Thoughts for the Day: Monday 1 March 2021

 

Raffa

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

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

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

--Farnum Street blog

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

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

Self-Reliance & Other Essays

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

N.B. I disagree.

Breath

James Nestor

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

Breath

James Nestor

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

The Wedge

Scott Carney

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

Dark Star Rising

Gary Lachman

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

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

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 28 February 2021

 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

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

Two Essays on Colin Wilson

Gary Lachman

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

Beyond the Robot

Gary Lachman

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

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

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

The Wedge

Scott Carney

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

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

In Europe's Shadow

Robert D. Kaplan

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

The Kennedy Imprisonment

Garry Wills

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

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

Thoughts of the Day: Saturday 27 February 2021

 

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

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

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

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

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

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

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

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

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 26 February 2021

 

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

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

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

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

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

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Gary Lachman

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

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 25 February 2021

 

A ground-breaking book

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Language, a principally left-hemisphere function, tends, as Nietzsche said, to ‘make the uncommon common’: the general currency of vocabulary returns the vibrant multiplicity of experience to the same few, worn coins.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers,” as a famously clever screenwriter/director/journalist named Ben Hecht once wrote, “is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.”

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

With the possible exception of the Scandinavians, no European citizenry has the political maturity of Americans, for whom a certain amount of responsibility, i.e., of moderation in the pursuit of self-interest, is almost a matter of course.

N.B. This was written sometime between the end of the Second World War and 1954, and what may have been true then seems not at all true now. (And I'd be delighted to be proved wrong about this.)

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Until the invention of antibiotics in 1928, Western medicine couldn’t deliver much better results than indigenous medicine anywhere else in the world. In many cases, going to a shaman or witch doctor offered just about the same likelihood of recovery as seeing a Western doctor.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

But in truth the U.S. government simply had no interest in creating an international order that would diminish American power. The Roosevelt administration was clear-eyed about raw-power realpolitik considerations, but FDR and many of his top diplomats were also influenced by misunderstandings about the causes of the Great Depression and infused with a righteous Wilsonian sense of national destiny.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

In a world of appearances, filled with error and semblance, reality is guaranteed by this three-fold commonness: the five senses, utterly different from each other, have the same object in common; members of the same species have the context in common that endows every single object with its particular meaning; and all other sense-endowed beings, though perceiving this object from utterly different perspectives, agree on its identity. Out of this threefold commonness arises the sensation of reality.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

The author Parag Khanna notes that economically, America has really turned into a collection of interlinked metro regions that he dubs, “The United City-States of America.” Big, developed cities are beginning to think of themselves as independent actors on the world stage.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 24 February 2021

 

1942 masterwork on political thought & crisis

The New Leviathan

R. G. Collingwood

26. 76. Historians to-day know that all history consists of changes, and that all these changes involve ‘reversals of fortune’. But the historical idea of a revolution implies that normally the course of history flows, as if by the Newtonian First Law of Motion, uniformly in a straight line: then it waggles, and you are surprised. This is how people really did think about history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; it is one of the many signs that they did not know very much history.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Weimar’s collapse owed much to the weakness of a liberal-democratic conservatism.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Among the intellectual-made Utopian myths, none was weaker than the liberal myth of self-organizing market society. (Sorel might have added a later liberal myth, the myth of the end of myths.)

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

They [Nazi collaborators] felt (after they no longer needed to fear God, their conscience cleared through the bureaucratic organization of their acts) only the responsibility toward their own families. The transformation of the family man from a responsible member of society, interested in all public affairs, to a “bourgeois” concerned only with his private existence and knowing no civic virtue, is an international modern phenomenon.

Diplomacy

Henry Kissinger

Bismarck’s legacy was quite the opposite. Few statesmen have so altered the course of history. Before Bismarck took office, German unity was expected to occur through the kind of parliamentary, constitutional government which had been the thrust of the Revolution of 1848. Five years later, Bismarck was well on his way to solving the problem of German unification, which had confounded three generations of Germans, but he did so on the basis of the pre-eminence of Prussian power, not through a process of democratic constitutionalism. Bismarck’s solution had never been advocated by any significant constituency. Too democratic for conservatives, too authoritarian for liberals, too power-oriented for legitimists, the new Germany was tailored to a genius who proposed to direct the forces he had unleashed, both foreign and domestic, by manipulating their antagonisms—a task he mastered but which proved beyond the capacity of his successors.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 23 February 2021

  

The Future of History

John Lukacs

Sociology, with all of its limitations, can be serious and valuable: an exhaustive (and sometimes comprehensive) study of a society or of a definite portion of it.

sng: Sociology is anantomy to history's physiology; structure vs. process; narrative vs. analysis. Of course, many of the most important thinkers imcorporate and blend these dichotomies in their work.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

THE IDEA THAT our mind does not only depict or reflect reality but also independently lends it a format was of course the central idea of Kant’s critical philosophy and his so-called Copernican revolution.

The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Gary Lachman

In Aion, Jung presented the idea that the archetypes evolve, and that we were currently caught in the shift from one “psychic dominant” to another—rather as Jean Gebser believed that we are moving from one “consciousness structure” to another. The new age, for Jung, would be one that would “constellate the problem of the union of opposites” and this would come about through the “individual human being, via his experience of the living spirit.”

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

A representation may be a work of art; but what makes it a representation is one thing, what makes it a work of art is another’ (PA 43).

The Fifth Discipline

Peter M. Senge

There are two distinct types of feedback processes:  reinforcing  and balancing.  Reinforcing  (or amplifying) feedback processes are the engines of growth. Whenever you are in a situation where things are growing, you can be sure that  reinforcing  feedback is at work.  Reinforcing  feedback can also generate accelerating decline—a pattern of decline where small drops amplify themselves into larger and larger drops, such as the decline in bank assets when there is a financial panic.

The best response is often "You're probably right."

Nothing is gained by arguing with someone over something that doesn't matter.

--Farnum Street blog

“I come from a family where my grandparents fled anti-Semitism and persecution. The country took us in and protected us. And I feel an obligation to the country to pay back. And this is the highest, best use of my own set of skills to pay back. And so, I want very much to be the kind of attorney general that you’re saying I could become. I’ll do my best to try to be that kind of attorney general.”

--Attorney General nominee Judge Merrick Garland