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| An outstanding & much-needed work: Read it! |
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.
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.
Mark Twain said, “Education is mainly what we have unlearned.” Yoda implored, “You must unlearn what you have learned.”
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.
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.
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.
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.’
Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking.
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