Thoughts 24 Jan. 2022

 

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Even though the coevolution of consciousness and culture cannot be conflated with biological evolution, these distinct evolutionary domains are nevertheless united by a structural sequence of emergence wherein something more keeps coming from something less—a sequence that can be traced all the way back to the beginning of time and space in the primordial emergence of the big bang.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

I hope that in what follows the reader may come to see grounds for a view that the world is a seamless, always self-creating, self-individuating, and simultaneously self-uniting, flow that is only truly knowable as it comes to be known.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Once again, the whole illuminates the parts as much as the parts can illuminate the whole. To the left hemisphere, you find the truth about something by building it up from bits. But, as the right hemisphere is aware, to understand it you need to experience it as a whole, since the whole reveals as much about the nature of the parts as the parts do about the nature of the whole.

Last Best Hope

George Packer

But in identity politics, equality refers to groups, not individuals. All disparities between groups result from systems of oppression and demand collective action for redress, often amounting to new forms of discrimination—in other words, equity.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The French thinker Bertrand De Jouvenel refreshed for latter-day readers the nineteenth-century complaint that by isolating people from each other and weakening the middle-ground of civil associations, liberalism overempowered the central state. The philosopher-historian R. G. Collingwood pled on conservatism’s behalf the cause of historical knowledge. History was vital, he believed, to understanding politics, which liberalism, in the Utilitarian spirit of cost-benefit calculation, was squashing into economics and social observation.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

The fact that the numbers are a purely decorative addition to an older style of argument shows that applying mathematical probability to legal reasoning will not be as straightforward as it appears.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

So we must ask if LCHF/ketogenic eating is justifiable if it means increasing your “climate footprint” compared to alternatives. Given what may be a trade-off between humanity’s future and your own health (and that of your children), how do you decide?

N.B. Having investigated this issue, I'm not at all convinced that there is a real trade-off.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

It’s also critically important to understand the basis of the faith upholding these arguments. The authorities who make them—whether they are the experts convened for U.S. News & World Report or the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s dietary guidelines or the Katzes and Bittmans of the world or the well-meaning friends (“dude!”) who advise us to ease off the bacon—derive their opinions not from experience but from theoretical concepts about a healthy diet.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Since the beginning of this century, the growth of meaninglessness has been accompanied by loss of common sense.

Thoughts 23 Jan 2022

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

But truth, like reality, is an encounter. It is in the nature of an encounter that more than one element is involved. And what I find in whatever-it-is does not pre-exist my encounter with it. There must be a potential, true enough, but it is actualised only in my encounter with it. The encounter is genuinely creative. The whole universe is constantly creative – but not out of nowhere.

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

[T]his culture of care must include not just those of us alive today, but also future generations—a point the pope makes more than once, in both economic and moral terms. Our current economic models literally dis-count the future, insofar as damage in the future is counted as costing less than damage today, but what sort of a calculus is it that concludes that our needs are greater than our children’s? The notion of the common good, the pope concludes, also extends to future generations: “We can no longer speak of sustainable development apart from intergenerational solidarity …" [Naomi Oreskes writing in the Introduction.]

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

In general, the net effect of tax and welfare systems in all countries is to reduce inequality at least to some degree. However, welfare can also serve a conservative function. Indeed, the historic purpose of the welfare state as it emerged in Bismarckian Germany in the 1880s was precisely that—to preserve the social status hierarchy across the vicissitudes of sickness, old age, and, eventually, unemployment.34 That was the principal logic of spending in 2020. The crisis affected the entire economy. No one was to blame. Everyone should be made whole. So the range of potential claimants on state support exploded.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Our minds don’t have direct control over every autonomic process. We can’t just think the word “adrenaline” and trigger the hormonal release we want. But we can put ourselves in situations that trigger that same predictable hormonal release. When we choose stressors, we choose our biological reactions. The same goes for the immune system: We can’t think it into action, but we can certainly change the environment that the immune system responds and reacts to.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

The meta-programming circuit — known as the “soul” in Gnosticism, the “no-mind” (wu-hsin) in China, the White Light of the Void in Tibetan Buddhism, Shiva-darshana in Hinduism, the True Intellectual Center in Gurdjieff — simply represents the brain becoming aware of itself.

Time and Narrative, Volume 3

Paul Ricoeur, trans. by Kathleen Blamey, and David Pellauer

[F]rom an Augustinian point of view, the future and the past exist only in relation to a present, that is, to an instant indicated by the utterance designating it. The past is before and the future after only with respect to this present possessing the relation of self-reference, attested to by the very act of uttering something.

Immoderate Greatness

William Ophuls

Unfortunately, although naturally clever, human beings are not innately wise, especially in crowds.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

Emerson begins his essay “Character” with four paragraphs on morals, three of them opening with that very word. “The will constitutes the man,” he writes. In this Emerson is little different from the most influential of all Victorian philosophers, John Stuart Mill: “A character is a completely fashioned will.”

Thoughts 22 Jan. 22

 

Last Best Hope

George Packer

More than anything, Trump was a demagogue—a thoroughly American type, familiar to us from novels like All the King’s Men and movies like Citizen Kane. “Trump is a creature native to our own style of government and therefore much more difficult to protect ourselves against,” the Yale political theorist Bryan Garsten wrote. “He is a demagogue, a popular leader who feeds on the hatred of elites that grows naturally in democratic soil.” A demagogue can become a tyrant, but it’s the people who put him there—the people who want to be fed fantasies and lies, the people who set themselves apart from and above their compatriots. So the question is not who Trump was, but who we are

The Enigma of Reason

Hugo Mercier

Facts, as we are using the term, are true propositions, abstract objects without causal powers. It is not, strictly speaking, the fact that some plums are ripe that causes them to fall from the tree; it is their ripeness itself or, to be more precise, it is the chemical and physical changes that define ripeness. Objective reasons, being facts, are themselves without causal powers. From our empirical point of view, it doesn’t matter whether objective reasons exist in the world independently of human interests and what well-defined criterion of objectivity they meet, if any. If we talk about objective reasons at all, it is because they are represented both in what people think and in what they say and, unlike facts, representations of facts do have causal powers.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

At one point I was going to call this book There Are No Things. I changed my mind when I saw that it might align me with a nihilistic trend in post-modernism that I deplore. It also gave the impression that I was arguing for ‘truth-as-correctness’ rather than ‘truth-as-unconcealing’. My aim is to clear away the assumptions that cloud our vision: and the assumption of a materialist world composed of ‘things’ is the greatest impediment we face.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

...ἡμεῖς δέ – τίνες δὲ ἡμεῖς; But we – who are we? —Plotinus

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Morgenthau may have been the philosopher of power politics, but he was also at pains to explain what power was not. The crucial point, often forgotten even by his own Realist disciples, was that violence was not political power. The threat of force might be necessary in international relations, but its use signaled the failure of political power and its displacement by military power, which was a very different thing.

Very near the thinking of Morgenthau's friend, Hannah Arendt.

Thoughts 21 Jan. 22

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

An algorithm is what the left hemisphere wants; the recognition that it’s got to be free of any algorithm, yet not at all random, is characteristic of the understanding of the right hemisphere. We can specify what is not jazz, but not what is. Our knowledge of anything unique is similarly apophatic.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Just as ‘and’ is not merely additive, ‘not’ is not merely negative. Both are creative. Indeed resistance – ‘not-ness’ – is an absolute necessity for creation, another apparent paradox that will become clearer as this book unfolds.

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

This is what is known as the ’âlam al-mithâl, or, as Corbin calls it, the mundus imaginalis, or ‘Imaginal World’. As Corbin writes, this is ‘a very precise order of reality, which corresponds to a precise mode of perception’. This ‘order of reality’ and ‘mode of perception’ is based on a ‘visionary spiritual experience’ that Suhrawardi believed was ‘as fully relevant as the observations of Hipparchus and Ptolemy are considered to be relevant to astronomy’.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

As for the power of reason, it is the servant of what today we call confirmation bias, an idea Montaigne impressively anticipated. “Men’s opinions are accepted in the train of ancient beliefs, by authority and on credit, as if they were religion and law. They accept as by rote what is commonly held about it.… On the contrary, everyone competes in plastering up and confirming this accepted belief, with all the power of their reason, which is a supple tool, pliable, and adaptable to any form. Thus the world is filled and soaked with twaddle and lies.”

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

For sure, self-censorship is part of living together (we call it “courtesy”)—but not when it impedes honest conversation and criticism in university intellectual life, where honest conversation and criticism are the whole point of being there.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

“Demoralization,” I tell Theaetetus, “denies your agency. It makes you feel helpless. Don’t let them do that. You are not helpless.”

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The error is to think of radicals as political types or of radicalism as a set of ideas. The terms “radical” and “moderate” are not substantive but adverbial. Radicalism and moderation bear on pace, posture, and style, not content. The difference turns on how aims are held and acted on: rigidly or flexibly, zealously or temperately, in attacking thrusts or defensively dug in, bent on annihilating opposition or allowing for compromise, unable to live without conquest or able to survive defeat and failure.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

This old standard argument of the opponents of democracy was supported there by an unusually strong tradition of political passivity and by a no less unusually strong tradition of work and pure production. Taken together, these traditions made appear quite plausible a curious equating of purely technical capability with purely human activity, the latter of which has always had to do with questions of right and wrong. Once the moral basis of the knowledge of right and wrong, unarticulated as it was, began to crumble, the next step was to measure social and political actions by technical and work-oriented standards that were inherently alien to these larger spheres of human activity.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

Thinking, no doubt, plays an enormous role in every scientific enterprise, but it is the role of a means to an end; the end is determined by a decision about what is worthwhile knowing, and this decision cannot be scientific.

Be Here Now

Ram Dass

“Early in the journey   you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HERE and you will arrive NOW...so you stop asking.”

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

One reason I and others promote the idea that eating saturated fat from animal products is most likely benign is that we’ve been consuming these fats as a species for as long as humans have been a species. The evidence isn’t compelling enough to convince us that this assumption is likely to be wrong. We may or may not have been consuming as much of these saturated fats, but we can presume we are genetically adapted to eating them.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

Where Heidegger places his Dasein-redeeming confidence in primal anxiety, Benjamin places it in the rapture of different kinds of artificial paradise; the wild roar of rush-hour traffic replaces the experience of the storm high in the Black Forest; aimless flâneuring replaces the ski slope down to the abyss; absorption in outward things replaces the retreat into the interior; apparently random distraction occupies the space of contemplative concentration; the deracinated, disenfranchised masses of the international proletariat replace those people rooted in their homeland . . . Both Benjamin and Heidegger longed for revolutionary change, in everything that they were and had.

Thoughts 19 Jan. 2022

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

The flow of the universe is always creative, though it has order, and is not random or chaotic; the world is always a matter of responsiveness, though it is equally not a free-for-all. It is a process of creative collaboration, of co-creation.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Whatever-it-is-that-exists-apart-from-ourselves creates us, but we also take part in creating whatever-it-is. By this I do not only mean the common sense view that I have an impact on the world, as the world has an impact on me: that I leave my footprints. That would lead immediately to the reflection that I am very small in relation to the world, and so effectively my impact is so small that for all intents and purposes it can be ignored. There is, it might seem, an inexpressibly vast universe and an inexpressibly tiny individual consciousness (I’d say that this is the left hemisphere’s attempt to represent spatially and quantify something that is experiential and developed in time, but I hope that will be more comprehensible when we come to the discussion of time and space in Part III). Such a reflection seems to posit an objective position – the view outside of history or geography, time or space – a view from nowhere, in which all can be measured and compared. It implies a Measurer of all the measurers, measuring the other scales and putting each part in its place according to its overall worth. But though that cannot be, the alternative is not just a merely subjective position, either: this very polarity – subjective/ objective – is misleading. In the fado, in the raga, in jazz, it is what it is because of me, and I am what I am because of it. I will have much more to say about the crucial issue of the subjective/ objective ‘divide’ throughout this book.

Four Quartets

T. S. Eliot

A people without history

Is not redeemed from time,

for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

[Don Beck of Spiral Dynamics fame] realized a surprising truth—one that might have seemed nonsensical to the uninitiated but represented a radically different perspective on the political tensions of the country [South Africa]. “Oh my God,” he realized. “This is not about race.” To most South Africans, the societal fault lines were clear. It was black versus white, African versus European. But for Beck, it wasn’t so simple. This struggle really masked a deeper conflict, one between value systems.

Doom

Niall Ferguson

Xi’s panopticon is actually more akin to the dystopia imagined in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1920s novel We.

Fear Itself

Ira Katznelson

IN FACT, the entire New Deal period, lasting until the inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, reflects an unremitting sense of fragility. From the Great Depression to the blood-filled battlefields in Korea, persistent, nearly unremitting anxiety conditioned the era’s “normal politics” of voting, public opinion, pressure groups, federalism, and the separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government.

The Science of Likability

Patrick King

When people subconsciously begin to associate you with positive moods and emotions, you are going to be the bell that makes people smile without realizing why.