Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 31 March 2021

 

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

When, as an historian, I relive in my own mind a certain experience of Julius Caesar, I am not simply being Julius Caesar; on the contrary, I am myself, and know that I am myself; the way in which I incorporate Julius Caesar’s experience in my own personality is not by confusing myself with him, but by distinguishing myself from him and at the same time making his experience my own. The living past of history lives in the present; but it lives not in the immediate experience of the present, but only in the self-knowledge of the present. This Dilthey has overlooked; he thinks it lives in the present’s immediate experience of itself; but that immediate experience is not historical thought.

The Road to Unfreedom

Timothy Snyder

Concepts from the three interflowing currents of Russian fascism—Ilyin’s Christian totalitarianism, Gumilev’s Eurasianism, and Dugin’s “Eurasian” Nazism—appeared in Putin’s discourse as he sought an exit from the dilemma he created for his country in 2012.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

Etienne Gilson, asked to write his autobiography, responded: “A man of seventy-five should have many things to say about his past, but . . . if he has lived only as a philosopher, he immediately realizes that he has no past.”

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

In post-1945 France, the choices offered to conservative voters were normality (growing prosperity in a consumer society), pride (national grandeur as France decolonized and Europeanized), or rage (the frustrations of the hard right).

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

[Edward] Gibbon speaks for the mentality still characteristic of the social sciences: “As soon as I understood the principles, I relinquished for ever the pursuit of Mathematics; nor can I lament that I desisted before my mind was hardened by the habit of rigid demonstration so destructive of the finer feelings of moral evidence which must however determine the actions and opinions of our lives.” Modern defenses of the rationality of historical inferences continue to rely on an objective concept of probability, but do not demand it be quantified.

The notion of probability found in the evaluation of historical evidence pervades Jane Austen’s novels on persuasion, sense, and prejudice. The crucial chapter 36 of Pride and Prejudice, in which Elizabeth Bennet is forced to make humiliating changes to her beliefs in response to the new evidence contained in Mr. Darcy’s letter, is a tour de force of the careful reappraisal of a belief system that has been based on a large body of evidence. As Elizabeth “weighed every circumstance with what she meant to be impartiality—deliberated on the probability of each statement . . . reconsidering events, determining probabilities,” she came to see that her previous opinions of Darcy’s and Wickham’s characters were based on vanity and were now insupportable. Austen goes through each piece of evidence carefully, explaining its relation to the whole (“How could she deny that credit to his assertions, in one instance, which she had been obliged to give in the other?—He declared himself to have been totally unsuspicious of her sister’s attachment;—and she could not help remembering what Charlotte’s opinion had always been.—Neither could she deny the justice of his description of Jane”).

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Another reason to believe that the problem with discovering mathematical probability lies in the mathematics is the parallel between the history of probability and that of two other abstract and loosely mathematical concepts, continuity and perspective.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 30 March 2021

 

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

Keynes was one of the best writers who ever referred to himself as an economist. His career as a popular journalist demonstrated that he knew how to make himself understood, and he had come to the central ideas of The General Theory years before its publication. He had plenty of time to make it presentable. The book is difficult and obscure because he wanted it to be. And its sheer ugliness created a small industry of interpreters, some of whom enjoyed distinguished careers and won Nobel Prizes just by simplifying or interpreting sections of the book.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

“Denmark is far from a socialist, planned economy. Denmark is a market economy,” Lars Løkke Rasmussen explained in 2015. The facts bear him out. Denmark ranks higher than the United States on the free-market Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom (eighth for Denmark, seventeenth for the US). In general, Denmark, like most Northern European countries, has an open, low-tariff, competitive economy. In some ways it better incentivizes the accumulation of capital than America does, with lower taxes on capital gains and inheritance (the estate tax is 15% in Denmark and zero in Sweden and Norway).

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Unlike the conservative authoritarian, the fascist, as earlier noted, aims to stifle all independence and diversity. The authoritarian relies for control on fear and acquiescence; the fascist, on fear and popular mobilization. Although fascism won power through the ballot with the aid of irresolute constitutional authorities, it embraced illegality and violence as routine and acceptable methods in politics. Nazism in Germany added the toxic element of anti-Semitism.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Though some who loved Goldwater were bigots, Goldwater himself was less bigot than libertarian, approving in old age, for example, gay marriage. He nevertheless united the various streams of the hard right into a force with which Nixon and Ford had to deal and which won the Republican Party after 1980.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

“The enemy of conservatism,” Samuel Huntington wrote, “is not liberalism, but radicalism.”

The Human Condition

Hannah Arendt

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.

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.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 29 March 2021

 

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

Not a pathogen, not genocide, not a war; simply human action and inaction, their own action and inaction, killing the most vulnerable. And more would surely follow, because they all were vulnerable in the end.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

[Fear researcher] Huberman decides to paraphrase the great horror writer Stephen King: Fear has a lot to do with time frames. Before the event, a person experiences the dread of anticipation; during the event, there’s terror when they’re helpless in the moment; and after it’s over, a person remembers the experience as horror.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

As Heraclitus said: “Underworld souls perceive by smelling.” Twenty-five hundred years later, we say that the person who can get down has a quick apprehension—“street smarts”—and senses reality behind the front. Ancient descriptions of the underworld maintain that in this realm nothing solid exists, only images, phantoms, ghosts, smoke, mist, shades, dreams. We cannot see it; we can only see into it, with suspicions, hunches, intuitions, feelings. It is a two-dimensional realm with no more—and no less—substance than words, feelings, thoughts, reflections.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

We call consciousness (literally, as we have seen, “to know with myself) the curious fact that in a sense I also am for myself, though I hardly appear to me, which indicates that the Socratic “being one” is not so unproblematic as it seems; I am not only for others but for myself, and in this latter case, I clearly am not just one. A difference is inserted into my Oneness.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 28 March 2021

 

The Caretakers of the Cosmos

Gary Lachman

As Kathleen Raine put it: ‘the imagination does not see different things, it sees things differently.’

NL IV: “Feeling”

"We study history in order to see more clearly the situation in which we are called on to act. Hence the plane on which, ultimately, all problems arise is the plane of ‘real’ life: that to which they are referred for their solution is history." ---R.G. Collingwood

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

First, we must look at Collingwood’s claim that what is re-enacted is past thought. Why thought? Collingwood writes that ‘to know another’s act of thought involves repeating it for oneself’ (IH 288). For Collingwood the act of thought is not solely the thought as it actually happens.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Re-enactment, in other words, includes counter-factual discussion as well as the delineation of what actually occurred.

“Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.”
— Karl Popper, one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century

%Tim Ferris

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

People are all for freedom until it provokes insecurity and disorder. Then they begin to long for security and order at all costs, and this is exactly what the would-be tyrant(s) seem to offer, often accompanied by promises to restore past greatness or crush ancient enemies.

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.

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 (2 words) 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: Saturday 27 March 2021

 

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Save when the economic system is threatened with collapse, American Democrats repeatedly prove wary of Keynesian, welfarist, or social-democratic policies, misleadingly called “socialist.” In the absence of effective party-political or intellectual opposition from the left, partisan argument is being reshaped by a fight among conservatives for control of their tradition.

The War of Art

Steven Pressfield

Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. Resistance is the enemy within.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Totalitarian government is unprecedented because it defies comparison.

Why Read Hannah Arendt Now?

Richard J. Bernstein

“The first loss which the rightless suffered was the loss of their homes, and this meant the loss of the entire social texture into which they were born and in which they established for themselves a distinct place in the world” --Hannah Arendt

Breath

James Nestor

By day, we unconsciously attempt to open our obstructed airways by sloping our shoulders, craning our necks forward, and tilting our heads up. “Think of someone who is unconscious and about to receive CPR,” Mike said. The first thing a medic does is tilt the head back to open the throat. We’ve adopted this CPR posture all the time.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 26 March 2021

 

2021 publication from the outstanding science journalist

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

In 1952, while acknowledging he had no meaningful evidence to support his proposition, Ancel Keys suggested Americans should eat one-third less fat than they were at the time if they wanted to avoid heart disease. In 1970, still without hard clinical trial evidence, the American Heart Association recommended low-fat diets for everyone in America literally old enough to walk.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

[Ernst] Cassirer wanted to make a clear profession of faith, a philosophical celebration of the origin of the Renaissance as a milestone in self-liberation and the reshaping of the world. The essential impulses of this immense event were overshadowed, from the seventeenth century onward, by the abstraction-fixated, anti-corporeal, consciousness-obsessed modern age of René Descartes and his methodical successors—with profound consequences well into the philosophy of the 1920s.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

WHAT MADE WITTGENSTEIN’S TREATISE [Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus] so incredibly difficult for its first readers (and would continue to do so for decades after) was his decision to express his thoughts through two modes of language that are so different as to seem mutually exclusive. One is the language of mathematical logic, with its entirely abstract symbols, the other a poetic language rich in imagery, concepts, allegory, and paradoxical aphorism.

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

Modern Monetary Theory was in some ways a re-introduction of Keynesian economics into the climate crisis. Its foundational axiom was that the economy works for humans, not humans for the economy; this implied that full employment should be the policy goal of the governments that made and enforced the economic laws. So a job guarantee (JG) was central to MMT’s ideas of good governance. Anyone who wanted a job could get one from the government, “the employer of last resort,” and all these public workers were to be paid a living wage, which would have the effect of raising the private wage floor also to that level, in order to remain competitive for workers.

The Consolations of Philosophy

Alain De Botton

We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 25 March 2021

 

Lila

Robert M. Pirsig

There’s this pseudo-science myth that when you’re ‘objective’ you just disappear from the face of the earth and see everything undistorted, as it really is, like God from heaven. But that’s rubbish. When a person’s objective his attitude is remote. He gets a sort of stony, distant look on his face.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) epitomized the British right’s chary accommodation to liberal modernity. A Romantic “Young England” Tory, he began as an opponent of suffrage extension and a defender of established institutions—landed property, English church, crown, old universities, and the Lords—which embodied in his mind not vested interests but conservative ideals of loyalty, deference, and faith. He ended as a pragmatic manager-tactician largely reconciled to mass democracy, social reform, and the upper classes’ loss of cultural privileges.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Whenever an event occurs that is great enough to illuminate its own past, history comes into being. Only then does the chaotic maze of past happenings emerge as a story which can be told, because it has a beginning and an end.

Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt

Violence is traditionally the ultima ratio in relationships between nations and the most disgraceful of domestic actions, being always considered the outstanding characteristic of tyranny. (The few attempts to save violence from disgrace, chiefly by Machiavelli and Hobbes, are of great relevance for the problem of power and quite illuminative of the early confusion of power with violence, but they exerted remarkably little influence on the tradition of political thought prior to our own time.)