Saturday, October 31, 2020

Thoughts of the Day: Saturday 31 October 2020 (Happy Halloween!)

 



For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.


Studies of food webs or trade networks, electrical systems and stock markets, find that as they become more densely linked they also become less resilient; networks, after all, propagate and even amplify disturbances. Worse, the more efficient these networks are, the faster they spread those dangers.

If we assume that what we see of the world is limited by our understanding of space and time, and that these limits are not necessarily fixed, we can use our existing perceptions as starting points for deeper, more inclusive ones.

Neither capitalist indust-reality nor socialist indust-reality have been able to give humanity what most of us really want: liberty and justice, freedom and the abolition of poverty, continued growth and continued security. In looking at capitalism vs. socialism, we are always confronted with a dilemma, not a choice.

[T]here is, in the nature of sovereign power, an impatience of control, that disposes those who are invested with the exercise of it, to look with an evil eye upon all external attempts to restrain or direct its operations. From this spirit it happens, that in every political association which is formed upon the principle of uniting in a common interest a number of lesser sovereignties, there will be found a kind of eccentric tendency in the subordinate or inferior orbs, by the operation of which there will be a perpetual effort in each to fly off from the common centre. This tendency is not difficult to be accounted for. It has its origin in the love of power. Power controlled or abridged is almost always the rival and enemy of that power by which it is controlled or abridged. This simple proposition will teach us how little reason there is to expect, that the persons intrusted with the administration of the affairs of the particular members of a confederacy will at all times be ready, with perfect good-humor, and an unbiased regard to the public weal, to execute the resolutions or decrees of the general authority. The reverse of this results from the constitution of human nature. Hamilton, Madison, & Jay: The Federalist Papers (Optimized for Kindle) (Kindle Locations 1680-1689). Kindle Edition (Federalist No. 15, Hamilton).

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 28 October 2020

 


The Buddha taught a way—that is, a method of investigation, not a set of beliefs—that leads to ultimate truth, a truth beyond words.
 Without goals, without some purposeful anticipation, we live, Frankl said, only a 'provisional existence', a kind of marking time which is really a death in life.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954
The life of peoples, according to Montesquieu, is ruled by laws and customs; the two are distinguished in that “laws govern the actions of the citizen and customs govern the actions of man” (L’Esprit des Lois, Book XIX, ch. 16). Laws establish the realm of public political life, and customs establish the realm of society. The downfall of nations begins with the undermining of lawfulness, whether the laws are abused by the government in power, or the authority of their source becomes doubtful and questionable. In both instances, laws are no longer held valid. The result is that the nation, together with its “belief” in its own laws, loses its capacity for responsible political action; the people cease to be citizens in the full sense of the word.
Arendt, Hannah. Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (p. 315). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Thoughts for the Day: 27 October 2020

 



If you want to be persuasive and influential, then passion is going to be one of the great keys to getting everyone on board, motivated, and actively seeing to the work that you need them to do to help build your inspirational vision.

What every literature teacher wants is for students to experience the meaning—and also experience the sensory effects of the words in their connotations and music. This out loud approach is simple and it gets me further than I’ve been able to get with more traditional approaches. (Traditional? What could be more traditional than asking students to read literary texts out loud?)

Nature gave us the ability to heal ourselves. Conscious breathing and  environmental  conditioning are two tools that everyone can use to control their immune system, better their moods, and increase their energy. I believe that anyone can tap into these unconscious processes and eventually control their autonomic nervous system.

“...how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes...” Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers.”

Monday, October 26, 2020

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 26 October 2020

 


“Climate change is obviously real, and byproducts of our economy have had a role in this global warming. Republicans by denying this have compounded the problem, and lost our descendants hundreds of fellow species, and decades of work. Now it’s time to do something about it, and I’m the one with the will to do it. We’re going to need to work at this, it needs to become a big part of the national project, the focus of our economy. In that sense it is actually an incredible opportunity for new industries. We’re on the verge of a truly life-affirming and sustainable global economy, based on justice and nurturing the biosphere, rather than strip-mining and fouling it. I’m ready to lead the way in starting to treat this planet like our home.”
[The quote above was published in 2005. It's from the second of three books in Robinson's "Science in the Capital" trilogy. Isn't it horribly sad that this quote--by a fictional politician portrayed in the book-- remains relevant today, almost aspirational?]

[M]y own utopian vision—“a more experienced and wiser savage” living in a “Bali with electronics”—is just that: a utopia. However useful as a thought experiment, any attempt to rationally construct a better future disregards the messy way in which history has been made in the past and will almost certainly be made in the future.


It was as necessary that Christ should be rejected as that he should rise again on the third day. For his message was the death-warrant of the religious consciousness itself, and all that was strongest and most vital in the religious consciousness rose up against it to destroy it. The religious consciousness in its explicit form is simply the opposition between man and God, an opposition perpetually resolved in the actuality of worship and perpetually renewed as the intermittent act of worship ceases. The Christian gospel announced the ending of that opposition once for all, not by the repetition of acts of worship, by the blood of bulls and goats, but by the very act of God which was at the same time the death of God. The one atoning sacrifice of Christ swept away temple and priests, ritual and oblation and prayer and praise, and left nothing but a sense that the end of all things was at hand and a new world about to appear in which the first things should have passed away.
[In the quote above I hear echoes of Rene Girard. Am I imagining things?]

Isn’t it possible that humanity exists under multiple laws and demands, including accidents? And that our lives may serve many imperatives, some of them inscrutable and even painful? Don’t we, like all creatures, exist to fertilize, feed, and facilitate an unimaginably vast scale of creation, on which we have little perspective?

I call this the three-axes model of political communication. A progressive will communicate along the oppressor-oppressed axis, framing issues in terms of the (P) dichotomy. A conservative will communicate along the civilization-barbarism axis, framing issues in terms of the (C) dichotomy. A libertarian will communicate along the liberty-co

Sunday, October 25, 2020

Thoughts fo r the Day: Sunday 25 October 2020

 



But in speaking as well as in writing, the choice of every word is not only an esthetic or a technical but a moral choice.

An upsurge of irrationality is a mortal threat to democratic polity. Political truth is always biased to some extent, but there is a profound and crucial difference between limited rationality and complete irrationality, relative objectivity and pure fantasy, demonstrable facts and blatant lies. A sane information environment is a precondition for a workable democracy. Once reality has been hijacked, there can be no reasonable basis for either voting or legislating.

Beethoven, to cite him one more time, said “Anybody who understands my music will never be unhappy again.” That is because his music is the song of the Sixth Circuit, of Gaia, the Life Spirit, becoming conscious of Herself, of Her powers, of Her own capacities for infinite progress.

Content in both history and fiction comes from what is necessary to the story and ‘the judge of necessity’, as Collingwood says (IH 246), is the imagination itself.

The problem posed by narrativity is, in fact, both more simple and more complicated than the one posed by lyric poetry. More simple, because the world, here, is apprehended from the angle of human praxis rather than from that of cosmic pathos. What is resignified by narrative is what was already presignified at the level of human acting.

The acorn theory states that each of us is singled out. The very fact of eachness presumes a unique acorn that characterizes each person. Sun or shade, each has a character.

Friday, October 23, 2020

Thoughts of the Day: Friday 23 October 2020

 



This “state in which the mind continues calm and strong, undisturbed by … any … emotion” Democritus called athambia (inability to be astonished or frightened) and, according to Stobaeus (DK 68A67), ataraxia (inability to become agitated or upset), the term which descended through the two Democritean lineages—the dogmatic or Epicurean and the critical or Pyrrhonist. It is related closely to the apatheia (nonemotionality) taught by the Cynics and seems substantially the same as the condition which the Prajñaparamita literature attributes to one who knows emptiness: One who is convinced of the emptiness of everything is not captivated by worldly dharmas, because he does not lean on them.

An increasing demand for an increasingly free flow of information is yet another way in which markets fragment and disperse power.
It is doubtful if any large society has ever succumbed to a single-event catastrophe. And the cause of understanding is not advanced by the suggestion that collapse is caused by accidents. `Accidents,' notes R. M. Adams, `happen to all societies at all stages of their history...' Too many societies encounter accidents without collapsing.
Weak circulatory muscles are a side effect of living in a very narrow band of temperature variation.


Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Thoughts of the Day: Wednesday 21 October 2020

 



The individual life was seen in the past as more than just a line leading to – what? Its shape had the qualities of a circle: in my end is my beginning, and in my beginning is my end. Like many complex and apparently paradoxical dispositions to the world, this belief is better expressed in music than in words.

No matter what you want to achieve, playing offense begins by recognizing the two basic lessons from chapter 1: Your supply of willpower is limited, and you use the same resource for many different things. Each day may start off with your stock of willpower fresh and renewed, at least if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and a healthy breakfast. But then all day things chip and nibble away at it. The complexity of modern life makes it difficult to keep in mind that all these seemingly unrelated chores and demands draw on the same account inside of you.

Once upon a time, every literate person was versed in the techniques Ed was about to teach me.  Memory training was considered a centerpiece of classical education in the language arts, on par with grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Students were taught not just what to remember, but how to remember it. In a world with few books, memory was sacrosanct.
And a guest deeper dive from Alan Watts:

“Well now really when we go back into falling in love. And say, it’s crazy. Falling. You see? We don’t say “rising into love”. There is in it, the idea of the fall. And it goes back, as a matter of fact, to extremely fundamental things. That there is always a curious tie at some point between the fall and the creation. Taking this ghastly risk is the condition of there being life. You see, for all life is an act of faith and an act of gamble. The moment you take a step, you do so on an act of faith because you don’t really know that the floor’s not going to give under your feet. The moment you take a journey, what an act of faith. The moment that you enter into any kind of human undertaking in relationship, what an act of faith. See, you’ve given yourself up. But this is the most powerful thing that can be done: surrender. See. And love is an act of surrender to another person. Total abandonment. I give myself to you. Take me. Do anything you like with me. See. So, that’s quite mad because you see, it’s letting things get out of control. All sensible people keep things in control. Watch it, watch it, watch it. Security? Vigilance Watch it. Police? Watch it. Guards? Watch it. Who’s going to watch the guards? So, actually, therefore, the course of wisdom, what is really sensible, is to let go, is to commit oneself, to give oneself up and that’s quite mad. So we come to the strange conclusion that in madness lies sanity.”

— Alan Watts

Monday, October 19, 2020

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 19 October 2020

 

R.G. Collingwood circa 1939


His [Collingwood's] second thought is much more radical. The historical reconstruction of the past is itself nothing other than the work of the historical imagination. For the historian there are no data on which to hang imaginative reappraisal. The assumption that historians work from fixed, stable and settled information, as from tablets set in stone, serves only to confine and distort history which leads Collingwood to the view that far from it being the case that it is past fact which controls the imagination it is actually the imagination which controls what is to count as past fact.


Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.
We do not “create reality.” There clearly is a reality “outside” us. What we do create is our representation of it, and it is to this we are responsible.
“For this is what it means to be a king: to be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and when there’s hunger in the land (as must be now and then in bad years) to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land.”

Sunday, October 18, 2020

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 18 October 2020

 



[Ernest] Becker’s book is really an elaboration on the psychology of self-esteem; death is the final blow to that and this is why we deny it. It also relates very closely to the idea of the Right Man. As mentioned, the Right Man is an idea developed by the science-fiction writer A. E. van Vogt. It describes a type of person—there are Right Women too—who under no circumstances can accept that he is wrong. His need for self-esteem is so great and his grasp of it is so tenuous that the slightest contradiction sends him into a rage. His belief in the absolute correctness of all of his actions is so unshakable—like the pope, he enjoys infallibility—that he treats any question of it as a personal betrayal.
SNG: Rings a bell? P.S. My review of this book.

Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation. --Rabindranath Tagore

As the definite article indicates in the French Revolution, historians do not proceed from the classificatory term toward the general law but from the classificatory term toward the explanation of differences.
And by reflecting on it we can perhaps detect one more characteristic which art must have, if it is to forgo both, entertainment-value and magical value, and draw a subject-matter from its audience themselves. It must be prophetic.
Real conversations require utter concentration, not texting on the side when you are in a café with someone. That is because travel is linear—it is about one place or singular perception or book at a time, each one etched deep into memory, so as to change your life forever.



Saturday, October 17, 2020

Thoughts of the Day: Saturday 17 October 2020

 

                                            Fukuyama; more than just "The End of History"


Democracies exist and survive only because people want and are willing to fight for them; leadership, organizational ability, and oftentimes sheer good luck are needed for them to prevail.

Lister had said to his friend, “My dear Pasteur, every great benefit to the human race in every field of its activity has been bitterly fought in every stage leading up to its final acceptance.”
Young people, he says, are impatient, changeable, and appetitive—“and of the bodily appetites they are especially attentive to that connected with sex and have no control over it.”
Glucose consumption will make your pancreas release more insulin and make you gain weight, while fructose consumption will drive the accumulation of liver fat, causing insulin resistance, leading to chronic metabolic disease.
Professor Howard Fulweiler, in his essay, "The [Other] Missing Link: Owen Barfield and the Scientific Imagination," delivered at the 1983 Los Angeles MLA seminar on Owen Barfield, opens with a reference to Thomas Berger's novel, Little Big Man, in which the old Indian, Lodge Skins, tells his adopted grandson "that the Indians believe everything in the world is alive, while the white men think everything is dead." Had Barfield been there, he would have said that such mechanical thinking on the part of the white men was new, the result of something called the Scientific Revolution, which began a few centuries ago and which has given rise to philosophical and scientific hypotheses which separated mind from matter, man from nature, and doomed the reality of the spirit-world.
For each of these four kinds of mental balance, we will identify the “middle way” of homeostasis as the freedom from three kinds of imbalance: deficit, hyperactivity, and dysfunction.
We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.
As William James and Henri Bergson would argue around the same time, without the selective activity of the mind there would be no “world,” only a formless chaos.