Thoughts 8 Dec 2021

 

Last Best Hope

George Packer

When Trump ran for president, the party of Free America collapsed into its own hollowness. The mass of Republicans were not constitutional originalists, libertarian free traders, members of the Federalist Society, or devout readers of The Wall Street Journal. They wanted government to do things that benefited them—not the undeserving classes below and above them. Party elites were too remote from Trump’s supporters and lulled by their own stale rhetoric to grasp what was happening.

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

Francis helps us to see that an integral ecology calls for openness to categories which transcend the language of mathematics and biology, and take us to the heart of what it is to be human.

American Philosophy

John Kaag

“He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity,” [William] James wrote, “loses the prize as surely as if he had tried and failed.”

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

What you’ve got here, really, are two realities, one of immediate artistic appearance and one of underlying scientific explanation, and they don’t match and they don’t fit and they don’t really have much of anything to do with one another. That’s quite a situation. You might say there’s a little problem here.

"The determining factor in the self is consciousness; i.e., self – consciousness. The more consciousness the more self; the more consciousness the more will, the more will the more self. . . . The self is the conscious synthesis of the limited and the unlimited which is related to itself and the task of which is to become a self, a task which can be realized only in relation to God. To become a self means to become concrete. But to become concrete means to be neither limited nor unlimited, for that which must becomes concrete is a synthesis. Therefore development consists in this: that in the eternalization of the self one escapes the self endlessly and in the temporization of the self one endlessly returns to the self."

Kierkegaard, quoted in Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: Vol. 1 Human Nature.

[T]he nation is a corporate unity held together much more by force and emotion than by mind. Since there can be no ethical action without self-criticism and no self-criticism without the rational capacity for self-transcendence, it is natural that national attitudes can hardly approximate the ethical.

Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 88.

Thoughts 7 Dec. 2021

 

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

[A]s Napoleonic armies battled on the streets of Jena, Hegel completed his first major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, in which he declared that “the Truth is not only the result [of philosophy] . . . the truth is the whole in the process of development.” 

Let us examine that last statement for a moment. Hegel is, for lack of a better word, evolutionizing the idea of philosophical truth. Truth is the whole in the process of development. He is liberating truth from the spell of solidity. Truth is not just found in this insight or that revelation; it is to be found in the very process of one idea giving way to another, and then being transcended by yet another, in the rough-and-tumble struggle of history. Truth is not static, he is saying, it is a process, a developmental unfolding. In order to appreciate any current philosophical idea, we need to understand its tributaries; we need to recognize the developmental process that has given it life. We need to take into account the give and take, the back and forth, the dialectical process, as Hegel calls it, as one stage of understanding gives way to another. “Hegel was the first to recognize that consciousness develops through a series of distinct stages,” writes Steve McIntosh, “[and] among the first to understand that this process of development or ‘becoming’ is the central motif of the universe.”

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

The Constitution of Knowledge relies on independent judgment; cancel culture relies on bullying.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

In analyzing a shock, economists like to disentangle changes in supply from changes in demand. The distinction matters because different causes require different remedies. If production, employment, and income contract because of a supply shock, then what is required to restore economic activity is an adjustment in the way we produce, deliver, and consume goods and services. This is what economists tend to call a “real” adjustment. If the problem is inadequate demand, then the system of production and distribution can remain as it is. What we need to do is to stimulate more spending by loosening budget constraints, for instance, through lower taxes, government spending, or easier credit.

Technopoly

Neil Postman

The fact is, there are very few political, social, and especially personal problems that arise because of insufficient information. Nonetheless, as incomprehensible problems mount, as the concept of progress fades, as meaning itself becomes suspect, the Technopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is yet more information.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

The Greek view of nature, at least that cosmology transmitted from them to later ages, was essentially dramatic. It is not necessarily wrong for this reason: but it was overwhelmingly dramatic. It thus conceived nature as articulated in the way of a work of dramatic art, for the exemplification of general ideas converging to an end. Nature was differentiated so as to provide its proper end for each thing. There was the centre of the universe as the end of motion for those things which are heavy, and the celestial spheres as the end of motion for those things whose natures lead them upwards.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

The direct influence of Greek literature vanished. But the concept of the moral order and of the order of nature had enshrined itself in the Stoic philosophy. For example, Lecky in his History of European Morals tells us ‘Seneca maintains that the Divinity has determined all things by an inexorable law of destiny, which He has decreed, but which He Himself obeys.’ But the most effective way in which the Stoics influenced the mentality of the Middle Ages was by the diffused sense of order which arose from Roman law. Again to quote Lecky, ‘The Roman legislation was in a twofold manner the child of philosophy. It was in the first place formed upon the philosophical model, for, instead of being a mere empirical system adjusted to the existing requirements of society, it laid down abstract principles of right to which it endeavoured to conform; and, in the next place, these principles were borrowed directly from Stoicism.’

Thoughts 6 Dec. 2021

 

The Wedge

Scott Carney

The goal of the Wedge is to separate stimulus from response.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

When an ecosystem functions well, it’s homeostasis; if it’s in decline or in the midst of unsustainable growth (as with cancer), then it’s heading into trouble. The system could end up in a state of constant vigilance and, to use [Justin] Feinstein’s term, become allostatic [attempting to return to a prior state of homeostasis] and never return to normal.

"The economy" (that most dangerous of abstractions) can be seen as a sub-ecosystem. But then like all such systems, it's never static, completely "in balance." And for the last ~200 years or so it's behaved much like a cancer, has it not?

The Wedge

Scott Carney

So if the immune system uses the same chemical hardware that creates feelings in our brains and influences our behavior in the world, then how much of a stretch is it to say that our immune system is conscious? What if instead of assuming that the immune system is just a machine, we give it a chance to have a semblance of cognition? Obviously the immune system can’t have the sort of complex emotions or thoughts that you or I experience, but even a shard of that subjectivity is powerful.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Alas, in 2020, one story about our collective future that’s becoming increasingly ubiquitous— and maybe even appealing to those inclined to resignation— starts with the opening line “we’re doomed” (or, in the vernacular, that we’re “fucked” or “screwed”). I hear this kind of declaration from a substantial and rapidly growing proportion of the students I teach. I respond to these young people by saying, as I say to Ben and Kate, that humanity is in fact doomed only if we collectively choose to be doomed. [My italics.]

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Society therefore needs ingenuity to get ingenuity, which means it is both an input to and output of the economic system. (Surprisingly, this claim often perplexes people. But a moment’s reflection shows that many economic factors are both input and output—for example, physical and human capital.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

Might humans, or intelligent life in whatever form, play that same role in the cosmological, universal evolutionary scheme of development? Might we in some way represent this feedback loop for the universe itself? Could our reflection on the evolutionary process itself be an essential element not only in fulfilling the next stage of our own development but in creating the next novel stage of cosmogenesis? [James N.] Gardner’s hypothesis is one of the most original—and compelling—evolutionary speculations that I have come across in some time.

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.

And this was written before January 6. The "angry mob," encouraged by ambitious politicians and special interests, remains in waiting. The outcome--whether democracy and the rule of law will survive in the U.S.--remains open.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Ian Kershaw, has said, “Hitler was no tyrant imposed on Germany. Though he never attained majority support in free elections, he was legally appointed to power as Reich Chancellor just like his predecessors had been, and became between 1933 and 1940 arguably the most popular head of state in the world.” The historian John Lukacs shares this view: Hitler “may have been the most popular revolutionary leader in the history of the modern world. The emphasis is on the word popular because Hitler belongs to the democratic, not the aristocratic, age of history.”

A reminder: Germany went from a democratic state with a model (in many ways) constitution to one of the worst political regimes in history, all without a coup or violent revolution, as Kershaw notes.

Age of Ambition

Evan Osnos

In 1949 the average life expectancy [in China] was thirty-six, and the literacy rate was 20 percent. By 2012,  life expectancy (2 words) was seventy-five, and the literacy rate was above 90 percent.

These figures go a long way in explaining why China is feeling its oats these days.

Bonds That Make Us Free

C. Terry Warner

It is a key sign of danger when we expect that others should change in response to our change. This signals a lapse on our part, back into self-absorption. Why so? Because the moment we begin to feel that we need others to change before we can be free of our troubled, afflicting thoughts and feelings, we have either lost the joy we felt when we experienced our change of heart or else we never experienced that change at all. We’re back in our self-absorbed condition or we never got out of it. Anyone free of that condition enjoys an emotional freedom that no external circumstance can destroy—including the reactions of other people.

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.

Thoughts 4 Dec. 2021

 

Ultrasociety

Peter Turchin

War between societies can be a very bloody affair, with many soldiers and civilians killed. But if it’s inconclusive, it will not be a force of cultural group selection. This is a very important point: what makes war creative is not how many people are killed. What matters is the effect on cultural evolution. War is an evolutionary force of creation only when it results in some cultural traits outcompeting others.

"War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothin'." Well, not so fast. War spurs a lot of change (at a high cost, no doubt). It's also a source of evolutionary competition in the cultural realm--multi-level group selection.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

With the notable exception of [Clare] Graves, developmental psychologists have not attempted to tie-in the psychological stages they recognize with the socio-cultural stages of human history. Although philosopher Jürgen Habermas has noted the “homologies” that can be found between historical and psychological worldviews, the intriguing parallels between personal and cultural development have not been carefully explored outside the confines of integral philosophy.

But inside integral philosophy, this topic is widely (and well) explored.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

“Bacon was a bad scientist,” the sociologist of science Joseph Ben-David has argued, “and in many details he was not a very good philosopher either. There was little connection between the rise of new astronomy and mathematical physics and Baconian principles; experimentation without theory and collection of empirical knowledge had produced few scientific results.” Yet in his own era Bacon was revered and his work was widely influential (and today he is still adjudged a seminal figure in the emergence of science).

Dark Star Rising

Gary Lachman

The desire Hitler and Mussolini met in millions of people was a simple one: to be free of the burden of giving meaning to their lives themselves, of fulfilling their hunger for “struggle and self-sacrifice,” for some greater purpose than the satisfaction of their own appetites, through their own efforts.

Revolutionaries of the Soul

Gary Lachman

And John Eccles, who won the Nobel Prize in 1963 for his work on the brain’s synapses, agreed with Swedenborg that the mind could not be reduced to some epiphenomenon of gray matter and argued, along with the philosopher Karl Popper, in favor of the irreducible reality of the Self. All these men were rigorous scientists, yet they all discovered that the most important things about human existence—consciousness, the mind, the self, free will—eluded even the most methodical investigation.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

[Australian evolutionary theorist John] Stewart’s young mind was filled with significant twentieth-century figures like philosopher Karl Popper, spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff, and also an individual who seems to inevitably surface as a formative influence in the lives of so many Evolutionaries—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Karl Popper again!

Last Best Hope

George Packer

In almost every way [Horace] Greeley’s life defied the categories in which we’re used to thinking. He was a kind of American and a kind of journalist who no longer make sense. He combined elements of all four narratives [Packer's four group narratives in contemporary American society] and moved through their spheres without encountering high walls.

Thoughts 3 December 2021

 

Diagnosis & prescription

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Developmental politics acknowledges that cultural growth exhibits many varied characteristics. Viewed from certain perspectives this growth appears not as a sequential trajectory of step-wise advance, but rather as a “sprawling bush” of development that includes numerous branches, contradictory countercurrents, and even forces of decay that work against positive development or pervert it into trends that result in social regression. But notwithstanding the chaotic and contingent nature of cultural evolution, the historical record clearly shows how both modernism and postmodernism have emerged in opposition to what came before.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

When faced with a positive-positive value polarity, the best way to advance the values of our preferred pole is to actually affirm the foundational values of the pole we oppose.

A Secret History of Christianity

Mark Vernon

Since the work of Immanuel Kant, the imaginal has taken center stage in theories of perception. It’s like a pair of glasses, manufactured by the mind that brings what we see into focus. The great philosopher of the Enlightenment argued that we don’t know “the thing in itself” but perceive what our minds can represent – trees, sunshine, soil, showers.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

If psychology is really the science which tells us how we think, it is beyond doubt that what I have called metaphysics falls within its province. And there I would gladly leave it if once I could satisfy myself that this phrase, even if not a complete account of psychology, is a correct one so far as it goes. But on this point I ask to be fully satisfied. The work of metaphysics is too important, too intimately bound up with the welfare of science and civilization (for civilization is only our name for systematic and orderly thinking about what are called ‘practical’ questions), to be handed over to any claimant on the strength of his own unsupported assertion that he is its rightful owner.

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

Because we [in contemporary America (?)] do not look back, we can remain innocent — and stupid. Whereas in Italy, it seems, you have looked back for centuries, are always looking back and therefore never innocent, but instead cynical.

The backward look reveals the patterns that show themselves repeatedly and indicate archetypal realities. It is not history that governs the future but the projections forward of these archetypal patterns. Thus when Futurology reports hope, progress, and greening, and supports these optimistic prognostics with advances in space science, biotechnology, lowered rates of infant mortality, more telephones, automobiles, and refrigerators, longer life expectancy, new ecological awareness — we believe we see reality. We imagine these are the determining facts.

But the reality lies in the eyes that see, not in what it sees. For precisely, the eye of the futurologist, informed by another archetypal vision, looks into the future and sees doom and gloom, destruction of habitat and species, floods and famines, civil insurrections, terrorism and plagues — a world, described by the great Saturnine pessimist Thomas Hobbes as a war of “all against all,” and the life of man as “nasty, brutish, and short.” Hillman, James. Philosophical Intimations (Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman Book 8) . Spring Publications. Kindle Edition.

Flashpoints

George Friedman

When two nations share economic interests  there is always concern that one side will take advantage of its position or withdraw from the relationship to work with someone else, or fail to keep its agreements. The more interdependent countries are, the more they try to ensure that their partners remain committed to the relationship and don’t, in an extreme scenario, seek to blackmail them. This distrust mounts and nations look for more effective levers to use, sometimes ending in war. Interdependence can create security—or insecurity and war.

The Art of Loving

Erich Fromm

It is hardly necessary to stress the fact that the ability to love as an act of giving depends on the character development of the person. It presupposes the attainment of a predominantly productive orientation; in this orientation, the person has overcome dependency, narcissistic omnipotence, the wish to exploit others, or to hoard, and has acquired faith in his own human powers, courage to rely on his powers in the attainment of his goals. To the degree that these qualities are lacking, he is afraid of giving himself—hence of loving.

Thoughts 2 Dec. 2021

 

Last Best Hope

George Packer

Technological prowess and individual sacrifice were no match for national incoherence. The virus exploited every fault line, every division of class, race, geography, and politics, every declining social and economic indicator, every institutional weakness, every blind spot and bias. The failure began at the top, where it was least forgivable and most devastating, but it extended to the whole society.

An Essay on Philosophical Method

R. G. Collingwood, ed. by James Connelly & Giuseppina D'Oro

We speak well, in prose, only in order to say what we mean: the matter is prior to the form. This priority, no doubt, is rather logical than temporal. The matter does not exist as a naked but fully formed thought in our minds before we fit it with a garment of words. It is only in some dark and half-conscious way that we know our thoughts before we come to express them. Yet in that obscure fashion they are already within us ; and, rising into full consciousness as we find the words to utter them, it is they that determine the words, not vice versa.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

At this time in history at least, God is too big and social justice is too small to serve as a solidarity-restoring ideal.

Doom

Niall Ferguson

The Great Depression, which is generally dated from the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, was a consequence of structural imbalances in the world economy, a rigid system of fixed exchange rates, beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism, and errors of monetary and fiscal policy.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

In reviewing this rapid sketch of the influence of mathematics throughout European history, we see that it had two great periods of direct influence upon general thought, both periods lasting for about two hundred years. The first period was that stretching from Pythagoras to Plato, when the possibility of the science, and its general character, first dawned upon the Grecian thinkers. The second period comprised the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of our modern epoch.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

“Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial, really,” I expound. “It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test’s always your own serenity. If you don’t have this when you start and maintain it while you’re working you’re likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.”