Thoughts 20 Dec. 2021

 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Economic development as we know it started with Europe’s conquest of the New World, a bonanza of found wealth. Before the conquest, European societies were politically, economically, and socially closed. But once flooded by a surge of new energy from the Americas, they began to open and develop. All the philosophies, institutions, and values characteristic of modern life, above all liberal democracy, slowly emerged. Over time, as the New World bonanza was supplemented and then supplanted by fossil fuels, economic and political development proceeded in tandem to transform the world and to create the luxuries and freedoms we enjoy today. With a return of ecological scarcity, however, what abundance has given will be taken away—to what extent and how rapidly remains to be seen, but we can hardly expect liberal democratic institutions fostered by abundance and predicated on abundance to survive in their current form.

Good Calories, Bad Calories

Gary Taubes

The science of epidemiology evolved to make sense of infectious diseases, not common chronic diseases like heart disease. Though the tools of epidemiology—comparisons of populations with and without the disease—had proved effective in establishing that a disease such as cholera is caused by the presence of micro-organisms in contaminated water, as the British physician John Snow demonstrated in 1854, it is a much more complicated endeavor to employ those same tools to elucidate the subtler causes of chronic disease. They can certainly contribute to the case against the most conspicuous determinants of noninfectious diseases—that cigarettes cause lung cancer, for example.

Still one of my favorite science books.

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.

Following the "wolves" metaphor, part of what I understand to be one of the lethal attributes of the (at least the original) COVID virus is the "storm" of antibodies it triggers. The wolves go too wild, in a manner of speaking. N.B. Here, Carney is referring to autoimmune diseases.

In Europe's Shadow

Robert D. Kaplan

EASTER 2013 IN BUCHAREST also illuminated the work of Patrick Leigh Fermor, that craftsman of irreducible godlike essences whose every sentence belongs in a time capsule—to call him a mere travel writer is to diminish him.

I was tipped off to Patrick Leigh Fermor at the Jaipur Literature Festival (thank you, William Dalrymple). Having read Fermor's work, and having lived in Romania, I heartily concur with Kaplan's appraisal. Great writing!

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

The wealth of religion is a pearl of great price hidden in a field; it is wheat growing among tares. You cannot have the glory and comfort of religion without its superstition, its magic, its brutal hatreds and slavish fears. In the highest and sternest religions these elements are kept in check, but no more. They are always present at the back of the mind, always ready to break out and devastate human life. Religion is always looking forward to the day when it shall be set free from this body of death which, as its own shadow, it perpetually carries with it. That freedom is nothing but the self-revelation of thought, the discovery by the mind of its own nature as a thinking mind.

However abstract and barren may be the first-fruits of this discovery, the discovery itself is an incalculable advance in the history of man. As art and religion lift man above the level of the beasts, science lifts the civilized man above the level of the savage. The material utility of science, its service in feeding and clothing and sheltering us, carrying us from place to place and providing us with comforts, is the least part of its importance. Its real gift is simply the end of dreaming and the promise of a waking life. It sweeps aside with a ruthless hand all mythology, all symbols that are heavy with unrealized meanings and dark with the terrors of dreamland, and bids the mind face the world’s mystery armed with nothing but its five senses and the sling of its wit. What that means, no one knows who has not long and carefully weighed the debt which he owes to the scientific consciousness. But when that is done, he will hardly shrink from praising the founders of science for the gift of spiritual freedom even in the words of the ancient poet.

The Kennedy Imprisonment

Garry Wills

America, we like to think, has been specially “graced.” Set apart. The first child of the Enlightenment, it was “declared” to others as the harbinger of a new order. Yet this rationally founded nation was also deeply devotional, a redeemer nation. Reason and religion, which should have contended near our cradle, conspired instead. If we kept ourself isolated from others, it was to avoid contamination. If we engaged others, we did so from above, to bring light into their darkness. To deal with others as equals would betray our mission.

Thoughts 15 Dec. 2021

 

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

If a society relied excessively on financial markets to allocate resources, develop research, and improve industry, Keynes believed, it was destined for underperformance, instability, and unemployment. He had designed a theory and a policy agenda in which financial markets were subjugated to the authority of the state, believing the coordinated action of a government was capable of meeting the investment needs of society which financial markets could only secure through fleeting accidents.

Have financial markets become any more successful (in terms of any reasonable understanding of the common good) than they were in Keynes's day?

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

The financial run for safety happened very fast. It made sense individually. But when implemented simultaneously by the men and women who manage tens of trillions of dollars worldwide, it threatened total systemic collapse and forced massive intervention by the state.

Lots of individually rational decisions can result in collective failure (irrationality).

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

The Romantics seeded a whole tradition of Anglo-American criticism in the nineteenth century to which the conservative Dickens belongs as much as Thoreau, who famously asserted in his section on ‘Economy’ in Walden (1854) that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’. This largely moral critique of modernity was broadened by writers in countries playing ‘catch-up’ with the Atlantic West. The Russians, in particular, stressed social facts: the ill-directed energy and posturing of political elites, and the loss of a sense of community and personal identity.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

One does not first acquire a language and then use it. To possess it and to use it are the same. We only come to possess it by repeatedly and progressively attempting to use it.

The Future of History

John Lukacs

“The law is a coarse net; and truth is a slippery fish.” Yes: but a net, however coarse, is better than no net at all. Yet the purpose of law has little (and sometimes nothing) to do with truth. It is the establishment of justice—or, more precisely, the protection against injustice. And justice is of a lower order than is truth (and untruth is lower than injustice. All of Christ’s parables taught people to follow truth, not justice). The administration of justice, even with the best of intentions for correcting injustice, may often have to overlook or even ignore untruths during the judicial process.

Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt

Among Arendt’s chief concerns in Between Past and Future is to convey a concrete sense of the high price traditional thought will pay when a conception of human affairs, of political reality, which no longer conforms to our experience is relinquished. The traditional conception, which lasted for more than two thousand years, derives, as we have seen, from Plato, to whom Arendt refers more than any other thinker in this book, and nowhere more decisively than in her reading of his familiar cave allegory. The heart of her reading is Plato’s justification of the rule of philosopy, “the domination of human affairs by something outside its own realm.”

From the Introduction written by Jerome Kohn.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

In one passage [Buddha] rejects the premise that what is useful is true, what is useless, false. There are statements, he says, which are true but useless. Again, four categories are implied: (1) true and useful, (2) true and useless (like knowing how many insects there are in the world, to use a later Buddhist example), (3) false and useful, (4) false and useless. In this formulation he said that he himself bothered to teach only what was both true and useful.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

In the rationalist and absolutist tradition self-canceling or uroboric formulas were excluded from the discourse about experience, where they were seen as invalid by contradiction, and were applied only in discourse about the transcendent and absolute One. The Neopythagorean Moderatus, for example, used the formula “It is neither this nor that” to describe the transcendent One; Plotinus said of the One, “It is the not-this.” In this tradition it was considered that Plato had shown (primarily, but not exclusively, in the Parmenides) that language must lapse into paradox when it approaches ultimate reality.

Crafting Hypnotic Spells! - Casebook Confessions of a Rogue Hypnotist

The Rogue Hypnotist

Confusion is hypnotic because it creates absorption: that's it! If you are confused you are temporarily trying to understand something – this absorbs your attention.

Thoughts 14 Dec. 2021

 

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

The principle of the subordination of private property to the universal destination of goods, and thus the right of everyone to their use, is a golden rule of social conduct and “the first principle of the whole ethical and social order.” The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property. Saint John Paul II forcefully reaffirmed this teaching, stating that “God gave the earth to the whole human race for the sustenance of all its members, without excluding or favouring anyone.”

OMG! This guy must be kidding. Questioning the sanctity and inviolability of private property? Un-American! [#irong, #sarcasm].

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

Seen globally, the story of the last decades is one of considerable advance in reducing death from diseases of poverty—communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases.

Thank you public health!

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

“The choice is not between legality and illegality, but between political wisdom and political stupidity.”

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Take China, the fastest-growing economy on the planet over the last twenty years—indeed the fastest-growing major economy in history. That country followed its own particular mix of capitalism, state planning, openness, and dictatorship. Its economy grew, but so did its political controls. (The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof described it as “Market-Leninism.”)

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Steven Pinker

Across time and space, the more peaceable societies also tend to be richer, healthier, better educated, better governed, more respectful of their women, and more likely to engage in trade.

Thoughts 13 Dec. 2021

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Our proclivity to evolve our culture (and hence our consciousness) can thus be seen as an essential part of our “nature.” We are deeply cultural creatures and as we evolve our civilization, we arguably evolve our essential human nature along with it. While consciousness can sometimes regress when subjected to severe survival pressures, or when civilizing cultural restraints become removed, the character of most twenty-first century Americans has clearly grown beyond our original “state of nature.”

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

Writing of the “magical” effects of Nazi mass propaganda, Morris Berman remarks, “Once we recognize that the human being has five (or more) bodies, and that these can get activated in such a way as to generate spiritual or psychic energy (‘consciousness’) that can actually float . . . , then continuity via the history of ideas becomes unnecessary. . . . Consciousness is a transmittable entity . . . and . . . an entire culture can eventually undergo very serious changes as the result of the slow accumulation of enough psychic or somatic changes on an invisible level” (my italics).

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Modern liberalism—what the philosopher Karl Popper and subsequently others have called the open society—is defined by three social systems: economic, political, and epistemic. They handle social decisionmaking about resources, power, and truth. The epistemic system is often analogized to the economic system, through the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas. But the parallels between the epistemic and political systems, although less well developed, are in important respects more revealing.

After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre

Certainly ‘moral’ is the etymological descendant of ‘moralis’. But ‘moralis’, like its Greek predecessor ‘êthikos’—Cicero invented ‘moralis’ to translate the Greek word in the De Fato—means ‘pertaining to character’ where a man’s character is nothing other than his set dispositions to behave systematically in one way rather than another, to lead one particular kind of life.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, “Thou art that,” which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened. 

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

The Greek genius was philosophical, lucid and logical. The men of this group were primarily asking philosophical questions. What is the substratum of nature? Is it fire, or earth, or water, or some combination of any two, or of all three? Or is it a mere flux, not reducible to some static material? Mathematics interested them mightily. They invented its generality, analysed its premises, and made notable discoveries of theorems by a rigid adherence to deductive reasoning. Their minds were infected with an eager generality. They demanded clear, bold ideas, and strict reasoning from them. All this was excellent; it was genius; it was ideal preparatory work. But it was not science as we understand it. The patience of minute observation was not nearly so prominent. Their genius was not so apt for the state of imaginative muddled suspense which precedes successful inductive generalisation. They were lucid thinkers and bold reasoners.

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

Fame is a social phenomenon; ad gloriam non est satis unius opinio (as Seneca remarked wisely and pedantically), “for fame the opinion of one is not enough,” although it is enough for friendship and love. And no society can properly function without classification, without an arrangement of things and men in classes and prescribed types. This necessary classification is the basis for all social discrimination, and discrimination, present opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, is no less a constituent element of the social realm than equality is a constituent element of the political.

Philosophy

Kevin Perry

“To live a self-depriving life committed to a fixed view of the good is to live with “resentment,” which disguises the fact that one is too weak to fully express one’s creative urges. This urge to create is what Nietzsche called the Will to Power. The healthiest life is one that does not hold back or fear the freedom of living without ultimate truths. A person capable of living such a life is what Nietzsche called the Übermensch or “higher man.”

Thoughts 12 Dec. 2021

 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

That people can be persuaded by factual or scientific arguments to change their minds is demonstrably false. Confirmation bias—we take in information that supports our existing beliefs and mostly ignore or reject the rest—is only one of the many tricks the human mind plays on itself. Hence we respond to new facts in less-than-rational and often sub-optimal ways.

Apologies to the Grandchldren

William Ophuls

Statistics that purport to show that humankind has never had it so good are not untrue. However, they ignore not just the reality of ecological overshoot but also the political reality identified by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan: a society cannot long exist in peace without a “Sovereign,” a governing entity that lays down and enforces laws designed to keep citizens on their best behavior and working together for the greater good.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

No ship is unsinkable, and long experience has taught prudent mariners to provision lifeboats and practice abandoning ship against the eventuality of shipwreck. We should do no less by bequeathing posterity the tools it will need to erect a new civilization from the ruins of the old.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[T]echnologies are problem-solving tools that we create using energy and information to exploit properties of our physical environment.

Unlimited Memory

Kevin Horsley

Most things in life can be solved with more responsibility and awareness.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

And for all the failings of Western medicine, it offers evolutionarily unthinkable powers to treat acute illnesses.

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

Reinhold Niebuhr

The social and historical optimism of democratic life, for instance, represents the typical illusion of an advancing class which mistook its own progress for the progress of the world.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

The universality of relation (which is perhaps the only positive ontological doctrine taught by either Sextus or Nagarjuna), combined with the denial of real-being to relatives, effectively disqualifies human experience from any metaphysically definitive verbal description whatever—for the term “unreal” as well as for the term “real.”

Thoughts 11 Dec. 2021

 

The Uninhabitable Earth

David Wallace-Wells

Climate change will accelerate two trends already undermining that promise of growth: first, by producing a global economic stagnation that will play, in some areas, like a breathtaking and permanent recession; and second, by punishing the poor much more dramatically than the rich, both globally and within particular polities, showcasing an increasingly stark income inequality, unconscionable already to more and more.

Think of the of how this is playing out.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

As a child, Keynes celebrated the British Empire as a humaynitarian, democratic force in world affairs. When the Great War and the Paris Peace Conference taught him an uglier truth, he began an intellectual project to create a new global order that would fulfill the ideals of his youth, hoping to transform an international system founded on predation into a scheme of justice, stability, and aesthetic brilliance—without resorting to war. If nineteenth-century empire couldn’t do it, Keynes would devise a system that would.

Can Keynes's dream be realized in light of what Wallace-Wells argues in the preceding paragraph? I doubt it. Cf. William Ophuls.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Each time society, through unemployment, frustrates the small man in his normal functioning and normal self-respect, it trains him for that last stage in which he will willingly undertake any function, even that of hangman.

Consider Arendt's contention in light of what Wallace-Wells said & Carter on Keynes above. This bodes trouble ahead.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

While there are many examples of the kind of creative leaps [Howard] Bloom described, consciousness certainly qualifies as Exhibit A on the how-the-heck-did-evolution-come-up-with-that? list. You don’t have to spend too much time at conferences where people are trying to explain human consciousness before you understand the appeal of the “God created it” point of view.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

The reality is that science does not yield one simple answer, especially not with a new phenomenon like the coronavirus.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Factory farms are also ground zero for new, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, as animals are bombarded with antibiotics that kill most bacteria but leave those that survive highly potent. Johns Hopkins professor Robert Lawrence calls antibiotic-resistant bacteria “the biggest human health risk of factory farms.”

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

The prophecy of Francis Bacon has now been fulfilled; and man, who at times dreamt of himself as a little lower than the angels, has submitted to become the servant and the minister of nature.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Nixon campaigned from the right but governed (with a Democratic Congress) from the center. His administration brought in affirmative action in federal hiring, big increases in spending and borrowing, wage and price controls, a dollar devaluation, détente with Soviet Union, and the opening of China, as well as disengagement from Vietnam, however grudging and brutal.