Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 31 August 2021

 

Dr. Lustig's most recent comprehensive critique & guidance about our health & health system

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

Politics must pay greater attention to foreseeing new conflicts and addressing the causes which can lead to them. But powerful financial interests prove most resistant to this effort, and political planning tends to lack breadth of vision. What would induce anyone, at this stage, to hold on to power only to be remembered for their inability to take action when it was urgent and necessary to do so?

(Location 647)

For all our limitations, gestures of generosity, solidarity and care cannot but well up within us, since we were made for love. (p.36)

59. At the same time we can note the rise of a false or superficial ecology which bolsters complacency and a cheerful recklessness. As often occurs in periods of deep crisis which require bold decisions, we are tempted to think that what is happening is not entirely clear. Superficially, apart from a few obvious signs of pollution and deterioration, things do not look that serious, and the planet could continue as it is for some time. Such evasiveness serves as a licence to carrying on with our present lifestyles and models of production and consumption. This is the way human beings contrive to feed their self-destructive vices: trying not to see them, trying not to acknowledge them, delaying the important decisions and pretending that nothing will happen. (pp. 36-37)

After you've carefully considered the above, chew (mentally) on these thoughts: 

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

[T]he main reason for high triglycerides has nothing to do with LDL-C; rather, it’s the refined carbohydrates and sugars in your diet. Again, the #1 risk factor for heart disease isn’t LDL-C; it’s the insulin resistance of metabolic syndrome, of which triglyceride is a much better biomarker than LDL-C.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

People were not being asked to believe something they knew to be false; they were being asked to put their faith in something new. “There is an element in the readjustment of our financial system more important than currency, more important than gold, and that is the confidence of the people. Confidence and courage are the essentials of success in carrying out our plan. You people must have faith; you must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses. Let us unite in banishing fear. We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system; it is up to you to support and make it work. “It is your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.”

I'm not sure who Carter is quoting above. My best guess is FDR. Alas, this was a public library read, so I don't have access to go back to check. But in any event, it's the thought that counts, right?

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

The ravaging of Libya, which suffered the world’s first aerial bombing in 1912, confirmed that the emerging New Man, theorized by Nietzsche and Sorel, and empowered by technology, saw violence as an existential experience – an end in itself, and perpetually renewable.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

In courtroom fashion, [James Fitzjames] Stephen bored away at weaknesses in [John Stuart] Mill’s proscription of coercive interference with personal liberty, which Mill himself recognized and had sought to patch. Society had no say over personal conduct, Mill insisted, unless it harmed others. To that “harm principle,” Stephen made familiar objections. The distinction between harm to self and others was unstable. Besides, Mill gave no usable gauge for the wrong of coercion or the worth of liberty. Mill’s arguments for free speech either failed or clashed with his utilitarian principles.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

When a person seeks out an altered state, we reflexively think of it as a moral failing. But what happens when feelings and sensations are the goal? In cases where altering the external stress is impossible, our mindsets can get reflexively fixed, and sometimes the only place to insert a wedge is in the sensory pathways themselves.

 

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 30 August 2021

 

Pope Francis issued his encyclical Laudato Si in 2015. Are we ready to listen, to discuss? 

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years.

(Location 620)

People may well have a growing ecological sensitivity but it has not succeeded in changing their harmful habits of consumption which, rather than decreasing, appear to be growing all the more. A simple example is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning. The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand. An outsider looking at our world would be amazed at such behaviour, which at times appears self-destructive.

(Location 634)

[E]conomic powers continue to justify the current global system where priority tends to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain, which fail to take the context into account, let alone the effects on human dignity and the natural environment. Here we see how environmental deterioration and human and ethical degradation are closely linked.

(Location 638)

“whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenceless before the interests of a deified market…"

(Location 641)

57. It is foreseeable that, once certain resources have been depleted, the scene will be set for new wars, albeit under the guise of noble claims. War always does grave harm to the environment and to the cultural riches of peoples, risks which are magnified when one considers nuclear and biological weapons.

(Location 643)

And now for some other voices:

“There are some people whose confidence outweighs their knowledge, and they’re happy to say things which are wrong. And then there are other people who probably have all the knowledge but keep quiet because they’re scared of saying things.”

— Helen Jenkins, on the problem of communicating scientific uncertainty. (%Farnum Street) 

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

As one of the best students of the area [southern California], Joan Didion, says: “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

But neither science nor even “scientificality,” neither scholars nor charlatans, supplied the ideas and techniques that operated the death factories. The ideas came from politicians who took power-politics seriously, and the techniques came from modern mob-men who were not afraid of consistency.

Fear Itself

Ira Katznelson

Fear about warfare and global violence became a permanent condition. It became an inextricable part of American consciousness, helping to produce an obsession with national security, one that risked political repression.

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

We went on to religion [from art]. Here again we found that the ostensible object, God, was not the real object. The mythology of religion does not say what it means. It points beyond itself, even more unmistakably than the work of art, to a concealed mystery, a truth which is not stated. The real object of religion is not grasped by religion itself.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Policy involves seeing a problem in all its dimensions, examining the pros and cons of different strategies (something neither Kennedy nor Johnson did), trying to estimate the consequences of any given decision (again a point neglected by Kennedy and Johnson), standing in the immediate present with no illusions or preconceived formulas, and trying to calculate the best path to follow, while taking into account Morgenthau’s admonition that in foreign policy, there are no good choices, only less bad ones.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Like Morgenthau, he reluctantly voted for Nixon—or so he says. In any case, Kissinger’s political double-dealing contributed to his winning the trust of the pathologically untrusting Nixon and landing the position of national security adviser with the new administration. Humphrey later said that if he had won the presidency he too would have appointed Kissinger national security adviser, suggesting two things: first, that Kissinger’s deviousness had paid off; second, that America’s Vietnam policy would not have been very different if Humphrey had been in the White House instead of Nixon.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 29 August 2021

 

“The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves---in their separate, and individual capacities.”--Abraham Lincoln

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues. It is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption. Besides, we know that approximately a third of all food produced is discarded, and “whenever food is thrown out it is as if it were stolen from the table of the poor.”

(Location 587)

Inequity affects not only individuals but entire countries; it compels us to consider an ethics of international relations. A true “ecological debt” exists, particularly between the global north and south, connected to commercial imbalances with effects on the environment, and the disproportionate use of natural resources by certain countries over long periods of time.

(Location 594)

The warming caused by huge consumption on the part of some rich countries has repercussions on the poorest areas of the world, especially Africa, where a rise in temperature, together with drought, has proved devastating for farming.

(Location 600)

We must continue to be aware that, regarding climate change, there are differentiated responsibilities. As the United States bishops have said, greater attention must be given to “the needs of the poor, the weak and the vulnerable, in a debate often dominated by more powerful interests.”31 We need to strengthen the conviction that we are one single human family. There are no frontiers or barriers, political or social, behind which we can hide, still less is there room for the globalization of indifference.

(Location 614)

Hard to follow Ol' Abe and the Pope, but here are some other voices worth considering: 

The Wedge

Scott Carney

An important aspect of the neural symbols that make up our cognition is that they not only register emotion and sensation together, but also the volume of those signals. An intense emotion or sensation is more likely to get picked up by the limbic librarian than one that doesn’t stand out. Insofar as the Wedge requires a person to be attentive to their sensations and feelings, learning to play with the volume levels is another tool we can use to subtly alter the way we experience the world. As counterintuitive as it may seem, sometimes diminishing our senses is the key to connecting outward.

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?

Transforming History

Thompson William Irwin

Whether humanity can move up to a transcultural identity in which science and a new kind of post-religious spirituality can reintroduce the fully individuated consciousness of the individual to a multidimensional cosmos is the question of our time.

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

Basically, when we approach life with our habitually passive attitude (James's “inferiority to our true selves”) we are saying to our robot, “Go ahead and take care of this, it isn't important enough for me to attend to,” and the result is that sense of separation from life, of never really touching it, that plagues so many of us in the modern world.

Apologies to the Grandchldren

William Ophuls

The problem with a purely material and rational society is captured by two well-known Biblical sayings: “Man shall not live by bread alone,” and “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

Thoughts for the Day: 28 August 2021

 

We were not meant to be inundated by cement, asphalt, glass and metal, and deprived of physical contact with nature.

(Location 543)

The human environment and the natural environment deteriorate together; we cannot adequately combat environmental degradation unless we attend to causes related to human and social degradation. (Location 564)

“Both everyday experience and scientific research show that the gravest effects of all attacks on the environment are suffered by the poorest.”

(Location 566)

Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. (Loc. 580)

And now for some other voices:

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

What happened in the first years of the seventeenth century was no gradual development, no addition to what had gone before, but a complete break with the past and a radical new beginning.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

This modern belief in reason, with science as its handmaiden, was inherently optimistic; it confidently adhered to the notion of progress. As humankind’s understanding of the universe and its mechanisms increased, so too did its ability to gain control over nature and improve the conditions of human life.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

The Idea of Nature

R. G. Collingwood

The problem of the thing in itself is one of the most puzzling problems in Kant’s philosophy. What makes it so puzzling is the fact that it seems impossible to state the problem without flatly contradicting yourself. The problem is stated in some such way as this: Whatever we know, we know at once intuitively and discursively, that is, by the combined use of our senses and understanding. The only genuine intuition is sensuous intuition, and the only valid use of the understanding is to think about things which we sensuously perceive. The only knowledge, therefore, is an intelligent or thoughtful perception.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

“The point, therefore, is not that ‘complexity’ is a problem entirely unique to our age. It is rather (1) that ‘complexity’ has now become a crucial and perhaps even unavoidable consideration in many of our most pressing questions about the world and (2) that to deal with ‘complexity’ seriously seems to present some extraordinary difficulties for our understanding” (Langdon Winner, “Complexity and the Limits of Human Understanding,” in Organized Social Complexity: Challenge to Politics and Policy, ed. Todd La Porte [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975].

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

The appeal of demagogues lies in their ability to take a generalized discontent, the mood of drift, resentment, disillusionment and economic shakiness, and transform it into a plan for doing something. They make inaction seem morally degrading. And many young men and women become eager to transform their powerlessness into an irrepressible rage to hurt or destroy.

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

Burke’s horrified reaction to the killing of the French king and queen helps point us toward another, far fiercer right-wing critique of liberalism. That assault finds in liberalism a fatal overreliance on reason. It shares Burke’s sense of the chaos that could follow from the belief that society should be remade all at once on the basis of a big idea, with tradition and custom annihilated.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 26 August 2021

 

T.S. Eliot: a touch of poetry today

But first a few words from Pope Francis in Laudato Si:

We can be witnesses to terrible injustices if we think that we can obtain significant benefits by making the rest of humanity, present and future, pay the extremely high costs of environmental deterioration.

(Location 500)

Let us mention, for example, those richly biodiverse lungs of our planet which are the Amazon and the Congo basins, or the great aquifers and glaciers. We know how important these are for the entire earth and for the future of humanity. The ecosystems of tropical forests possess an enormously complex biodiversity which is almost impossible to appreciate fully, yet when these forests are burned down or levelled for purposes of cultivation, within the space of a few years countless species are lost and the areas frequently become arid wastelands.

(Location 506)

Many of the world’s coral reefs are already barren or in a state of constant decline. “Who turned the wonderworld of the seas into underwater cemeteries bereft of colour and life?”

(Location 526)

Human beings too are creatures of this world, enjoying a right to life and happiness, and endowed with unique dignity.

(Location 538)

And now for other important voices: 

Four Quartets

T. S. Eliot

And right action is freedom

From past and future also.

For most of us, this is the aim

Never here to be realised;

Who are only undefeated

Because we have gone on trying;

We, content at the last

If our temporal reversion nourish

(Not too far from the yew-tree)

The life of significant soil.

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

Politics deals with men, nationals of many countries and heirs to many pasts; its laws are the positively established fences which hedge in, protect, and limit the space in which freedom is not a concept, but a living, political reality.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Fear, the inspiring principle of action in tyranny, is fundamentally connected to that anxiety which we experience in situations of complete loneliness. This anxiety reveals the other side of equality and corresponds to the joy of sharing the world with our equals.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

[T]he enterprises produced by the individualistic energy of the European peoples presuppose physical actions directed to final causes. But the science which is employed in their development is based on a philosophy which asserts that physical causation is supreme, and which disjoins the physical cause from the final end. It is not popular to dwell on the absolute contradiction here involved. It is the fact, however you gloze it over with phrases.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The critical economists Robert Heilbroner and William Milberg write: “This inextricable entanglement of economics with capitalism appears to be the best guarded secret of the profession. . . . The failure of mainstream economics to recognize the insistent presence of this underlying social order, with its class structure, its socially determined imperatives, its technologies and organizations, and its privileges and rights, derives from its preconceptual basis in a natural rather than a social construal of economic society.” And later: “[The] universal grammar [of modern economics] does not communicate a message of any economic interest or significance, unless it applies to a society that possesses the institutional and cultural elements of capitalism: indeed, the very meaning of ‘economic’ would be unintelligible outside capitalism.” Robert Heilbroner and William Milberg, The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

On the other side of the debate we have a diverse group of economic optimists consisting mainly of neoclassical economists, economic historians, and agricultural economists. (At some point during the last two centuries, economics transformed itself from the “dismal science” of Malthus and Ricardo to a doctrine of hope and optimism for humanity.)

Technopoly

Neil Postman

Lacking a lucid set of ethics and having rejected tradition, Technopoly searches for a source of authority and finds it in the idea of statistical objectivity.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Steve Bannon, the ideologist of the Trump revolution, made clear that one of his central goals was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” For four decades, America has largely been run by people who openly pledge to destroy the very government they lead. Is it any wonder that they have succeeded?