Thoughts for the Day: 17 September 2021

 

1999 publication but oh so relevant today. 

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Because we tend to delude ourselves that we understand the complex systems around us better than we actually do, we are often less prudent than we should be when we deal with them. “The system works,” we say to each other after a crisis, in relief and self-congratulation, and continue doing things as we always have. We introduce changes not to reform but only to refine our institutions, practices, and technologies, to increase their performance and efficiency; and these refinements (like the ever greater speed of international currency transactions) often make the systems affecting us even more replete with unknown unknowns.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Progress in the social sciences is especially slow, for reasons we don’t yet fully understand; but we desperately need better social scientific knowledge to build the sophisticated institutions today’s world demands.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

And modern financial systems powerfully amplified the ability of money to transform fear into suffering. Financial markets and stock exchanges had enabled disparate individuals to pool their resources and knowledge to support enterprises that had been inconceivable only a century or so before.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

[Hannah] Arendt “repeatedly called attention to a very particular kind of lying that she associated with the authoritarian governments of mid-twentieth-century Europe,” writes the historian Sophia Rosenfeld. “This was a form of dissembling that was so brazen and comprehensive, so far from standard political fibbing and selective spin, that it left a population essentially impotent.” As Arendt famously wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

“Scientists check one another’s numbers,” Lee McIntyre writes in The Scientific Attitude. “They do not wait to find an error; they go out and look for one.” Although individual scientists can be as irrational and stubborn as anyone else, “science has made a community-wide effort to … make corrections” (McIntyre’s italics).

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

German conservatives were beginning to play by the rules of liberal modernity. They had to argue for policies and interests, not simply issue directives. Playing by the rules allowed, as elsewhere, for electoral manipulation, suborning the press, and, generally, gaming the system. To picture Wilhelmine conservatives as top-down string-pullers, however, is as distorting as the Junker caricature.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

The two antagonistic forces of past and future are both indefinite as to their origin; seen from the viewpoint of the present in the middle, the one comes from an infinite past and the other from an infinite future. But though they have no known beginning, they have a terminal ending, the point at which they meet and clash, which is the present. The diagonal force, on the contrary, has a definite origin, its starting-point being the clash of the two other forces, but it would be infinite with respect to its ending since it has resulted from the concerted action of two forces whose origin is infinity. This diagonal force, whose origin is known, whose direction is determined by past and future, but which exerts its force toward an undetermined end as though it could reach out into infinity, seems to me a perfect metaphor for the activity of thought.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 15 September 2021

Back to our journey through this important work. 

First, let's catch up with Pope Francis from his encyclical Laudato Si about climate change, environmental degradation, and justice:

We are free to apply our intelligence towards things evolving positively, or towards adding new ills, new causes of suffering and real setbacks. This is what makes for the excitement and drama of human history, in which freedom, growth, salvation and love can blossom, or lead towards decadence and mutual destruction. The work of the Church seeks not only to remind everyone of the duty to care for nature, but at the same time “she must above all protect mankind from self-destruction.”

(Location 818)

81. Human beings, even if we postulate a process of evolution, also possess a uniqueness which cannot be fully explained by the evolution of other open systems. Each of us has his or her own personal identity and is capable of entering into dialogue with others and with God himself. Our capacity to reason, to develop arguments, to be inventive, to interpret reality and to create art, along with other not yet discovered capacities, are signs of a uniqueness which transcends the spheres of physics and biology.

82. Yet it would also be mistaken to view other living beings as mere objects subjected to arbitrary human domination. When nature is viewed solely as a source of profit and gain, this has serious consequences for society.

(Location 840)

And now for some other voices: 

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

Personality is an entirely different matter. It is very hard to grasp and perhaps most closely resembles the Greek daimon, the guardian spirit which accompanies every man throughout his life, but is always only looking over his shoulder, with the result that it is more easily recognized by everyone a man meets than by himself. This daimon—which has nothing demonic about it—this personal element in a man, can only appear where a public space exists; that is the deeper significance of the public realm, which extends far beyond what we ordinarily mean by political life. To the extent that this public space is also a spiritual realm, there is manifest in it what the Romans called humanitas.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

The originality of totalitarianism is horrible, not because some new “idea” came into the world, but because its very actions constitute a break with all our traditions; they have clearly exploded our categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgment.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

If there is one message this book seeks to impart, that is it. Individuals talking to each other, no matter how big the network, are just people gabbing. Even truth-seeking individuals who cherish rigor and accuracy are likely to go unheard amid the din. The reality-based network’s institutional nodes—its filtering and pumping stations—are what give the system its positive epistemic valence.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

To [Joan] Robinson the point of The General Theory had been to restore human agency to economic theory. Keynes, she argued, forced economists to grapple with “life lived in time.” Systems didn’t immediately snap to equilibrium. People made choices based on expectations about an uncertain future. Decisions like whether to save or spend, or whether to buy new factory equipment or lay off workers, were never obviously rational or irrational in the moment, because long-term consequences could not be predicted.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

The United States was “a distinct moral, social and political entity,” [Hans] Morgenthau declared in the introduction of The Purpose of American Politics. All other countries defined themselves by their “ethnic affinities and historic traditions,” but the United States defined itself by an idea, with “a particular purpose in mind.” That idea, that purpose, was what Morgenthau called “equality in freedom.” Admittedly, this was a vague concept, even contradictory, or in Morgenthau’s words “intangible, shapeless and procedural,” as the principles of equality and freedom often came into conflict with each other. Pursued for its own sake, freedom became libertarianism, which necessarily undermined equality because, as Morgenthau said, there was a “natural inequality of man.” And equality by itself led to a repressive “equalitarianism,” or the denial of individual freedom. The two principles had to be forcibly yoked together to avoid extremes and the destruction of the American purpose.

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

There’s a big difference between soil and dirt. Soil has carbon, nitrogen, and bacteria. Dirt, on the other hand, is just dirt. It’s dead. There’s only so much carbon, nitrogen, and bacteria in the ground, and we have to replenish it or we get dirt. More people means more extrication of those elements.

The World Is Made of Stories by David R. Loy

 

David R. Loy is a Buddhist scholar-practitioner  who, in addition to more scholarly titles, has also authored books intended for general audiences. This is one of those books, and it's a gem. It's short at only 128 pages, but it's packed with genuinely thought-provoking insights. Loy's text consists of a large number of quotes from a wide variety of sources: contemporary and historical, famous and obscure, scriptural and profane, and a variety of cultural traditions. But this book is not simply a collection of thought-provoking quotes gathered at random from a wide variety of sources. Loy interspaces his quotes with his questions and commentary. Indeed, the quotes serve more to adorn his commentary than vice versa. But the book works so well because of the deft interweaving of Loy's thoughts with those whom he quotes. Loy's text lends itself to brief quotation as well, as I demonstrate below. But taken together, Loy's text provides a compelling argument, a compelling story about stories.

Below I'll share a series of quotes that I've lifted from Loy's text as he lifted from others. As those he's quoted, there's no doubt more said before and after the quotes that round out the thought and may be usefully persued. But brevity provides fertile seed with which one can grow one's own thinking as well. Here's a sample of Loy's text, primarily as it relates to story, although this isn't the sole topic that he touches upon. Enjoy: 

If the world is made of stories, stories are not just stories. They teach us what is real, what is valuable, and what is possible. Without stories there is no way to engage with the world because there is no world, and no one to engage with it because there is no self.


This is not to deny (or assert) that there is a world apart from our stories, only that we cannot understand anything without storying it. To understand is to story.


The limits of my stories are the limits of my world.


Science is not primarily about discovering facts. It is about accounting for the relationships that make them meaningful.


Stories do not have sharp edges. They never begin at the beginning.


A story is a point of view is no perspectiveless perspective. There is no way to escape perspectives except by multiplying them.


We transcend this world by being able to story it differently.


The metaphorical nature of religious language makes its truth claims the most difficult to evaluate, because we cannot agree on what criteria to use. Myth avoids this problem by being meaningful in a different way. Religious doctrines, like other ideologies, entail propositional claims to be accepted. Myths provide stories to interact with.


One of the most dangerous myths is the myth of a life without myth, the story of a realist who is freed himself from all that nonsense.
        Liberation from myth, is that our myth?


Another way to evaluate a story is by its consequences when we live according to it. The most important criterion for Buddhism is whether a story promotes awakening.


My character is constructed by the roles I play.


If one's personality is composed of sub-personalities, each of us is composed of multiple narratives.


The question is not so much “What do I learn from stories?” as quotes "What stories do I want to live?"


Happens when I realize that my story is a story?


One meaning of freedom is the opportunity to act out of the story I identify with. Another freedom is the ability to change stories and my role within them. I move from scripted character to co-author of my own life. A third type of freedom results from understanding how stories construct and constrict my possibilities.


Whether or not karma is an unfathomable moral law built into the cosmos, living a story has consequences.


Without stories there is no self. And letting go of all stories during samadhi meditation I become no-thing. What can be said about nothing? Neti, neti, “not this, not this.” To say anything about it gives it a role in a story, even if only as a place-marker like a zero.


Am I the storyteller, or the storytold . . . or both? If a sense of self is produced by stories, who is telling them?


Descartes accounts for the continuity of awareness, Hume for its transformations. A narrative self—self as story—bridges the two, providing both sameness and difference. Essential to this narrative is intentionality. It is not enough to have a story about what happens. It is necessary to story why I do what I do.


A narrative understanding of the self implies a distinction between two aspects. One’s character composed of dispositions solidified out of roles that have become habitual. This is my identity, from the Latin identidem, which means “over and over.”
        The other aspect of self preserves the possibility of novelty, of doing and become something different. This is my no-thing-ness. Identify is relatively fixed. No-thing-ness is that which cannot be fixed.


Myth as history, history as myth. Premodern people lived in a mythic world, how much of our own history is mythological? Although the past makes us what we are, what we have become determines what we will be able to see in our history.


A profusion of stories is liberating yet uncomfortable, because we want to tuck ourselves securely into the True Story, the one that reveals the way things really are and what’s really important.


The story of history as the history of story.


We are trying to fill up the hole at our core—the sense that something is missing, that I am not real enough—by becoming more wealthy, famous, attractive . . . more powerful. Power—the ability to impose my stories—offers the promise of reality. How could I be unreal, if I'm the one who decides what happens?


The Buddha, like Socrates and Jesus, wrote nothing.


Having learned to find meaning in words, we miss the meaning of everything else.


Our deepest fear is rooted in a compulsion to secure what cannot be secured.


The end of a life organized around fear is to forget your stories about yourself, and thereby your self.


We never achieve a neutral standpoint outside all stories from which to evaluate them objectively.

Those who do not care for such Big Stories [Buddhism, Christianity, etc.] need to consider the alternative. There is no such thing as not storying. Everybody stories. The only choice we get is how to story.


The best stories are paradoxical, one hand offering what the other takes back.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 14 September 2021

 

From the above book (reviewed here)

[T]o use Marxist language to make a point contrary to Marx, the state, not the private capitalist, was the true expropriator, and increased national and state power was both the end and the means of this expropriation.This is one powerful reason, among many others, why the Marxist solution to the problems of Hobbesian political economy has failed so badly: by appealing to the original agent of expropriation for salvation, it puts the fox in charge of the chickens. Seizure of the means production by the state does not alter the fact of expropriation; rather, it  replaces one class of exploiters, the monopoly capitalis ts and their political lackeys, with a "new class"of appartchiks and commissars, such as the corrupt nomenclatura that ran the former Soviet Union. 111

The free market is therefore an ideological fiction. Not only did the market system have to be created by the government in the first place, but it can continue only to operate with continuous government intervention and support thereafter. However, because of the disproportionate power of corporations, the economic tail wags the political dog. The upshot is the worst of both worlds: a top-heavy and heavy-handed state bureaucracy layered over a distorted and somewhat corrupt market economy. 118

An especially pertinent point:

Ironically, the supposed "conservatives" of American politics, that complain the loudest about many of these changes, especially moral decay, are the most laissez-faire with respect to the economic enterprise and technological innovation that produce them. In return for higher levels of production, we have to pay the price in lost social cohesion and political autonomy, as the values of "efficiency" and "exchange" implicit in achieving greater productivity have invaded the sociopolitical realm. (The supposed "liberals" of American politics are just as deluded as the "conservatives": equally addicted to material progress, they also want to conquer nature with technology; but they foolishly believe that economic production as possible without economic power, that ordinary citizens can call the political and social tune when, in fact, it is economic and technological enterprise that pays the piper. In short, with the collaboration of all parties, the technological servant has become the political master.) 171

 

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

“In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men,” [Madison] famously wrote in Federalist No. 51, “the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

William Walker Atkinson Premium 7 Book Collection

WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON

The word “suggestion” is derived from the Latin word “suggestus,” which has for its base the word “suggero,” meaning: “To carry under.” Its original use was in the sense of a “placing under” or deft insinuation of a thought, idea, or impression, under the observant and watchful care of the attention, and into the “inner consciousness” of the individual.

On Revolution

Hannah Arendt

The social question began to play a revolutionary role only when, in the modern age and not before, men began to doubt that poverty is inherent in the human condition, to doubt that the distinction between the few, who through circumstances or strength or fraud had succeeded in liberating themselves from the shackles of poverty, and the labouring poverty-stricken multitude was inevitable and eternal.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[Homer-Dixon details a] grim list of economic, social, and environmental challenges. But our societies [some argue], especially the rich ones, will generate and deliver enough ingenuity to solve many of them. As for the problems that can’t be solved easily, we will often learn to live with the consequences. Usually this won’t be too difficult, because human beings are very good at adjusting to new conditions. Wealthy countries will build more secure frontiers to keep out poor migrants. Strict quarantine procedures will isolate patients who don’t respond to drugs. We will wear hats to protect us from the sun, modify our crops to survive in eroded soils, and grow fish in huge aquaculture ponds. Some problems, like the loss of biodiversity, won’t have much immediate effect on our quality of life: we will easily and comfortably adjust to a world without jaguars, frogs, gorillas, and many of the species alive today.

To me [Homer-Dixon], though, there is little cause for optimism in these remedies. Nor do I think we have to accept such a future.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

And its relentlessly optimistic temperament (what the anthropologist Lionel Tiger has called our “biology of hope”) shortens our time horizons and instills in us a potentially fatal imprudence.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

After sketching his ideas about probability, he [Keynes] moved on to suggest that it is more rational for people—and society itself—to pursue small goods with a high probability of attainment than it is to strive for grand utopias with minute probabilities of attainment.

The Landscape of History

John Lewis Gaddis

It’s part of historical consciousness to learn the same thing: that there is no “correct” interpretation of the past, but that the act of interpreting is itself a vicarious enlargement of experience from which you can benefit.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 13 September 2021

 

N.B. I'll get back to Pope Francis & Laudato Si after catching up on my reading. 

The quotes today from Requiem for Modern Politics all concern television. When reading these quotes, ask yourself: would Donald Trump have been a candidate and then president if television as a medium didn't exist?

Television is not an informative medium at all, but a dramatic one: it transmits images, not ideas; it evokes emotions, not thoughts; and it arouses passion, not deliberation. Indeed, at its worst, it is frankly inflammatory. 81
 

Reading is active: the reader translates printed words on a page into mental images, which takes imagination and thought. Viewing television is passive: the viewer absorbs ready-made images, which takes neither thought nor imagination. Because reading exercises the mind, whereas television entrances and even stupefies it, citizens no longer deliberate but instead respond to events with raw emotion. Television is theIf refore antithetical to the traditional understanding of politics and citizenship in the liberal tradition. 82
 

Finally, if the goal of civilization is greater consciousness, a position held in one form or another by virtually everyone from Plato to Freud, then television is indeed the enemy of civilization: to use Fruedian language, it fosters more id and less ego, more unconscious emotional reaction and less of the reality principle. In effect, television is psychoanalysis in reverse. 86 [Italics mine]

"If the goal of civilization is greater consciousness": Is this the goal of civilization? If not, what is? What creates "greater consciousness"? 

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The breathless infotainment style of the media in modern democracies is understandable in a journalistic world operating at breakneck speed and plagued by info-glut, but it is completely inappropriate in an increasingly complex world that demands increasingly sophisticated policy-making.

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.”

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Bluntly put, when democracy no longer delivers the goods, it will be consigned to the dustbin of history by an angry mob.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

This is an argument in what is now called decision theory in which one evaluates the preferability of decisions by looking at their payoffs under various possible “states of nature,” the states being weighted by their probabilities of being true. It is clear that Pascal realizes that he has discovered such a science, since he concludes with the phrase: “This is conclusive (démonstratif) and if men are capable of any truth this is it.” Generally, decision theory advises one to choose the decision with the highest expectation, that is, the highest product of probability and corresponding payoff.

The Machiavellians

James Burnham

Disputes over the best form of society and government can be interpreted in terms of the notion of “social utility.” When we are asking whether some law or economic measure or belief or war or revolution will be best for society, we are wondering if it will contribute to the community’s welfare or utility.

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

[C]apitalism has destroyed the estates, the corporations, the guilds, the whole structure of feudal society. It has done away with all the collective groups which were a protection for the individual and for his property, which guaranteed him a certain security, though not, of course, complete safety. In their place it has put the “classes,” essentially just two: the exploiters and the exploited.

Metaphors We Live By

George Lakoff, Mark Johnson

Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

[Owen] Barfield, writing decades before either the New Age or the rise of the cyberworld, makes our responsibility for the phenomenal world the pivot of his insights into participation.

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 11 September 2021

 

These ancient stories, full of symbolism, bear witness to a conviction which we today share, that everything is interconnected, and that genuine care for our own lives and our relationships with nature is inseparable from fraternity, justice and faithfulness to others.

(Location 758)

All it takes is one good person to restore hope!

(Location 762)

78. . . . Judaeo-Christian thought demythologized nature. While continuing to admire its grandeur and immensity, it no longer saw nature as divine. In doing so, it emphasizes all the more our human responsibility for nature. This rediscovery of nature can never be at the cost of the freedom and responsibility of human beings who, as part of the world, have the duty to cultivate their abilities in order to protect it and develop its potential. If we acknowledge the value and the fragility of nature and, at the same time, our God-given abilities, we can finally leave behind the modern myth of unlimited material progress. A fragile world, entrusted by God to human care, challenges us to devise intelligent ways of directing, developing and limiting our power.

(Location 810)

79. In this universe, shaped by open and intercommunicating systems, we can discern countless forms of relationship and participation.

(Location 816)

One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draftsman and a disgusting human being. . . .The first thing we demand of a wall is that it stand up. If it stands up, it was a good wall , and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it's around the concentration camp.

George Orwell

 William Ophus, sage

From his Requiem for Modern Politics: 

More participation, for example, is often put forward as the panacea for our political ills. But this is a singularly inappropriate remedy – unless those who participate do so in a responsible and public-spirited fashion, which is less and less the case. 68

Our myth, of course, is that in partisan debate "the marketplace of ideas" will result in good ideas driving out bad. But the actuality seems to be that all marketplaces, including those including that of political discourse, are dominated by Gresham's law. So slogans and symbols have driven out reasoned discussion; and systemic mendacity has largely preempted reasonable argument. Public discourse in a hyper pluralistic polity therefore generates heat, not light. In fact, that is the real purpose, for the winners of the political struggle are those who build the hottest fires under the politicians feet. 69-70

In effect, politics is now a spectator sport: the moral and social vacuum left by the decay of Lockean society has been filled by an ersatz media community. 78

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

In the age of Pythagoras, the unconscious Paganism, with its traditional clothing of beautiful ritual and of magical rites, was passing into a new phase under two influences. There were waves of religious enthusiasm, seeking direct enlightenment into the secret depths of being; and at the opposite pole, there was the awakening of critical analytical thought, probing with cool dispassionateness into ultimate meanings. In both influences, so diverse in their outcome, there was one common element—an awakened curiosity, and a movement towards the reconstruction of traditional ways.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Critical persuasion is not the same as political compromise, of course. Physicists did not sit across a bargaining table and make a deal over Planck’s constant.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Wikipedia figured out how to bring the Constitution of Knowledge online. It made itself a microcosm of the reality-based community, and it embodied the community’s commitments. Fallibilism: anyone can always be corrected and no entry in the matrix of knowledge is final. Objectivity: truth is public, not individual; it is what we persuade each other we know, not what you or I claim to know. Disconfirmation: we hunt for truth by correcting errors. Accountability: we answer to others and must justify our claims.

The Science Is Clear. The Economy Is an Organism - Evonomics

evonomics.com

[T]he concept of society as an organism (again, including but not restricted to economies) functions well as a story that anyone can understand.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Since these abilities [to consider probabilities] are acquired even before infants have learned to speak, it is clear that humans have pre-linguistic abilities to respond to and reason about probabilities, confirming the view of The Science of Conjecture that the story of probability is one of bringing to consciousness existing but implicit probabilistic knowledge.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The captain of that ill-fated aircraft [that crash-landed in Sioux City, IA in the 1980s], Al Haynes, has since identified several factors that contributed to the relative success of the crash-landing, in particular luck, communications, preparation, and cooperation.

Seems that these factors might be useful in other emergencies as well, don't you think?