Thoughts for the Day: 30 June 2021

 

An outstanding & much-needed work: Read it!

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

All three of the great liberal social systems—economic, political, epistemic—are traceable to breakthroughs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All were pioneered by men who followed each other’s writings and doings and who sometimes knew each other personally. They and their works were flawed with the inequities and blind spots of their eras (one of which is reflected in the fact that all of them were men).

N.B. This book is a new one on the list--and I haven't even finished it yet. But it's a terrific book and one that really goes to the heart of much of our current economic, political, and epistemic malfunctions. Spoiler alert: three of the leading "men" behind "the great liberal systems" are John Locke, Adam Smith, and James Madison, while Socrates/Plato, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and Charles Sanders Pierce get well-deserved shout-outs also.

Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

Neil Postman

When one has knowledge, one knows how to make sense of information, knows how to relate information to one’s life, and, especially, knows when information is irrelevant.

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

Mark Twain said, “Education is mainly what we have unlearned.” Yoda implored, “You must unlearn what you have learned.”

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

While cows and sheep are indeed methane producers, the methane emissions from the animals (5 percent) turns out to be a pittance compared to the rest of agriculture (10 percent), and compared to industrial methane production (35 percent) and the transportation industry (50 percent). And the climate change impact of the animals is completely dwarfed by the nitrous oxide production resulting from synthetic fertilizer sprayed on all those plant-based products throughout the Midwest grain belt.

N.B. I believe that these figures are a bit out of sync with the most recent figures in the U.S. Livestock per the EPA accounts for less than 4% of emissions and that includes a 2% contribution from cattle.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

If imagination were sufficiently described . . . as a form of experience which presents the real and the unreal in a kind of undistinguished amalgam or solution from which, later, the work of intellect is to precipitate or crystallize the truth, art as imagination would have a genuine and important function in human life; a function analogous to that whereby a scientist envisages the various possible hypotheses which later experiment and observation will enable him to reject or raise to the level of a theory. The business of art, on this view, would be to construct possible worlds, some of which, later on, thought will find real or action will make real.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

Anarchists were not always responsible for this unprecedented carnage across Europe prior to the First World War, even if it was inspired by anarchist techniques. The violence was aimed at different political ends. But it was inspired by the belief – fundamental to much modern terrorism – that assaults on symbols of political and social order, and the self-sacrifice of individuals, had a propaganda value that far exceeded any immediate political ends.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

In this ‘monstrous tragi-comic scene’, as Edmund Burke warned, ‘the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror.’

The Way of Zen

Alan W. Watts

Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 29 June 2021

 

The Soul's Code

James Hillman

Absolute certainty, utter conviction—these, then, are signs of the demonic.

. . . .

We begin to see how power corrupts as the guiding whisper becomes a demonic voice obliterating all others. The seed comes with sure and uncanny knowledge. But while a god is omniscient, a human becomes a know-it-all, and so Hitler had no use for exchange with others. There was nothing they could teach him.

. . . .

To show this omniscience he [Hitler] memorized masses of facts—locations of regiments and reserves, displacement and armature of ships, kinds of vehicles—all of which he used to overpower his questioners and embarrass his commanders. This information “proved” his transcendence and disguised his lack of thought and reflection and his inability to hold a conversation.The demonic does not engage; rather, it smothers with details and jargon any possibility of depth.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Beyond underlining the critical importance of Eros for the future of civilization, this metaphor (along with the marriage of the Virgin and the Dynamo in the previous chapter) contains an implicit politics. Being a loving spouse implies caring, respect, mutuality, reciprocity, and interdependence.

Time and Narrative, Volume 1

Paul Ricoeur

As a narrative, all history has to do with “some major achievement or failure of men living and working together, in societies or nations or any other lastingly organized groups”

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Looking at the shape of international politics in the future, it’s clear—bipolarity is inevitable. A cold war is a choice.

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

There is a tragic rule of twenty-first-century life, a rule of double amnesia: the right tends to act as though the nineteenth century never happened, while the left tends to act as though the twentieth century never took place.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 28 June 2021

 

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Attention, however, intrinsically is a way in which, not a thing: it is intrinsically a relationship, not a brute fact. It is a ‘howness’, a something between, an aspect of consciousness itself, not a ‘whatness’, a thing in itself, an object of consciousness. It brings into being a world and, with it, depending on its nature, a set of values.

“Studies have shown that 90% of error in thinking is due to error in perception. If you can change your perception, you can change your emotion and this can lead to new ideas. Logic will never change emotion or perception.”

--Edward DeBono

“People prefer their sources of information to be highly correlated. Then all the messages you get are consistent with each other and you’re comfortable."

— Daniel Kahneman

One way to spot a poor thinker is to see how many of their decisions boomerang back to them. If poor thinkers make poor decisions it stands to reason those decisions will eventually create more problems. More problems consume more time, leaving them even less time to think about new problems.

The time used to correct poor thinking comes from the time that could be used for good thinking.

Good thinkers understand a simple truth: you can’t make good decisions without good thinking and good thinking requires time.

Good thinking is expensive but poor thinking costs a fortune.

--Farnum Street blog

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

The relevant sense of reasonable, and the phrase reasonable doubt, appeared in the sixteenth-century Scholastic, Suarez, while the reasonable man has an ancestor in the steady man of medieval canon law: If a man and woman are surprised by her father and compelled to marry, the man’s consent is null and the marriage void if the fear inflicted on him is such as would coerce a “steady man.”

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

History is the knowledge of an infinite whole whose parts, repeating the plan of the whole in their structure, are only known by reference to their context. But since this context is always incomplete, we can never know a single part as it actually is.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Most Westerners who travel in India find rickshaws discomforting. Although I have used them a lot over the years, in part because I sometimes feel safer to have company in strange parts of Indian cities, I have always found the experience morally jarring. Westerners tend to be big and heavy compared to Indians, and rickshaw drivers often have to use almost all their strength to move their machines with one of us on board. It seems reprehensible to sit in relative comfort on the back of a rickshaw while a nearly destitute person pedals one around for a few rupees. On the other hand, those rupees are vitally important for the driver, and it seems just as reprehensible to walk to spare oneself guilt.

N.B. This captures my feeling as well. We rarely used human-powered rickshaws, but when we did, I felt both uncomfortable but gratified to have given this man [sic] something (generous] towards his daily bread.

New Pathways in Psychology

Colin Wilson

[Alfred] Adler must be regarded as the fatherfigure of the new generation in psychology: [Victor] Frankl, [Abraham] Maslow, [Medard] Boss. What he called ‘the affirmative unfolding of the organism’ was, in fact, a recognition of the basic evolutionary drive of human beings, that man is an evolutionary animal, and that neurosis is the frustration of this evolutionary drive. In dealing with neurosis, Adler was less concerned to trace its roots in the patient’s childhood than to understand its meaning, what it was driving towards.

An Essay on the 'New' Existentialism

Colin Wilson

Heidegger, like Hemingway, claims that man only knows himself in the face of death or crisis (‘only a bullfighter lives his life all the way up’)—we may recollect, for example, Anna Karenina’s recognition, as she flings herself under a train, that death is the last thing she wants. This is the basis of their negative judgement on human life: that even the most intelligent of us are blinded by triviality until crisis shocks us awake (and by then it is usually too late).

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

The Chilean people had made a mistake in electing Allende—actually only a plurality of Chileans had been mistaken. Given what he knew, what he expected, and what he feared, Henry Kissinger was not going to let the mere fact of a free election stand in his way of dealing with a potential threat to the United States. “I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” The statement looks a lot different if one has the rise of Adolf Hitler in mind.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 27 June 2021

 

The Wedge

Scott Carney

No decision you make will ever make it possible to avoid death. Which, in a strange way, means that the whole idea of risk is something of an illusion. If avoiding death was the goal, then we’ve already lost the game. But what if the point of being alive was instead to experience the entire bounty of human emotion, failure, triumphs, love and loss?

Choosing Survival

John Kemp

What is a highly adaptive society? It is a nation-state that has acquired and developed a stable set of five key institutions: a representative form of government, a market-oriented economy, a growing scientific and technical enterprise, a universal system of education, and a system of religious practice which becomes progressively more disentangled from government and progressively more tolerant of diverse beliefs.

How are we doing? Oh, dear!

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

All of history testifies that in complex societies there must be a stable and experienced ruling class of some sort, for the alternative is chaos and anarchy, whether due to a lack of governance or to a takeover of society by ideological fanatics.

Beyond the Robot

Gary Lachman

If our attention is like a hand, it can only grasp something in one way at a time.

Two Essays on Colin Wilson

Gary Lachman

He [Colin Wilson] may, as some critics have said, have never gotten over Shaw—listening to a radio broadcast of Man and Superman was perhaps the single most decisive event of the young Wilson’s life; and his ‘Victorian’ belief in progress and heroism may seem antiquated amidst our own cool scepticism. But, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, it’s not enough that an idea be fashionable, it should also strive for truth.

Kinds of Power

James Hillman

Ancient thought could not even conceive of the individual’s soul life apart from the soul of the world.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

As T.S. Eliot famously wrote, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

Thoughts for the Day: 26 June 2021

 

Beyond the Robot

Gary Lachman

Simply put, immediacy perception gives us the bare facts of experience, the discrete bits and pieces that enter our awareness. Meaning perception is a kind of glue that holds these pieces together and makes them a whole.

Time and Narrative, Volume 1

Paul Ricoeur

“An intention,” we are told in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (section 337), “is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions.”

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

For Merleau-Ponty the ‘object’ of perception cannot be viewed in isolation, because is in reality embedded in a context, the nexus of relations among existing things which gives it meaning within the world. Thus no one object exists independently of others, but reflects a part of whatever else it co-exists with, and in turn is itself similarly reflected there.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

There is nothing in the case of feeling to correspond with what, in the case of thinking, may be called mis-thinking or thinking wrong. The most general name for this thing is failure. Failure and its opposite, success, imply that the activity which fails or succeeds is not only a ‘doing something’ but a ‘trying to do something’, where the word ‘trying’ refers not to what is called ‘conation’, but to an activity which sets itself definite tasks, and judges itself as having succeeded or failed by reference to the standards or criteria which it thereby imposes on itself.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Strauss said that “a tribal community may possess a culture, i.e., produce and enjoy hymns, songs, ornament of their clothes, of their weapons and pottery, and enjoy fairy tales and what not; it cannot however be civilized.” For that, you needed the “conscious culture of humanity,” to be found in the works of writers like Plato and Aristotle, Spinoza and Nietzsche.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” according to a universal legal maxim. It is asking a great deal, both of legal insiders and of those without. It demands that ordinary persons have a general understanding of legal principles, at least as far as their own affairs are concerned. The Digest [Roman legal precepts] and the Talmud are huge storehouses of concepts, and to be required to have even a sketchy idea of them is a powerful stimulus to learning abstractions. What is less obvious, but equally important, is that the maxim imposes a heavy burden on the law itself. Legal concepts must be, in some sense, comprehensible at large. No formulas, no flow charts, no diagrams. Despite a common impression to the contrary, the law cannot possibly be a tangle of esoteric rules that invariably need resort to a lawyer to understand or to have understood on one’s behalf. Since the point of the law is to order ordinary affairs, the language in which the rules are expressed must be substantially that of ordinary life.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 25 June 2021

 

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

Critics of sociobiology, who are dogmatic Liberals, denounce this idea as monstrous. We will not attempt to decide that difficult question here, since any attempt to decide what aspects of behavior are genetic and what are learned after birth always descends into ideological metaphysics in the prevailing absence of real data.

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Art is by its nature implicit and ambiguous. It is also embodied: it produces embodied creations which speak to us through the senses, even if their medium is language, and which have effects on us physically as embodied beings in the lived world.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much.

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam

[A private report to JFK from his friend Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield that was blunt and pessimistic about the future of Vietnam] showed that if this policy had not fooled anyone else, it had deceived the deceivers.

Connection

Randy Olson, Dorie Barton, Brian Palermo

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “Relate” as: “(v) - to bring into or establish association, connection or relation.” If you want to connect with your audience, get their attention, convey information and possibly move them to act, you must be relatable. It’s simple biology: People are animals. Animals are instinctually self-preserving. Animals learn the best self-preservation techniques by studying successful examples of others of their same species and copying those behaviors. (This is why dolphins tend to school with other dolphins and don’t generally hang out with oysters. At least not socially.) Animals respond to other animals that they relate to.

History Man

Fred Inglis

Collingwood makes a long detour through the history of the idea of ideas, agreeing with Hume that an idea is what consciousness makes of an impression.