Thoughts: 14 November 2021

 

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

The achievement of imitation – the meta-skill that enables all other skills – may explain the otherwise incomprehensibly rapid expansion of the brain in early hominids, since there would be a sudden take-off in the speed with which we could adapt and change ourselves, and in the range of our abilities. Imitation is how we acquire skills – any skill at all; and the gene for skill acquisition (imitation) would trump the genes for any individual skills. Thus from a gene – the symbol of ruthless competition (the ‘selfish gene'), and of the relatively atomistic and oppositional values of the left hemisphere – could arise a skill that would enable further evolution to occur not only more rapidly but in a direction of our own choosing – through empathy and co-operation, the values of the right hemisphere.

Imitation isn't just the sincerest form of flattery. 

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

There is nothing new about any of this. A chillingly accurate description of spirals of silence was written in 1840 about the United States of America. “I know of no country where, in general, there reigns less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, in the second volume of his masterpiece, Democracy in America. He explained: "In America, the majority draws a formidable circle around thought. Within these limits, the writer is free; but woe to him if he dares to go beyond them. It isn’t that he has to fear an auto-da-fé, but he is exposed to all types of distasteful things and to everyday persecutions. A political career is closed to him; he has offended the only power that has the ability to open it to him. Everything is denied him, even glory. Before publishing his opinions, he believed he had some partisans; it seems to him that he has them no longer, now that he has revealed himself to all; for those who censure him speak openly, and those who think as he does, without having his courage, keep quiet and distance themselves. He gives in; finally, under the daily effort, he yields and returns to silence, as though he felt remorse for having told the truth."

We're not the great individualists that we fantasize we are.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Both constitutions [American & the "constitution of knowledge"] rest, ultimately, on versions of what the American founders thought of as republican virtue: habits and norms like lawfulness, truthfulness, self-restraint, and forbearance. If anything could ruin the American constitutional experiment, they believed, a failure of republican virtue would be the most likely culprit. They understood that the people would be tempted to exercise their constitutional rights without shouldering their constitutional responsibilities. That was why Adams and Franklin and Madison and the other Founders warned that democracy was only fit for a virtuous public.

Query: can we ever enjoy rights without commensurate responsibilities. If our rights come from a social contract (as I'd say best describe the Bill of Rights), then any contractual right--to have a valid contract--must have some "consideration."

Good Calories, Bad Calories

Gary Taubes

[Ansel] Keys had noted associations between heart-disease death rates and fat intake, Yerushalmy and Hilleboe pointed out, but they were just that. Associations do not imply cause and effect or represent (as Stephen Jay Gould later put it) any “magic method for the unambiguous identification of cause.”

The Force of Character

James Hillman

In many indigenous societies, the deeper instructive and affective connections skip a generation. Since both grandparents and grandchildren are partly marginalized, the young fantast joins the old eccentric against a common opponent, the adult generation between them.

Intriguing observation.

The Rambler

Samuel Johnson

The anger which I propose now for my subject, is such as makes those who indulge it more troublesome than formidable, and ranks them rather with hornets and wasps, than with basilisks and lions. I have, therefore, prefixed a motto, which characterises this passion, not so much by the mischief that it causes, as by the noise that it utters.

Most outbursts of anger are more smoke than fire and are more nuisance than threat.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Re-enactment, in other words, includes counter-factual discussion as well as the delineation of what actually occurred.

Thouoghts: 13 Nov. 2021

 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Simply stopping the slide— just keeping things from getting worse— isn’t enough. Reversing it means aggressively addressing our world’s agonizing social and economic injustices; and most importantly, it means rebuilding nature. We must commit to fixing the hideous environmental mess we’ve made— with all the science, technology, economic investment, and intellectual, artistic, and emotional creativity we can muster.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Those values and rules and institutions do for knowledge what the U.S. Constitution does for politics: they create a governing structure, forcing social contestation onto peaceful and productive pathways. And so I call them, collectively, the Constitution of Knowledge.

Fooled by Randomness

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only his failure.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

The internet has been excellent at telling us about the actual, not so much about the contingent, although policymakers necessarily operate in an arena of uncertainty and unpredictability.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

“Nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations [read, today: Russia?] and passionate attachments for others [read, perhaps: South Vietnam?] should be excluded.” Washington’s text argues that “the nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.”

This was published in 1970, perhaps we'd substitute "China" for "Russia," and perhaps "Saudia Arabia."

The Way to Love

Anthony De Mello

This is what happened: First your society and your culture taught you to believe that you would not be happy  without certain persons and certain things. Just take a look around you: Everywhere people have actually built their lives on the unquestioned belief that  without certain things—money, power, success, approval, a good reputation, love, friendship, spirituality, God—they cannot be happy. What is your particular combination?

“Evolution doesn’t have a purpose in the human sense, as far as I know. But because we are human, we can give it a purpose. We are now in the position of being responsible for evolution, for life. It’s no longer just a mindless universe. I mean, it is just a mindless universe, which has generated through complexity a mind that now has to decide where we want to go. So, in that sense, now it has a purpose, it seems to me. It’s our purpose. And we have to decide what that purpose is.” —“Flow With Soul: An Interview with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi," What Is Enlightenment? Magazine, Issue 21, Spring/Summer 2002

Thoughts 12 Nov 2021

 

After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre

Weber’s understanding of values was indebted chiefly to Nietzsche and that Donald G. Macrae in his book on Weber (1974) calls him an existentialist; for while he holds that an agent may be more or less rational in acting consistently with his values, the choice of any one particular evaluative stance or commitment can be no more rational than that of any other. All faiths and all evaluations are equally non-rational; all are subjective directions given to sentiment and feeling. Weber is then, in the broader sense in which I have understood the term, an emotivist and his portrait of a bureaucratic authority is an emotivist portrait. The consequence of Weber’s emotivism is that in his thought the contrast between power and authority, although paid lip-service to, is effectively obliterated as a special instance of the disappearance of the contrast between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations.

The Enigma of Reason

Hugo Mercier

The defense would argue, citing Descartes, Aristotle, Kant, or Popper, that humans err by not reasoning enough. The prosecution would argue, citing Luther, Hume, Kierkegaard, or Foucault, that they err by reasoning too much.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

The purpose of a hypothesis in science is to propose an explanation for what we observe, either in nature or in the laboratory (ideally, a testable hypothesis): Why did this happen and not that? The more observations a hypothesis can explain or the more phenomena it can predict, the better the explanation, the better the hypothesis. This insistence that we get fat because we overeat is not even wrong, as the legendary physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a man with a gift for memorably pithy criticisms, might have put it. It explains nothing.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

Entropy is a measure of the deadness of a system. Negentropy or information is a measure of the liveliness of a system.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

He ["Phaedrus"] felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.

Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation

Frank R. Ankersmit

The great masterpieces of twentieth-century historical writing rarely mention dates. Think, in particular, of so-called cross-sectional studies, such as Fernand Braudel’s book on the Mediterranean world at the time of Philip II, which does not present us with a development over time but is instead content with describing what that world looked like at one specific temporal cross-section.

The Divine Comedy

Dante Alighieri, translated & notes by John Ciardi

[John Ciardi:] In contrast with the turbulent complexity of Hell, Dante’s Purgatory is simple, regular, and serene. On the lower reaches below the gate are kept in exile for varying lengths of time those souls who, for various reasons and in various conditions, sought salvation at the last moment. Above, within Purgatory, we find not the multifarious crimes by which vice or sin manifests itself in Hell (or on Earth), but simply the seven Capital Vices that lead to sinful acts.

Thoughts: 11 November 2021--Happy Armistice/Veterans Day (really)

 

Henry Adams and the Making of America

Garry Wills

There is much to be learned from the past—but it is better learned from the pragmatists than from the ideologues. Washington would have been the least surprised or disoriented to see what the nation looked like after the Jeffersonians had made it.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

Any attempt to capture the folkways of our local centers has told a story not of participatory democracy but of closed social corporations, the rules of climbing in them quite rigid, the pinnacle of power monopolized by various social and business combines. That situation has gradually been changing; and—is it accidental?—now we hear a lament for the decline of community, a decline which the new politicians would remedy by further atomizing society, “politicizing” each man, urging him to “do his own thing.” They seem to believe that community is merely the sum of individual “own things.”

Compare this observation with Collingwood's distinction between "community" & "society."

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Liberal education, he said, is the effort to establish “an aristocracy within democratic mass society.” Western civilization, as Strauss understood it, was the property of an educated minority. But that didn’t make it unworthy of defense against the nihilistic Nazis. Quite the contrary.

Are liberal educations today acting to protect us from authoritarianism & illiberalism?

Synchronicity

Joseph Jaworski,

I had always thought that we used language to describe the world—now I was seeing that this is not the case. To the contrary, it is through language that we create the world, because it’s nothing until we describe it.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

“There is no animal in nature, excepting Man, that sleeps with the mouth open; and with mankind I believe the habit, which is not natural, is generally confined to civilized communities, where he is nurtured and raised amidst enervating luxuries and unnatural warmth where the habit is easily contracted, but carried and practiced with great danger to life in different latitudes and different climates; and in sudden changes of temperature, even in his own house.”

Remember the Spanish proverb: "En un boca cerrado no entran moscas." ["In a closed mouth enter no flies.']

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

The question is, was anything lost nutritionally in the process of juicing? The answer is an emphatic yes—all of the insoluble fiber is now gone. The soluble fiber alone still has some benefit; orange juice moves the food through the intestine faster (to generate the satiety signal sooner), and the soluble fiber can be converted to short-chain fatty acids. But those benefits pale in comparison to the suppression of the insulin response associated with the combination of the two. Remember, it doesn’t matter where the fructose comes from—fruit, sugar cane, beets—without the fiber, it all has the same metabolic effect on your body.

Thoughts: 11 Nov 2021--Happy Armistice Day!

 

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

A discussion of the climate crisis—the historical transformation of nature and its implications for our history—written from the safety of an Upper West Side apartment could seem remote. The Anthropocene remained an abstract intellectual proposition. The coronavirus crisis has stripped even the most sheltered of us of that illusion.

The Anthropocene as "polycrisis" (as Tooze describes it elsewhere in his book). Whether as an addendum to the climate crisis or as a manifestation of that crisis, the pandemic revealed how we can't hide from the consequences of our choices (action or inaction).

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Even though economists widely agree on the basic principles behind carbon taxes and cap-and-trade policies, for example— and argue forcefully in favor of such policies— and even after decades of academic discussion, countless learned policy briefs, and some half-hearted government moves in Europe, Canada, and China, we’re still not paying anything close to an appropriate price for throwing our carbon junk into our air.

These words were published in 2020. Since then, Europe has moved significantly in this direction (carbon pricing) and Canada & China have made moves. The U.S. has this issue on deck, with perhaps as many as 49 senators and the Biden Admin are getting on board. Time to make this happen!

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

There are many who share responsibility without any visible proof of guilt. There are many more who have become guilty without being in the least responsible. Among the responsible in a broader sense must be included all those who continued to be sympathetic to Hitler as long as it was possible, who aided his rise to power, and who applauded him in Germany and in other European countries.

Arendt here refers to Hitler, Germany, and Europe, to whom else m and where else might her observation apply?

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Arendt began by noting that although the two ideas of “liberation” and “freedom” were often confused and conflated, they were not the same. Liberation consisted of a rebellious breaking of shackles, the dream of political upheavals from the dawn of recorded history, and had always been the focus of historians and other intellectuals because all the drama was contained in the fight against tyranny, or what Arendt called all the good stories.

And so what is "freedom." (Stay tuned!)

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

As [Jean] Gebser knew, images and symbols operate at the level of the magical structure, bypassing the critical, reflective mind. The perpetual “now” of the ever-present Internet does not allow for the deep, meditative time in which the mind can focus on values and understand why it thinks as it does. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but without the words to tell you, you may not even know what you are looking at—something all good advertisers know.

As Collingwood argued, without language we have no thoughts. "Thought" is created by and comprised of language. Images and symbols alone appeal to the soul, not the mind.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

The full and precise articulation of the doctrine of infinitely interpenetrated totality (dharmadha-tu) is one of the notable achievements of Mahayana Buddhist thought. It is also a characteristic theme of Greek thought. In fact, the Greeks seem to have been the first thinkers to formulate the concept of infinity except as an indefinite mass, the first to give it mathematical and logical formulations. The concept of interpenetrated infinities, that is, an infinity of separate entities in which each one contains all the others, was first articulated by Anaxagoras, in his conception of matter. Of infinite entities, each is conceived to have in it tiny parts of every other. Each separate thing contains, in a microcosmic form, everything else. Each apparent unit is in fact infinity squared—which is to say infinity to the infinite power.

The ability of the ancient Greeks and Indians (and some others) to develop such deep insights without the benefit of technological science is astounding.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Since its origins, capitalism has been synonymous with Schumpeter’s “gale of creative destruction.” The gale has now morphed into a hurricane that is genuinely creative but also extremely destructive.

Creativity is a Good (see Whitehead & Charles Hartshorne for details), but so are Conservation & Balance. Contemporary capitalism & its resulting consumerism and their thirst for novelty have become like the mischief of the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

Hayek’s brand of antiauthoritarianism was ambivalent about democracy. “Democracy is a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom,” he wrote. “There has often been much more cultural and spiritual freedom under an autocratic rule than under some democracies.” What mattered to Hayek was liberty, and by liberty he meant the rights of an aristocracy against the central government, whatever form that government took.

The Haves always fear democracy and the Have-Nots. And not without some basis in history, but often to excess and therefore working to kill real democracy.

Last Best Hope

George Packer

To believe that Trump showed us who we really are is no different from believing that Obama showed us who we really are. Narcissism is expressed in extremes of self-contempt as well as self-adoration. Both are paralyzing. They tell us more about the mind of the person in front of the mirror than the objective facts of the image in the glass.

As individuals, we are complex & often self-contradictory in our beliefs & actions. How much more so as a nation of individual, self-contradictory selves all given to some measure of narcissism.

The Beginning of Infinity

David Deutsch

In this book I argue that all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations.

An intriguing thought.