Thoughts for the Day: 28 August 2021

 

We were not meant to be inundated by cement, asphalt, glass and metal, and deprived of physical contact with nature.

(Location 543)

The human environment and the natural environment deteriorate together; we cannot adequately combat environmental degradation unless we attend to causes related to human and social degradation. (Location 564)

“Both everyday experience and scientific research show that the gravest effects of all attacks on the environment are suffered by the poorest.”

(Location 566)

Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. (Loc. 580)

And now for some other voices:

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

What happened in the first years of the seventeenth century was no gradual development, no addition to what had gone before, but a complete break with the past and a radical new beginning.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

This modern belief in reason, with science as its handmaiden, was inherently optimistic; it confidently adhered to the notion of progress. As humankind’s understanding of the universe and its mechanisms increased, so too did its ability to gain control over nature and improve the conditions of human life.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

The Idea of Nature

R. G. Collingwood

The problem of the thing in itself is one of the most puzzling problems in Kant’s philosophy. What makes it so puzzling is the fact that it seems impossible to state the problem without flatly contradicting yourself. The problem is stated in some such way as this: Whatever we know, we know at once intuitively and discursively, that is, by the combined use of our senses and understanding. The only genuine intuition is sensuous intuition, and the only valid use of the understanding is to think about things which we sensuously perceive. The only knowledge, therefore, is an intelligent or thoughtful perception.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

“The point, therefore, is not that ‘complexity’ is a problem entirely unique to our age. It is rather (1) that ‘complexity’ has now become a crucial and perhaps even unavoidable consideration in many of our most pressing questions about the world and (2) that to deal with ‘complexity’ seriously seems to present some extraordinary difficulties for our understanding” (Langdon Winner, “Complexity and the Limits of Human Understanding,” in Organized Social Complexity: Challenge to Politics and Policy, ed. Todd La Porte [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975].

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

The appeal of demagogues lies in their ability to take a generalized discontent, the mood of drift, resentment, disillusionment and economic shakiness, and transform it into a plan for doing something. They make inaction seem morally degrading. And many young men and women become eager to transform their powerlessness into an irrepressible rage to hurt or destroy.

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

Burke’s horrified reaction to the killing of the French king and queen helps point us toward another, far fiercer right-wing critique of liberalism. That assault finds in liberalism a fatal overreliance on reason. It shares Burke’s sense of the chaos that could follow from the belief that society should be remade all at once on the basis of a big idea, with tradition and custom annihilated.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 26 August 2021

 

T.S. Eliot: a touch of poetry today

But first a few words from Pope Francis in Laudato Si:

We can be witnesses to terrible injustices if we think that we can obtain significant benefits by making the rest of humanity, present and future, pay the extremely high costs of environmental deterioration.

(Location 500)

Let us mention, for example, those richly biodiverse lungs of our planet which are the Amazon and the Congo basins, or the great aquifers and glaciers. We know how important these are for the entire earth and for the future of humanity. The ecosystems of tropical forests possess an enormously complex biodiversity which is almost impossible to appreciate fully, yet when these forests are burned down or levelled for purposes of cultivation, within the space of a few years countless species are lost and the areas frequently become arid wastelands.

(Location 506)

Many of the world’s coral reefs are already barren or in a state of constant decline. “Who turned the wonderworld of the seas into underwater cemeteries bereft of colour and life?”

(Location 526)

Human beings too are creatures of this world, enjoying a right to life and happiness, and endowed with unique dignity.

(Location 538)

And now for other important voices: 

Four Quartets

T. S. Eliot

And right action is freedom

From past and future also.

For most of us, this is the aim

Never here to be realised;

Who are only undefeated

Because we have gone on trying;

We, content at the last

If our temporal reversion nourish

(Not too far from the yew-tree)

The life of significant soil.

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

Politics deals with men, nationals of many countries and heirs to many pasts; its laws are the positively established fences which hedge in, protect, and limit the space in which freedom is not a concept, but a living, political reality.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Fear, the inspiring principle of action in tyranny, is fundamentally connected to that anxiety which we experience in situations of complete loneliness. This anxiety reveals the other side of equality and corresponds to the joy of sharing the world with our equals.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

[T]he enterprises produced by the individualistic energy of the European peoples presuppose physical actions directed to final causes. But the science which is employed in their development is based on a philosophy which asserts that physical causation is supreme, and which disjoins the physical cause from the final end. It is not popular to dwell on the absolute contradiction here involved. It is the fact, however you gloze it over with phrases.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The critical economists Robert Heilbroner and William Milberg write: “This inextricable entanglement of economics with capitalism appears to be the best guarded secret of the profession. . . . The failure of mainstream economics to recognize the insistent presence of this underlying social order, with its class structure, its socially determined imperatives, its technologies and organizations, and its privileges and rights, derives from its preconceptual basis in a natural rather than a social construal of economic society.” And later: “[The] universal grammar [of modern economics] does not communicate a message of any economic interest or significance, unless it applies to a society that possesses the institutional and cultural elements of capitalism: indeed, the very meaning of ‘economic’ would be unintelligible outside capitalism.” Robert Heilbroner and William Milberg, The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

On the other side of the debate we have a diverse group of economic optimists consisting mainly of neoclassical economists, economic historians, and agricultural economists. (At some point during the last two centuries, economics transformed itself from the “dismal science” of Malthus and Ricardo to a doctrine of hope and optimism for humanity.)

Technopoly

Neil Postman

Lacking a lucid set of ethics and having rejected tradition, Technopoly searches for a source of authority and finds it in the idea of statistical objectivity.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Steve Bannon, the ideologist of the Trump revolution, made clear that one of his central goals was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” For four decades, America has largely been run by people who openly pledge to destroy the very government they lead. Is it any wonder that they have succeeded?

Thoughts for the Day: 25 August 2021

 

But first, a few words from Pope Francis: 

Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity. This debt can be paid partly by an increase...

(Location 461)

The earth’s resources are also being plundered because of short-sighted approaches to the economy, commerce and production. The loss of forests and woodlands entails the loss of species which may constitute extremely important resources in the future, not only for food but also for curing disease and other uses.

(Location 473)

We seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves.

(Location 490)

Now for some other voices: 

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

The Pope’s encyclical about climate change is arguably the most important piece of intellectual criticism in our time. See Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (London, 2015).

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

To understand their promptings, and the perils they pose, we have to examine the specific conditions – inequality, the sense of blocked horizons, the absence of mediating institutions, general political hopelessness – in which an experience of meaninglessness converted quickly into anarchist ideology; and we have to return to the man [Mikhail Bakunin] from a backward country [Russia] who gave political revolt its existential and international dimension.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

The problem of truth, Montaigne hinted, is a social problem: a problem about reaching, or failing to reach, a working consensus. The knowledge problem centers not on what you know or what I know, but on what we know.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

There’s nothing wrong with the economic principles behind the idea of internalizing costs. Still, when we come to implementing these principles, many devils haunt the details.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Aren’t some worldviews more “true”— more accurate reflections of the world’s underlying reality— than others? Undoubtedly, yes. But no worldview is true in any final sense. And many aspects of our worldviews are matters of judgment and value, about which there is, ultimately, no final truth.

Thoughts for the Day: 24 August 2021

 

Coming later this year to a bookstore near you! (9 November in the UK)

The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all. At the global level, it is a complex system linked to many of the essential conditions for human life. A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system.

(Location 408)

In recent decades this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon.

(Location 409)

Perhaps the pope should update this in light of the most recent IPCC report. To wit, we can now gauge more accurately the ties between extreme and persistent weather events with human-caused climate change. 

It is true that there are other factors (such as volcanic activity, variations in the earth’s orbit and axis, the solar cycle), yet a number of scientific studies indicate that most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity.

(Location 412)

Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded.

(Location 435)

And now from some other voices: 

"To me, a universe with tendencies towards beauty, complexity, and the rich unfolding of uniqueness is already teleological. It is a verb with many adverbs, not just a matter of nouns chasing nouns."

The Matter with Things (to be published this fall in the UK)

Iain McGichrist

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The beliefs in the unlimited substitutability of resources, in the primacy of economic institutions and policies, and in the exceptionalism of human beings and their modern markets often combine to produce what I can only call unbridled hubris.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Culture is an amorphous concept at best, but the scholars Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson provide the definition I’ve found most succinct and useful: according to them, culture is “information—skills, attitudes, beliefs, values—capable of affecting individuals’ behavior, which they acquire from others by teaching, imitation, and other forms of social learning.”

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

Frederick Douglass, in his once-famous Fifth of July oration, delivered on July 5, 1852, could combine a militant rejection of slavery with a bow to the moral possibilities inherent in the Constitution to annihilate it—and this wasn’t just a rhetorical gambit designed to win support for his cause: “In that instrument, I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither.”

The Road to Unfreedom

Timothy Snyder

What has already happened in Russia is what might happen in America and Europe: the stabilization of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda, the shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity. Russian leaders could invite Europeans and Americans to eternity because Russia got there first. They understood American and European weaknesses, which they had first seen and exploited at home.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

MODERNITY: Condition of society from late eighteenth ceTimntury, marked by rapid growth of population, spread of industrial and then finance capitalism, division of labor, literacy, and mobility. Intellectually, a climate of ideas marked by secularization and enlightened thought. Modernity cut loose natural science from the divine and the supernatural; philosophy from alone explaining the world; morality from the task of human redemption; law from the putative universal order of nature. Modernity entered political thought via Machiavelli and Hobbes, who lifted from rulers any duty beyond ensuring a safe, stable frame for people to flourish in and pursue worldly concerns. To liberals, modernity was a liberation, to conservatives a loss of anchorage and human shelter for which they blamed liberals, hence the term, “liberal modernity.” “Many old works become fragments. Many modern works start out as fragments” (Friedrich Schlegel).

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Like cultural conservatives before him and after, [Carl] Schmitt was also disturbed by the apparent loss of compass and bleak purposelessness in liberal modernity. The oddity, for a conservative, was Schmitt’s looking to politics to fill the gap. A more natural filler—one sought by [John Henry] Newman, for example—was an authoritative religion. Schmitt’s correspondent and interlocutor, Leo Strauss, pointed that out to Schmitt, who acknowledged the religious element in his thinking.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

The contradictory of ‘metaphorical’ is ‘literal’; and if the distinction between literal and metaphorical usages is a genuine distinction, which in one sense it is, both kinds of usage are equally proper. There is another sense in which all language is metaphorical; and in that sense the objection to certain linguistic usages on the ground that they are metaphorical is an objection to language as such, and proceeds from an aspiration towards what Charles Lamb called the uncommunicating muteness of fishes. But this topic belongs to the theory of language, that is, to the science of aesthetic, with which this essay is not concerned.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 23 August 2021

 

Continuing our journey with Pope Francis re our environmental crisis

I [Pope Francis] will point to the intimate relationship between the poor and the fragility of the planet, the conviction that everything in the world is connected, the critique of new paradigms and forms of power derived from technology, the call to seek other ways of understanding the economy and progress, the value proper to each creature, the human meaning of ecology, the need for forthright and honest debate, the serious responsibility of international and local policy, the throwaway culture and the proposal of a new lifestyle. (Location 366)

Technology, which, linked to business interests, is presented as the only way of solving these problems, in fact proves incapable of seeing the mysterious network of relations between things and so sometimes solves one problem only to create others.

(Location 391)

The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth. In many parts of the planet, the elderly lament that once beautiful landscapes are now covered with rubbish. Industrial waste and chemical products utilized in cities and agricultural areas can lead to bioaccumulation in the organisms of the local population, even when levels of toxins in those places are low. (Location 395)

And now some other voices: 

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Undoubtedly, the relative equality of women is an objective marker of the degree of evolution achieved by any society.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

[T]he fundamental question for all four philosophers [Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Benjamin, & Cassirer) was whether all the various natural languages are themselves based on a single, unifying, and unified language. If so, what is the nature of that form? And on what does its ultimate meaning rest? What does language do to us? Do we give our words sense and meaning, or is it the world-shaping power of the words and signs themselves, which call us into life, thought, and questioning? Who shapes whom? In what form? And above all: With what objectives?

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Fourth, the mathematical theory of probability can be, and usually has been, developed without reference to what kind of probability is being spoken of. This is because the mathematical theory of, say, dice throwing depends only on the symmetry or equiprobability of certain outcomes, allowing equal numbers to be assigned to them. One can say that there is symmetry between all of the six possible outcomes of a single throw of a die, and hence they each have probability , without needing to say in what respect they are symmetrical or what kind of probability is being considered—whether one is discussing properties of the die or uncertainty about the outcome.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

Here were the beginnings of the public sphere and civil society, two of the great spurs of modernity; but Rousseau saw them as centres of soul-destroying hypocrisy. ‘In the midst of so much philosophy, humanity, and civilization, and of such sublime codes of morality,’ he wrote, ‘we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.’

Breath

James Nestor

As molecules of breath descend deeper, they switch on parasympathetic nerves, which send more messages for the organs to rest and digest. As air ascends through the lungs during exhalation, the molecules stimulate an even more powerful parasympathetic response. The deeper and more softly we breathe in, and the longer we exhale, the more slowly the heart beats and the calmer we become.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 22 August 2021

 

Pairs nicely with Laudato Si

Pope Francis. Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality [Laudato Si] Melville House. Kindle Edition.

I will begin by briefly reviewing several aspects of the present ecological crisis, with the aim of drawing on the results of the best scientific research available today, letting them touch us deeply and provide a concrete foundation for the ethical and spiritual itinerary that follows.

I will point to the intimate relationship between the poor and the fragility of the planet, the conviction that everything in the world is connected, the critique of new paradigms and forms of power derived from technology, the call to seek other ways of understanding the economy and progress, the value proper to each creature, the human meaning of ecology, the need for forthright and honest debate, the serious responsibility of international and local policy, the throwaway culture and the proposal of a new lifestyle. These questions will not be dealt with once and for all, but reframed and enriched again and again.

18. The continued acceleration of changes affecting humanity and the planet is coupled today with a more intensified pace of life and work which might be called “rapidification.”

19. Following a period of irrational confidence in progress and human abilities, some sectors of society are now adopting a more critical approach.

And now some other voices:

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

An upsurge of irrationality is a mortal threat to democratic polity. Political truth is always biased to some extent, but there is a profound and crucial difference between limited rationality and complete irrationality, relative objectivity and pure fantasy, demonstrable facts and blatant lies. A sane information environment is a precondition for a workable democracy. Once reality has been hijacked, there can be no reasonable basis for either voting or legislating.

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

Reinhold Niebuhr

The social and historical optimism of democratic life, for instance, represents the typical illusion of an advancing class which mistook its own progress for the progress of the world. [Published in 1944]

Apologies to the Grandchldren

William Ophuls

"Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." — Friedrich Nietzsche