he recognizes, the path forward is like negotiating a mountain trail that never goes straight up but dips and climbs and switches back and thereby allowing the climber to ascend to the higher peak. Course corrections and setbacks are a part of the human story. There's no true tale of uninterrupted progress. (McIntosh includes a useful meditation on the idea of "progress" in our thinking.) McIntosh is also realistic enough to identify the strange twists that often occur in politics and between worldviews. His comment on Trump's relationship with the traditionalist worldview is choice: 

Although clearly not a traditionalist, Trump has positioned himself as an enemy of postmodernism. Traditionalists therefore hired Trump as their “bouncer” or cultural bodyguard. And when hiring a bouncer, one may be inclined to overlook his arrest record.(Location 1097, Kindle ed.)

 McIntosh packs a great deal into this book. In addition to his political and cultural analysis of the contemporary American scene, he also details the (integral) philosophic background to his thinking. The full details of McIntosh's program are too much to consider in this review (read the book!), but a couple of items caught my attention that I want to take point-out. The first item involves McIntosh's description and deployment of "polarity theory." I'd not heard of this theory before, although the idea behind seems intuitive and easy enough to grasp. The example of the application that McIntosh shared and that caught my eye as a former athletic team member, coach (volunteer level), and spectator, as well as from my career as an attorney, is contained in this quote:

In the case of the competition-cooperation polarity, for example, unrestrained competition, in the absence of a larger agreement to play by the rules and cooperate, can quickly devolve into a dog-eat-dog condition wherein defensiveness saps productivity. Conversely, cooperation by itself, without the incentive or opportunity for individual excellence or creativity, can similarly devolve into groupthink or stifling bureaucratic mediocrity. But when competition and cooperation are brought together in a mutually correcting relationship that provides for both challenge and support, the value-creating potential of each side is maximized. (Location 1210)

Anyone who's been a member of an athletic team understands the challenge of competing for playing time and "glory" while also understanding the need to pull together and work as a team. Teams require cooperation and sacrifice for the good of the team. I've always thought that the most successful coaches have learned how to maximize both sides of the competition-cooperation polarity to get the most out of their players as individuals and as a team. (McIntosh has recently posted a useful series of visuals identifying different polarities at work in our lives.) 

The other topic that I want to note is McIntosh's introduction of "virtue ethics" into his integral thinking. Some years ago (okay, on the order of three decades ago) I read Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. Honestly, I didn't get it, but after reading McIntosh's promotion of this line of thinking, I'm ready to sign-up for the remedial program. McIntosh cites the work of Aristotle and Aquinas as well as more contemporary thinkers like Elizabeth (G.E.M.) Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, and Alasdair MacIntyre as developing the virtue ethics perspective. McIntosh also mines the traditional virtues theological (faith, hope, and love) and classical (justice, prudence, temperance, and courage) for their usefulness. He also provides a list of "alternative and somewhat more secular terms for the virtues" that includes loyalty, compassion, fairness, integrity, creativity, determination, and enthusiasm. This alternative way of considering morality, so different from deontological and utilitarian theories, is an intriguing and practical way of thinking about how we conduct ourselves. 

Before closing (and I've left many topics unaddressed), I should note that partway through the book it struck me how well organized and well-written this book is. Knowing of McIntosh's training and experience as a lawyer, I couldn't help but think of this book as a well-written brief. McIntosh makes his case systematically and methodically, supporting his contentions and anticipating objections. A winning brief from my perspective. (And believe me, not all briefs are well-written well-argued, or persuasive, all to the consternation of judges and their clerks.) 

Has McIntosh provided us with a roadmap out of (political) hell? Yes, at least a rough one. Not the only one, certainly, but his map provides enough guidance to allow us to commence our journey with the hope of arriving at our promised land of relative political tranquility. The challenge will be to spread McIntosh's political and developmental good news among the people. I'm on board. I'm now a member of the Post-Progressive Alliance that seeks to implement the principles of McIntosh's book and the insights of his confederates. I say, "Onward and upward!"

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 9 August 2021

 

A Secret History of Christianity

Mark Vernon

The soul’s “imaginary sight” may see more than the empirical ever can. As Shakespeare famously elsewhere put it: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” From a first possibly distorted sense of something, the imagination may show a truth that is gradually revealed over time. It led Shakespeare to present the imagination as an intermediate zone. It’s somewhere between the subjective and the objective. It hovers at an edge, on a threshold. It’s the domain we enter into when we hear a play, a poem, a parable. It’s a region of revelation.

N.B. My review of this book is here.

Fear Itself

Ira Katznelson

MUCH OF this volume is devoted to examining how this national state got fashioned. This task leads to Congress, the fulcrum of the book. One cannot understand the New Deal without appreciating the activist lawmaking that resulted from many bouts of arguing, bargaining, and voting in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. These policy achievements demonstrably challenged the period’s common claim that national legislatures had become incapable and obsolete.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

There is much here that accords with later theories of probability: the various grades of probability, the high degree of probability that provides a good criterion for action, the increase in probability through the coherence of different pieces of evidence. What is unique about Carneades’ theory is that his probability is a property of perception rather than of propositions or beliefs and is genuinely equated with appearance of truth or likeness to truth.

Doom

Niall Ferguson

A catastrophe divides us all up into three groups: the prematurely dead, the lucky survivors, and the permanently wounded or traumatized. A catastrophe also separates the fragile from the resilient and the antifragile—Nassim Taleb’s wonderful word to describe something that gains strength under stress. (Remember Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”) Some cities, corporations, states, and empires collapse under the force of the shock. Others survive, though weakened. But a third, Nietzschean category emerges stronger.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

First, Socrates is a gadfly: he knows how to sting the citizens who, without him, will “sleep on undisturbed for the rest of their lives” unless somebody comes along to arouse them. And what does he arouse them to? To thinking and examination, an activity without which life, in his view, was not only not worth much but was not fully alive.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

To bring the matter down to earth, a system of education that prepares people for “careers” rather than for life in all its dimensions, especially its tragic dimension, will readily lead its graduates into Thoreau’s trap of “improved means to an unimproved end.”

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 8 August 2021

 

The Caretakers of the Cosmos

Gary Lachman

If I smashed my skull in I would certainly upset my consciousness, just as if I smashed my television set I would be unable to watch what was on – something, I must admit, I am often tempted to do. But while my TV would be broken, the program I was watching would be unaffected, and would still be running on millions of other TVs. I believe that my brain acts in some way as a radio or television receiver. It doesn’t ‘cause’ the consciousness I have any more than my TV or radio ‘causes’ what is broadcast on them.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Fear is doing much of the dirty work here. It’s a useful emotion— as when it motivates us to escape from danger or fix the underlying problems that are its causes. After all, higher organisms evolved the biological capacity for fear because it helped them survive, which allowed them to pass their genes to future generations. Yet while a certain degree of fear can help us stay resilient in an ever-changing and often hazardous world, if fear is too great, and if we see no avenue for relief, it becomes horribly toxic. Most importantly, persistently high levels of fear tend to divide people into shortsighted, rigidly exclusive, and antagonistic groups.

N.B. My encapsulation: fear is a warning device, not a navigating device.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

What sets Thucydides apart from the rest is the importance he attaches to honor, which can encompass shame, vengeance, ambition, and other correlates of ego. For the most part, honor is not taken very seriously today, unlike past epochs when it was something paramount to be defended at all costs, even at the cost of one’s life. The exceptions that prove the rule today are revealing: prisons and ghettos, places close to a state of nature, where to violate the code or lose respect can mean death; and the military, whose members serve a higher cause and offer up their lives in exchange for the king’s shilling. However, political actors—like the warriors in Homer’s Iliad, albeit in a less flamboyant manner—are also vitally concerned with reputation. It is a rare politician who will admit error, or even that he has changed his position on an issue.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

[D]igital media turned out to be an even better tool for display, which, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has pointed out, is very different from communication. “We are obsessed with our reputations,” Haidt told me. “Social media has such profound effects on so many social systems because it creates a form of community in which we’re ostensibly talking to each other, but we’re really signaling virtue to people we care about.”

The Foundations of Buddhism

Rupert Gethin

The list of ten fetters includes four items that are not prima-facie aspects of craving or attachment: doubt, aversion, agitation, and ignorance.

Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic

B. Alan Wallace

Nothing inherently exists, with its own parts and attributes, independently of our conceptual designation.

The Lost Art of Scripture

Karen Armstrong

The rapidity of these developments [associated with the growth of cities] had made city-dwellers acutely aware of the pace of change. In the countryside, where life was ruled by the seasons, everybody did the same things year in and year out. But in the towns, where life was being dramatically transformed, people could see for themselves that their “actions” (karma) could have long-term consequences.

The Yoga of Breath

Richard Rosen

Efficient breathing activates the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system and the relaxation response. In all, the efficient breather is much calmer and more clearheaded, and probably healthier and happier, than her inefficient friend [fast, hard breathing promoted by the sympathetic nervous system].

William Walker Atkinson Premium 7 Book Collection

WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON

Courage is the backbone of man. The man with courage has persistence. He states what he believes and puts it into execution. The courageous man has confidence. He draws to himself all the moral qualities and mental forces which go to make up a strong man.

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 7 August 2021

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

As Paracelsus said in 1537, “the dose determines the poison.” Nothing is safe at infinite dosage.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

The whole point of The General Theory, [[Joan Robinson] believed, was to show that economic production could not be understood as a self-sustaining set of processes independent from social norms and political realities.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Charles Raison, a professor of psychiatry and evolution at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, stands at the front of the room wearing a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows—a nod to the stuffy academic halls that he’s used to lecturing in. He’s discussing the relevance of ancient medicinal practices in 21st-century psychiatry. And he starts with a simple supposition: Until the modern world, energy was always at a premium, and humans—not to mention every other living thing on Earth—need energy to survive. The first challenge for any living thing is to find a way to produce, store or share heat.

Collingwood's The Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Whereas in a natural process the past dies in being replaced by the present, in historical processes the past survives in the present. The difference is vital. So to think of human history as, for example, an evolutionary process is to commit a double mistake. First, it confuses human action with natural phenomena, and second, it is blind to the notion of the past living in the present.

N.B. Isn't the whole concept of evolution based on the accumulation change over time? The "past" always delivers the present. And like all human phenomena, it is part "natural phenomenon" and part "human action." In a sense were all ten million (or more!) years old! (Hat tip to William Ophuls for this turn of phrase, who hat-tipped Jung for it.)

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

Plotinus and Jung agree in declaring for a wholly psychic base to consciousness, a base in the imagination, of what Ficino later was to call fantasy or idolum. By holding to this tenet — the independent power of the imagination –Jung separates his psychology from those of Freud and Adler.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Albert O. Hirschman pointed out in a bravura essay, “Rival Interpretations of Market Society” (1982). If indeed capitalism softened manners and made competition less warlike, was that good or bad? Schumpeter first thought it good, by making nations less eager to fight each other. Later he worried that “softening” both disarmed the bourgeoisie for its historic task of throwing off the “shackles” of the old order and robbed it of the self-denial needed to be effectively capitalistic. Like another observer at mid-century, the liberal Louis Hartz, Schumpeter wondered if a capitalist society given over entirely to the authority of the market would not work better if some of the old shackles providing cultural and moral guidance were somehow retained. As Hirschman suggested, there were part truths in each of those grand claims. They lived on in thinking about the “cultural contradictions” of capitalism, which took wing among German and American neoconservatives in the 1950s and 1960s.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 6 August 2021

2020 publication

 

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

With the justifying authority of God’s natural law increasingly absent, modernists needed a new way to ground their notions of justice and morality in something higher—something more worthy than self-interest alone.

The Gardens of Democracy

Eric Liu, Nick Hanauer

True citizenship is about treating even the most trivial choice as a chance to shape your society and be a leader.

Ages of Discord

Peter Turchin

[The chief] causes of sociopolitical instability (in order of importance) are (1) elite overproduction leading to intraelite competition and conflict, (2) popular immiseration, resulting from falling living standards, and (3) the fiscal crisis of the state.

The Soul of the World

Roger Scruton

If there is anything that could be called progress in the religious history of mankind, it resides in the gradual preference for the self over the other as the primary sacrificial victim. It is precisely in this that the Christian religion rests its moral claim.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

What distinguished these international laws from domestic laws, however, was that enforcement was voluntary, dependent on the consent of the parties to the agreements and not some sovereign authority beyond the individual nation-states. Governments accepted international treaties and agreements because it was in their interest to do so, and while a coalition of nations might try to compel agreement from a recalcitrant country through sanctions, boycotts, and the like, where a question of national interest was at stake no government was likely to yield short of war.

Collingwood's The Idea of History

Peter Johnson

[T]he actions which are the subject matter of history are past actions and so the historian’s problem is how to breathe life into a past which is now dead.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

I can think of no way by which statements of possibility can be rendered acceptable to positivists; and I think this is because they belong to an element in science which positivism ignores and by implication denies.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Anyone who allowed him his premise of the omnipotence of nature but then did not draw the logical conclusion that called for the “eradication” of all who were not “viable” or were “alien to the community”—anyone with such scruples belonged among those weaklings or blockheads who “denying the force of logic, shrank back from saying B and C after they had said A.” There were of course, both within the party and outside it, weaklings of this sort with their moral scruples, just as there were idiots who translated into practice the “totally mad plan” of zeppelins, even though “nature had not provided a single bird with a balloon.”