Thoughts 23 Dec. 2021

 

The Uninhabitable Earth

David Wallace-Wells

In 1965, Adlai Stevenson managed to give a more poetic treatment, in an address before the United Nations Social and Economic Council in Geneva:

We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

If the transhumanist [e.g., Ray Kurzweil] represent one extreme in the diversity of evolutionary visions in this book—the transcend-at-all-costs, techno-positive, biology-is-for-wimps, let’s-engineer-the-universe sense of optimism—then [Thomas] Berry represents perhaps the other side of the picture, a corrective argument for a radically biocentric approach to the future, a deconstruction of human arrogance, and a deeper embrace of our immanent spiritual connection with the natural world.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

In the last few years, the conventional wisdom has emerged that eating animal products results in a greater contribution to greenhouse warming of the planet than does eating plants. Because we worry with good reason that global warming is a major threat to planetary health and humanity’s future, we believe we should do whatever we can personally to mitigate it. This has led newspapers to publish analyses of “how to shop, cook and eat in a warming world,” as The New York Times did in April 2019, and to suggest that the fewer animal products we consume (and certainly the less beef, lamb, and dairy, as these seemingly have the greatest climate footprints), the healthier the planet will be.

This may indeed be true. While acknowledging that livestock can be raised in ways that are relatively climate friendly and much of it is (in the United States, for instance, more, say, than in Brazil), the implication is that the most climate-friendly eating pattern is one that omits these foods—a vegan diet—and that that’s how we should eat. For those who don’t think they can become a vegan, the Times suggests, then “another approach would be to simply eat less meat and dairy, and more protein-rich plants like beans, legumes, nuts and grains.”

The problem, of course, is that this thinking once again assumes that the conventional healthy diet—or even an unconventional and arguably unnatural diet, per Geoffrey Rose’s thinking, like the vegan diet—is indeed healthy for all of us. It builds on a foundation of the bad science in nutrition research of the past fifty years, and it shows little concern for the absence of clinical trials that might actually test it. It’s also the lean person’s perspective. If those of us who are predisposed to be insulin resistant, obese, and/or diabetic in the modern food environment get fat or stay fat eating beans, legumes, and grains, we have a conflict that must be resolved.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

“Censorship has always been on the side of authoritarianism, conformity, ignorance, and the status quo,” write Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman in their book Free Speech on Campus, “and advocates for free speech have always been on the side of making societies more democratic, more diverse, more tolerant, more educated, and more open to progress.”

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.

Love and Saint Augustine

Hannah Arendt, Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott (Editor), Judith Chelius Stark (Editor)

“It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy (beatum esse velle), our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.”

Thoughts 22 Dec 2021

 

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

[Henry, if I'm recalling correctly] Ford was channeling the attitude of [Herbert] Hoover’s recently reassigned Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, who had advocated a response to the Depression that amounted to financial nihilism: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate,” he told Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness from the system…people will work harder, live a more moral life.” That had been [Frederick] Hayek’s position in his attack on A Treatise on Money. A bust was the inevitable consequence of a reckless boom, and any government sugarcoating of the necessary losses would only make matters worse.

To wit, burden everyone with a depression to purge the system; pre-Keynesian economics performing the work of 18th-century physicians: don't have a cure? Then bleed the patient! No wonder Hoover (who didn't buy into Mellon's extremism) didn't win re-election with advisors like Mellon! 

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Feedback can be positive or negative. By “positive” feedback, complexity theorists don’t mean that the feedback is always a “good” thing. Instead, they mean that the feedback reinforces or amplifies the initial change, and in the process it creates a virtuous or vicious circle.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

“Briefly, what I am proposing,” [Clare] Graves writes in the article that first introduced [Don] Beck to his work, “is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as man’s existential problems change.”

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

A long process of trial and error has weeded out the bad innovations, leaving behind what has stood the test of time. The result may not be perfect, but it is probably the best that can be accomplished with the materials at hand. Evolution or ecology should not be used to justify wealth and privilege or inherited evils, but it does imply a Burkean stance toward change. There is a kind of wisdom contained in the system—biological or social—that we would be wise to study and understand before we launch “reforms” based on our “progressive” ideas.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Even today, now that it has achieved stability and strength (if on the bodies of millions of victims), it is not clear that the leaders in Beijing accept the Westphalian concept of a community of nations in which each country is left alone to pursue its own national interest as long as it does not upset the world order by threatening others.

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

Caponigri, Time and Idea, 131: “ ‘Ricorsi’ appears in Vico, in the first instance, as a methodological notion. It designates a methodological device for making effective his discovery of the primacy of poetry and, with this, of the genuine time-structure and movement of history. It consists in the employment of the categories of poetic wisdom for the interpretation of the cultural and social structures of post-poetic times. By this employment there is determined abstract contemporaneity between time-form structures.” In other words: archetypal persons transcend historical limitations even as they manifest themselves in historical time. These poetic figures are the ultimate categories for understanding human existence.

Thoughts 21 Dec. 2021

 

2021 publication

Doom

Niall Ferguson

But to turn the story of COVID-19 into a morality play—The Populists’ Nemesis—is to miss the more profound systemic and societal failure that occurred, in a way that future historians will surely see as facile.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

These ills of government are an American, not a democratic, disease. Many other democracies handled this pandemic effectively, better than any dictatorship.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

As the Christian scholar N. T. Wright explains, worldviews “are like the foundations of a house: vital, but invisible. They are that through which, not at which, a society or an individual normally looks.”

Time Warrior

Steve Chandler

Process goals encouraged me to enjoy the present moment. They are brief and achievable. I set up process goals and fun tasks and projects so that I never had to worry about future “outcome” goals. The best futures get created in the present moment.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

The statement “To travel is better than to arrive” comes back to mind again and stays. We have been traveling and now we will arrive. For me a period of depression comes on when I reach a temporary goal like this and have to reorient myself toward another one.

Compare Pirsig's comment with the immediately preceding quote from Steve Chandler.

Last Best Hope

George Packer

But if I were to put it [the current sorry state of American politics] in a single sentence, I would say: Inequality undermined the common faith that Americans need to create a successful multi-everything democracy. The postindustrial era has concentrated political and economic power in just a few hands and denied ordinary people control of their own lives. Overwhelmed by unfathomably large forces, Americans can no longer think and act as fellow citizens. We look for answers in private panaceas, fixed ideas, group identities, dreams of the future and the past, saviors of different types—everywhere but in ourselves. When none of these sets us free, we turn against one another.

Last Best Hope

George Packer

Call its ["Progressives," "Social Justice Warriors"] narrative Just America. It’s another rebellion from below. As Real America [~the Trump crowd] breaks down the ossified libertarianism of Free America [libertarian, pro-business], Just America assaults the complacent meritocracy of Smart America [high educated]. It does the hard, essential thing that the other three narratives avoid, that white Americans have avoided throughout our history. It forces us to see the straight line that runs from slavery and segregation to the second-class life so many Black Americans live today—the betrayal of equality that has always been the country’s great moral shame, the dark heart of its social problems.

After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre

The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protestors can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestors can never lose an argument either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors’ premises. The effects of incommensurability ensure that protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and that its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this.

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.