Thoughts for the Day: Monday 30 November 2020

 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The financial crisis was actually only one of three social earthquakes that shook the world simultaneously in 2008. Between January and June of that year, as the US sub-prime mortgage crisis was reaching its climax, world energy prices soared— the international price of light crude oil rose more than 60 percent to over $140 a barrel— and the price of grain worldwide shot upwards too, triggering food riots and violence in dozens of poor countries. Few commentators or analysts have noted the extraordinary synchronicity of these three crises; but they were intimately related to each other.

So what is the connection between these events?

[C]ascading failure is an example of contagion. More connectivity enables change in one element to more easily cause change in another, so it’s easier for the pathogen [actual or figurative] to jump between elements; and greater uniformity among the elements makes the pathogen’s effects more consistently harmful. Homer-Dixon, Thomas. Commanding Hope (p. 202). Knopf Canada. Kindle Edition.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Our e-mail messages are stripped of nuance and texture and reduced to Morse-like staccatos of data; we drop punctuation, capitalization, and proper spelling, and we adopt an impoverished symbolism of emoticons.

The Story Factor

Annette Simmons

Values are meaningless without stories to bring them to life and engage us on a personal level.

Ultrasociety

Peter Turchin

An important characteristic of cooperation is that while the benefits are typically shared among all, such public goods are costly. For example, maintaining internal peace and order, something that any decent society must do, requires a lot of work.

Unlimiting Mind

Andrew Olendzki, John Tarrant (Foreword)

“Mindfulness means being present to whatever is happening here and now - when mindfulness is strong, there is no room left in the mind for wanting something else. With less liking and disliking of what arises, there is less pushing and pulling on the world, less defining of the threshold between self and other, resulting in a reduced construction of self. As the influence of self diminishes, suffering diminishes in proportion.”

Thoughts of the Day: Saturday 28 November 2020

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

A more promising method of differentiating would be to distinguish exposition from argument, as a static from a dynamic aspect of thought. The business of St. Thomas himself is not to expound Thomism, but to arrive at it: to build up arguments whose purpose is to criticize other philosophical views and by criticizing them to lead himself and his readers towards what he hopes will be a satisfactory one.

Ever since Pythagoras (or so we are told) invented the word philosophy, in order to express the notion of the philosopher not as one who possesses wisdom but as one who aspires to it, students of philosophy have recognized that the essence of their business lies not in holding this view or that, but in aiming at some view not yet achieved: in the labour and adventure of thinking, not in the results of it. What a genuine philosopher (as distinct from a teacher of philosophy for purposes of examination) tries to express when he writes is the experience he enjoys in the course of this adventure, where theories and systems are only incidents in the journey.

History Man

Fred Inglis

[Quoting R.G. Collingwood] Biography, though it often uses motives of an historical kind by way of embroidery, is in essence a web woven of these two groups of threads, sympathy and malice. Its function is to arouse these feelings in the reader; essentially therefore it is a device for stimulating emotion, and accordingly it falls into the two main divisions of amusement-biography, which is what the circulating libraries so extensively deal in, and magical biography, or the biography of exhortation and moral-pointing, holding up good examples to be followed or bad ones to be eschewed. The biographer’s choice of his materials, though it may be (and ought to be) controlled by other considerations, is determined in the first instance by what I will call their gossip-value. The name is chosen in no derogatory spirit. Human beings, like other animals, take an interest in each other’s affairs which has its roots in various parts of their animal nature, sexual, gregarious, aggressive, acquisitive, and so forth. They take a sympathetic pleasure in thinking that desires in their fellow-creatures that spring from these sources are being satisfied, and a malicious pleasure in thinking that they are being thwarted.

I should add that Inglis goes on to criticize Collingwood's view, nothing several worthwhile examples of biography as history and art, not the least of which is Collingwood's own An Autobiography.

Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Over the course of human evolution, as each group of people became gradually aware of the enormity of its isolation in the cosmos and of the precariousness of its hold on survival, it developed myths and beliefs to transform the random, crushing forces of the universe into manageable, or at least understandable, patterns. One of the major functions of every culture has been to shield its members from chaos, to reassure them of their importance and ultimate success.

Escape From Freedom

Erich Fromm

We believe that the realization of the self is accomplished not only by an act of thinking but also by the realization of man’s total personality, by the active expression of his emotional and intellectual potentialities. These potentialities are present in everybody; they become real only to the extent to which they are expressed. In other words, positive freedom consists in the spontaneous activity of the total, integrated personality.

She

Robert A. Johnson

When a westerner is touched by being in love, now one of the only ways we are visited by the gods anymore, a road of evolution can be traveled that has consciousness as its goal.

On Writing Well

William Zinsser

Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 27 November 2020

 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Combining the positions on the left end of each scale yields a worldview emphasizing moral relativism, the power of circumstances over choice, the essential similarity of all people, responsibility to others, and resistance to authority— a common leftist perspective.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Politicians and commentators often say that we’re all simply going to have to adjust to the “new normal” of a climate-changed world. But there’s no normal anymore, new or otherwise.

New Pathways in Psychology

Colin Wilson

[Alfred] Adler’s view that neurosis springs from feelings of inadequacy, inferiority. But what is more important is that he recognises the vital importance of the human will in mental illness. Freud’s psychology is virtually will-less, like Hume’s; the human will is very small and unimportant compared to the vast forces of the subconscious; curing a patient consists in somehow reconciling him to these forces, persuading him to stop resisting them, attempting to repress them.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

The historical achievement of liberalism is a great one, and even its severest critics would not systematically raze all its monuments. That these great deeds were accomplished by men acting, often, out of self-delusion means only that we are looking at the history of men—the same could be said of any school of thought that led to large actions in the world. One cannot even indulge in “hypothetical history” by saying a different course would have been a better one. This is our history, its good and bad intermixed; we cannot choose another.

Making Make-Believe Real

Garry Wills

There was a deep element of make-believe in such self-conscious adoption of a style. “Courtly love was a social utopia. It was the code word for a new and better society, a society that was unreal and could exist only in the poetic imagination.”

The Caretakers of the Cosmos

Gary Lachman

Meaning perception [from Alfred North Whitehead] is the glue that holds these separate items together to form a whole and allows them to make sense. It is a form of Schwaller de Lubicz’s ‘intelligence of the heart’ and Bergson’s ‘intuition’, which allows us to get into things, to know their ‘insides’.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 25 November 2020

 

Immoderate Greatness

William Ophuls

Will and Ariel Durant echo Machiavelli: “History repeats itself in the large because…man is equipped to respond in stereotyped ways to frequently occurring situations and stimuli like hunger, danger, and sex.”

My review here. 

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Some animals adopt a form of ‘musilanguage’, using intonation, not just body language, to communicate with humans: look at the domestic dog. Amongst one another they communicate preferentially by scent, and body language. But they have achieved awareness of the fact that intonation is an important part of human communication.

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

John J. Mearsheimer

If defense has a clear advantage over offense, and conquest is therefore difficult, great powers will have little incentive to use force to gain power and will concentrate instead on  protecting  what they have. When defense has the advantage, protecting what you have should be a relatively easy task. Alternatively, if offense is easier, states will be sorely tempted to try conquering each other, and there will be a lot of war in the system.

The Caretakers of the Cosmos

Gary Lachman

One of these [ideas about consciousness that are off the beaten scientific track] is the evolution of consciousness, something we touched on in the last chapter. What I mean by the evolution of consciousness has nothing to do with Darwin’s ‘dangerous idea’. I do not mean how consciousness evolved by chance out of ‘un’ or ‘non-consciousness’, or how our chance consciousness evolved, under a variety of environmental pressures, from some dim, vague awareness to our own acute sense of self and the world. As we’ve seen, in these and other mainstream ideas about consciousness, it is ultimately a chance outcome, an epiphenomenon, of some physical or material reality. The evolution of consciousness I am thinking of takes consciousness as fundamental and irreducible and not solely localised inside our heads. Consciousness from this perspective did not emerge out of matter at some time in the past. Consciousness was there to begin with, and it would be more correct from this perspective to say that matter emerged out of it, a point we will return to.

My review here.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 24 November 2020

 

History Man

Fred Inglis

Collingwood’s constitution of scientific history was fourfold: that it asked relevant and exact questions; that it asks these of “determinate men at determinate times”; that it maintains a “criteriological” rationality in its recourse to evidence; that its point is to enlarge humankind’s knowledge of itself by telling it what it has done.

My review here.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

This is how their [Englightenment philosophes] notion of self-expansion – through unlimited growth of production, and the expansion of productive forces – steadily replaced all other ideas of the human good in the eighteenth century; it became the central objective of existence, with corresponding attitudes, norms, values, and a quantitative notion of reality defined by what counts and what does not count.

In this schema, now wholly internalized, the human being used the tools of theoretical and practical reason to expand his capacities; and all his reference points and norms were defined by the imperative of expansion. Progress for him denoted the endless growth of a society whose individuals are free but responsible, egocentric but enlightened.

My review here.

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

The high stimulus society in which we live is represented through advertising as full of vibrancy and vitality, but, as advertisers know only too well, its condition is one of boredom, and the response to boredom. Since the rise of capitalism in the eighteenth century, when according to Patricia Spacks boredom as such began, an ‘appetite for the new and the different, for fresh experience and novel excitements’ has lain at the heart of successful bourgeois society, with its need above all to be getting and spending money.

My review here.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Many resort to diseased methods of coping, not only physical addiction to drugs, alcohol, and tobacco but also psychological addiction to eating, entertainment, gambling, pornography, sex, shopping, and sports.

My review here.

The Age of the Unthinkable

Joshua Cooper Ramo

In sum, this would be systems-style leverage: avoid direct conflict, use the forces already at play, manipulate so quietly as to be unnoticed, know that no effort truly ends. Treat  Middle East peace not as something to be hammered together but — to use Hayek’s idea for economies — as a garden to be tended.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 23 November 2020

 

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

“The laws of complexity,” says James Gleick, “hold universally, caring not at all for the details of a system’s constituent atoms.”

My review here.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

A chaotic system magnifies the effect of small perturbations: as a result, the way the system develops over time is highly sensitive to minute differences in initial conditions, just as Poincaré proposed at the turn of the last century. The further one tries to project the system’s behavior into the future, the harder accurate prediction becomes. But chaos should not be confused with randomness—that is, with events and behavior that have no specific cause. In chaotic systems, the basic processes of cause and effect still operate among the system’s components. But how the interactions of these components unfold over time and what kinds of large-scale behavior these interactions produce are nevertheless, in important respects, unpredictable.

Review in the works.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

But the rationalist theory of causation, however valuable it may be as the manifesto of a particular scientific enterprise, cannot be regarded as an ‘analysis’ of the causal propositions asserted by natural science as it has existed for the last few centuries.

My review here.

Loving What Is

Byron Katie, Stephen Mitchell

You’re either believing your thoughts or questioning them. There’s no other choice.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 22 November 2020

 

The Wedge

Scott Carney, Amelia Boone, and Dave Asprey

Flipping the switch between parasympathetic and sympathetic defines our “state.” Mastering the Wedge puts our thumb on that switch so that we can learn to control the state of our nervous systems, flipping between sympathetic and parasympathetic systems almost at will.

My review here.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

We cannot convincingly proclaim that where we stand is a “vital center.” Our “mainstream” is a sludge. The “consensus” is no longer a matter of compromise but surrender. Our archetypal “self-made man” is not only self-effacing but almost self-obliterating.

My note on this book.

To Move the World

Jeffrey D. Sachs

I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of universal peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal.

My review here.

William Walker Atkinson Premium 7 Book Collection

WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON

Desire is the motivating power behind all actions – it is a natural law of life. Everything from the atom to the monad; from the monad to the insect; from the insect to man; from man to Nature, acts and does things by reason of the power and force of Desire, the Animating Motive. "

How's this compare with the Buddha?

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.

An Autobiography

R. G. Collingwood

There have always been people who saw that the true ‘unit of thought’ was not the proposition but something more complex in which the proposition served as answer to a question. Not only Bacon and Descartes, but Plato and Kant, come to mind as examples. When Plato described thinking as a ‘dialogue of the soul with itself’, he meant (as we know from his own dialogues) that it was a process of question and answer, and that of these two elements the primacy belongs to the questioning activity, the Socrates within us.

My review.

Thoughts of the Day: Saturday 21 November 2020

 

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

So Wordsworth describes at the opening of Book XII of The Prelude how inspiration requires both the effort by which the mind ‘aspires, grasps, struggles, wishes, craves’ and the stillness of the mind which ‘fits him to receive it, when unsought’ – despite the effort, it still only comes unsought.

Compare the above with Hannah Arendt's descriptions of "thinking," such as undertaken by Socrates.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

Plotinus’s level of Soul is in turn divided into two sublevels, one rapt in upward contemplation, the other dynamically involved below. The tradition of this distinction in Greek philosophy goes back from Plotinus through Middle Platonist and Neopythagorean sources to Aristotle’s distinction between active and passive intellect, and ultimately to Plato’s conception of the World Soul in the Timaeus.

Made to Stick

Chip Heath, Dan Heath

As we pored over hundreds of sticky ideas, we saw, over and over, the same six principles at work. PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.” To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize.

And for a deeper dive today:

The ‘corrupting influence of power’ is a commonplace. Power means the exercise of force; it corrupts by undermining a man’s will and reducing him to the level of his own slaves. [Collingwood is writing in the context of Greco-Roman political thought.] A slave-driver, getting out of the habit of explaining to his slaves what he means them to do, gets out of the habit of formulating his intentions even to himself. He can retain that habit only by discussing them on equal terms with his equals.

Plato knew this. He has left us a psychological study of the political slave-driver (in Greek ‘tyrant’) and a psychological study of the slave, the ‘tyrant’s’ subject. The results are the same. The lack of free will, the inability to resist the pressure of emotional forces, which makes the slave a slave, is also what makes the ‘tyrant’ a ‘tyrant’.

To narrate the genesis and career of the ‘tyrant’ (for us to-day, as it was for Plato or the Hellenistic period, an absorbing task) is not exactly the business of political science, because the field of activity in which the ‘tyrant’ distinguishes himself is not, strictly speaking, political. For the time being, let us call it pseudo-political. Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition.