Thoughts for the Day: Monday 21 June 2021

Mastermind

Maria Konnikova

“That process starts upon the supposition that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” [Quoting "Sherlock Holmes"]

Mastermind

Maria Konnikova

I raise this . . . to point out one somewhat obvious and yet absolutely central element of the human mind: we never stop learning. The Holmes that took the case of a mysterious lodger and ended up embroiled in a saga of secret societies and international crime rings (for that is the meaning of Red Circle: a secret Italian crime syndicate with many evil deeds to its name) is no longer the same Holmes who made such seemingly careless errors in “The Yellow Face.” Holmes may have his Norburys. But he has chosen to learn from them and make himself a better thinker in the process, ever perfecting a mind that already seems sharp beyond anything else. We, too, never stop learning, whether we know it or not.

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

In a population where 88 percent have some level of metabolic dysfunction, the entire concept of healthy has been obfuscated.

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

Reinhold Niebuhr

Marxist social theory betrays striking similarities to Rousseau's conceptions. It fails to anticipate the rise of a ruling group in a socialist society.

Ultrasociety

Peter Turchin

A successful upstart who wants to become king needs something extra. His authority cannot be maintained by force alone; he needs to persuade others that he has legitimate authority.

Strangely enough, it is easier to become a god-king than merely a king.

To become god-king the successful upstart needs several things. Obviously, he must be at the top of the military chain of command. But he also needs to become the ritual leader, so that he controls the religious hierarchy—large-scale ritual cults that evolved to cement tribal alliances. Finally, the king-in-the-making needs a fanatically loyal retinue that will follow his orders without question and compel others to do the same. The king needs loyal warriors to protect him from assassination, and to put to death any commoner who shows insufficient respect and obedience. Basically, the king and his retinue are a coalition of upstarts, with the king as the alpha male and his followers as lesser upstarts, but who also do quite well out of the deal.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

In Heraclitus’s statement that the restraining of impulse is difficult but necessary to the soul’s health lies the source of the Stoic emphasis on intervening in the mental process that leads from sensation to action. And in Democritean athambia is found the root of Epicurus’s ataraxia. Most Greek philosophies, like most Indian philosophies, were, in their ethics anyway, philosophies of retreat.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

One paints a thing in order to see it People who don’t paint, naturally, won’t believe that; it would be too humiliating to themselves. They like to fancy that everybody, or at least everybody of refinement and taste like themselves, sees just as much as an artist sees, and that the artist only differs in having the technical accomplishment of painting what he sees. But that is nonsense. You see something in your subject, of course, before you begin to paint it (though how much, even of that, you would see if you weren’t already a painter is a difficult question); and that, no doubt, is what induces you to begin painting; but only a person with experience of painting, and of painting well, can realize how little that is, compared with what you come to see in it as your painting progresses.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 20 June 2021

 

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Where the right hemisphere can see that metaphor is the only way to preserve the link between language and the world it refers to, the left hemisphere sees it either as a lie (Locke, expressing Enlightenment disdain, called metaphors ‘perfect cheats’)or as a distracting ornament; and connotation as a limitation, since in the interests of certainty the left hemisphere prefers single meanings.

The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!

George Lakoff

So far as the law is concerned, metaphorical thought, which is ubiquitous, does not exist. But in reality, unconscious conceptual metaphors do exist, they are everywhere, and they have consequences. This disparity between the law and the human brain and mind is unframed—not part of most people’s everyday consciousness or discourse.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Tell no lies…. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.

--Amílcar Cabral

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[I]t’s important to acknowledge that there’s no clear boundary between human beings and their surrounding natural world— that the natural world is intimately part of us. This means that the boundary of our identity— of our “we”— must expand to encompass nature too. “To regain our full humanity,” writes the systems theorist Fritjof Capra, “we have to regain our experience of connectedness with the entire web of life.”

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

In this book, I explore a wide range of other factors that will limit our ability to supply the ingenuity required in the coming century. For example, many people believe that new communication technologies strengthen democracy and will make it easier to find solutions to our societies’ collective problems, but the story is less clear than it seems. The crush of information in our everyday lives is shortening our attention span, limiting the time we have to reflect on critical matters of public policy, and making policy arguments more superficial.

N.B. This book was published in 2020.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Think of the macrophage—and, for that matter, the entire diverse assembly of immune cells—as a pack of friendly wolves patrolling the area inside our skin, attacking the things that might hurt us. What happens when those wolves no longer have regular prey? They go stir-crazy. They get bored. And they might turn on themselves.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

In contrast to the inorganic thereness of lifeless matter, living beings are not mere appearances. To be alive means to be possessed by an urge toward self-display which answers the fact of one’s own appearingness. Living things make their appearance like actors on a stage set for them. The stage is common to all who are alive, but it seems different to each species, different also to each individual specimen. Seeming—the it-seems-to-me, dokei moi—is the mode, perhaps the only possible one, in which an appearing world is acknowledged and perceived. To appear always means to seem to others, and this seeming varies according to the standpoint and the perspective of the spectators. In other words, every appearing thing acquires, by virtue of its appearingness, a kind of disguise that may indeed—but does not have to—hide or disfigure it. Seeming corresponds to the fact that every appearance, its identity notwithstanding, is perceived by a plurality of spectators.

Letter to Senators Bennet & Hickenlooper re "The For the People Act, the Manchin Alternative, and the Filibuster

My email sent today to our Senators Bennet & Hickenlooper. How about you? 

Dear Senator: 

Thank you for co-sponsoring S. 1, the “For the People Act.” At a time when too many state legislatures are acting to reduce access to voting and to subvert the democratic process, your willingness to act in support of this fundamental right is crucial. 

I do understand that under the current Senate rules and the disposition of the Republicans, passage of this bill in its current form is highly unlikely. If this bill doesn’t pass, then I urge you to support the alternative sponsored by Sen. Manchin. While I find that many of Senator Manchin’s positions are either naive or utterly self-serving (or both), on this issue (and that of the filibuster), his alternative provides at least a small step forward. I came to this conclusion after reading Ezra Klein’s commentary on Manchin (NYT) and the statement of Stacey Abrams in support of Manchin’s alternative to S.1. To put it simply, if it’s good enough for Ms. Abrams, it’s good enough for me (and you, too). 

Related to this issue, and others that Congress needs to address is the problem of the filibuster. Again, Senator Manchin (along with Senator Sinema) seems to hold the key. And while I urge you to support the repeal of this extra-Constitutional vestige of a bygone era, I know repeal is highly unlikely. But you can reform the filibuster to require a determined minority to hold the floor and speak to their cause (or read from the phone book— if they can find one). The American people might then might consider the issue and appreciate what the minority is attempting to prevent—the passage of meaningful legislation. Also, put the burden on those wanting to dodge a vote by requiring a vote of 41 Senators to continue the filibuster. Put the burden on the recalcitrant minority. 

Thank you for your efforts on these matters. The time to enact some vital legislation is at hand, and I urge you to take every reasonable step to bring these matters before the Senate and to a vote—and continue to support democracy and the rule of law.

s/ Stephen Greenleaf

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 19 June 2021 Happy Juneteenth to All!

 

Doom

Niall Ferguson

This illustrated the central point of this book—that all disasters are at some level man-made political disasters, even if they originate with new pathogens. Politics explained why World War II killed twenty-five times as many Germans as Americans. Politics explains why COVID-19 has thus far killed eighteen times as many Americans as Germans.

N.B. I suggest that if you prefer, you can substitute human "choices," "actions," or "thought" for politics as they are, per Collingwood & Arendt (and others), more or less the same. I don't believe that NF would disagree much. 

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

The top 10% of America owns almost 70% of the total wealth of the country—from houses and cars to stocks and bonds—while the bottom 50% own just 1.5% of assets. Back in the 1980s, Reagan’s heady vision seemed to promise that America could grow its way out of addressing poverty and inequity. In 2020, growth—at least in developed countries like the US—looks likely to stay sluggish, as it has for two decades.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The hard right’s vote comes from many sources: first-time voters, disgruntled left-wing voters, and, for the most part, disgruntled conservatives. They are socially mixed and some are economically distressed, but one marker of the typical hard-right voter is the lack of a higher degree.

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

Chronicle, then, is the past as merely believed upon testimony but not historically known. And this belief is a mere act of will: the will to preserve certain statements which we do not understand. If we did understand them, they would be history. Every history becomes chronicle when related by a person who cannot relive the experiences of its characters: the history of philosophy, for example, as written or read by people who do not understand the thoughts of the philosophers in question.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

Humanity had not suffered some mass collapse of creative energy or business acumen any more than it had been engulfed by a sudden international unwillingness to work for a reasonable wage. Economic underperformance, whatever its original cause, had created an investment market that now assumed chronic underperformance to be the norm—and was perfectly capable of fulfilling its own prophecy.

A Writer's Coach

Jack R. Hart

[A] principal “obstacle to writing improvement is our tendency to dwell on either the final results or the mental origins of writing to the exclusion of the activity of writing, as if an empty gap separated writing from thinking.”

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 18 June 2021

 

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Success doesn’t happen if you only act when you are sure of a positive outcome. Real success means risking failure. We succeed only after we accept that we might fail and plan for the worst.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

The Nazi impress on the German mind consists primarily in a conditioning whereby reality has ceased to be the sum total of hard inescapable facts and has become a conglomeration of ever-changing events and slogans in which a thing can be true today and false tomorrow.

The Immortality Key

Brian C. Muraresku 

Magna Graecia and Rome. Southern Italy was ground zero for Greek mysticism in the centuries before and after Jesus. It was almost more Greek than Greece itself. Hence the name “Naples,” the “new city” in Greek. In Pythagoras and Parmenides alone, Magna Graecia boasted the greatest prophet and the greatest philosopher the ancient world ever knew. In Empedocles, it found the greatest magician in the history of Western civilization. It was here that the “secret doctrine” of cave techniques flourished at least until the third century AD, when Plotinus died in Campania. It was here that the priestesses of Persephone practiced their death and rebirth for the Queen of the Dead, toggling between Rome and Velia along the Mystery Coast Highway.

1493

Charles C. Mann

Fun, exciting, and wildly addictive, tobacco was an instant hit around the globe—    the first time people in every continent simultaneously became enraptured by a novelty. N. tabacum was the leading edge of the Columbian Exchange.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 17 June 2021

 

Greeks ancient to contemporary & Paddy Leigh Fermor 

Natural Born Heroes

Christopher McDougall

Instead of bowing down to saints and miracles, the Greeks worshipped problem solvers and hard how-to. They understood the difference between heroism and impulse, and they devised an easy, two-step test for telling them apart: 1. Would you do it again? 2. And could you?

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

Just as the original sense of the word ‘cause’ is what I have called the historical sense, according to which that which is caused is the act of a conscious and responsible agent, so the original sense of the word ‘necessary’ is an historical sense, according to which it is necessary for a person to act in a certain way: deciding so to act and acting therefore freely and responsibly, yet (in a sense which in no wise derogates from his responsibility) ‘necessitated’ to act in that way by certain ‘causes’, in sense I [#1] of the word ‘cause’.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

The decision the will arrives at can never be derived from the mechanics of desire or the deliberations of the intellect that may precede it. The will is either an organ of free spontaneity that interrupts all causal chains of motivation that would bind it or it is nothing but an illusion.

The Big Fat Surprise

Nina Teicholz

As the accompanying graph shows, the only fats that could be found in any American kitchen up until about 1910 were those that came exclusively from animals: lard (the fat from pigs), suet (the fat from around an animal’s kidneys), tallow (a harder fat from sheep and cattle), butter, and cream.

Fear Itself

Ira Katznelson

He [Walter Lippmann] further identified the rupture between past and present—in the democracies as well as the dictatorships—with two revolutionary developments in modern politics he believed to be “wholly without precedent in history.” First was the active and self-conscious participation in government by “the masses of men,” making of “modern government in our Western World, even under the dictatorships,” something of “a daily plebiscite.” The legitimacy of any government thus had come to depend on its ability to solve problems and formulate policies to which the governed would offer consent, both active and passive.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 16 June 2021

 

This book becomes more important with each passing day

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

We are not yet ready to admit that the destruction of nature is the consequence not of policy errors that can be remedied by smarter management, better technology, and stricter regulation but rather of a catastrophic moral failure that demands a radical shift in consciousness.

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

Hitherto, the natural landscape and the human world took a backseat to the essentially spiritual and religious subjects of paintings. Prior to perspective, the mundane world was merely a reflection of the spiritual realms, a hieroglyphic backdrop to celestial events and figures. But with perspective, this changed. The represented world now became what was perceived from the point of view of a single human consciousness. The world was now what we saw.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

To be an elder, benefactor, conservator, and mentor calls for a learning about shadows, an instruction from the “dead” (that is, from what has gone before, become invisible, yet continues to vivify our lives with its influences). The “dead” come back as ancestors, especially in times of crisis, when we are at a loss.

The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Gary Lachman

“Imaginal” is the world that lies between the purely intelligible—that is, conceptual—world of Plato’s Forms (the Intellect in Plotinus’s philosophy) and the purely material world of the senses. It is, as Corbin writes, “ontologically as real as the world of the senses and that of the intellect.” It partakes of and informs both in the sense that in it, the pure abstract Ideas are clothed in symbols, and the brute objects of the physical world can become imbued with symbolic significance. We enter it every night when we dream, and some intrepid explorers have entered it while fully conscious. To jump ahead somewhat: C. G. Jung’s “descent into the unconscious,” Swedenborg’s journeys to heaven and hell, Rudolf Steiner’s “readings” of the “Akashic record,” to name perhaps the most well-known modern journeys into the interior, all took place within the Mundus Imaginalis.

A Guide to the I Ching

Carol K. Anthony

The suspension of disbelief becomes a humble acceptance of whatever is going on as part of the zigzag workings of the Creative. These two attitudes combine in an unshakable modesty which exemplifies The Receptive. While they appear to be passive attitudes, they are not. The secret is that they perfectly arouse the powers of the Creative to work out all things correctly.

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam

“For there was no doubt in Bundy’s mind about his ability to handle... the world. The job was not just a happenstance thing; he had, literally and figuratively, been bred for it, or failing this, Secretary of State. He was the  brightest  light in that glittering constellation around the President [Kennedy], for if those years had any central theme, if there was anything that bound the men, their followers and their subordinates together, it was the belief that sheer intelligence and rationality could answer and solve anything.”