Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 9 September 2021

 

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

81. Human beings, even if we postulate a process of evolution, also possess a uniqueness which cannot be fully explained by the evolution of other open systems. Each of us has his or her own personal identity and is capable of entering into dialogue with others and with God himself. Our capacity to reason, to develop arguments, to be inventive, to interpret reality and to create art, along with other not yet discovered capacities, are signs of a uniqueness which transcends the spheres of physics and biology. The sheer novelty involved in the emergence of a personal being within a material universe presupposes a direct action of God and a particular call to life and to relationship on the part of a “Thou” who addresses himself to another “thou.” The biblical accounts of creation invite us to see each human being as a subject who can never be reduced to the status of an object.

82. Yet it would also be mistaken to view other living beings as mere objects subjected to arbitrary human domination. When nature is viewed solely as a source of profit and gain, this has serious consequences for society. This vision of “might is right” has engendered immense inequality, injustice and acts of violence against the majority of humanity, since resources end up in the hands of the first comer or the most powerful: the winner takes all. Completely at odds with this model are the ideals of harmony, justice, fraternity and peace as proposed by Jesus. As he said of the powers of his own age: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant” (Mt 20:25–26).

Pope Francis. Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality (pp. 51-52). Melville House. Kindle Edition. 

Now for some William (Patrick) Ophuls from his Requiem for Modern Politics: 

Pt. 3:

The drama of modern politics is a tragedy in which the hero, his supposed enlightenment being but another name for hubris, has become the author of his own impending doom. 54

The inexorable tendency of all forms of polity based on liberal premises, as Hobbes himself made explicit, is to compensate for the decline in civic virtue of the individual by increasing the political power of the state – the story of modern politics in a nutshell. 55

The so-called American revolution was, in fact, a rebellion, reluctantly undertaken only after much brooding and many efforts to obtain a redress of grievances. Thus it was fought not to overturn colonial society but to overthrow Royal authority. Nor did the American aristocracy ever abandon its cultural and philosophical allegiance to the mother country or to European civilization in general. In fact, the Founding Fathers exemplified (and were seen by their European contemporaries as exemplifying) the best of the Enlightenment civilization, combining philosophical learning and high principles derived from natural religion with practical reason and political skill. 58

And now some other voices: 

 

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

The decisive experience that persuaded [Georges] Sorel as well as [Alfredo] Pareto to stress the factor of violence in revolutions was the Dreyfus Affair in France, when, in the words of Pareto, they were “amazed to see [the Dreyfusards] employing against their opponents the same villainous methods that they had themselves denounced.”

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

No matter what form a world government with centralized power over the whole globe might assume, the very notion of one sovereign force ruling the whole earth, holding the monopoly of all means of violence, unchecked and uncontrolled by other sovereign powers, is not only a forbidding nightmare of tyranny, it would be the end of all political life as we know it.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

The fundamental political reality of our time is determined by two facts: on the one hand, it is based upon “nations” and, on the other, it is permanently disturbed and thoroughly menaced by “nationalism.”

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

[T]he codification of the Roman law established the ideal of legality which dominated the sociological thought of Europe in the succeeding centuries. Law is both an engine for government, and a condition restraining government. The canon law of the Church, and the civil law of the State, owe to Justinian’s lawyers their influence on the development of Europe. They established in the Western mind the ideal that an authority should be at once lawful, and law-enforcing, and should in itself exhibit a rationally adjusted system of organisation.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

The ancient world takes its stand upon the drama of the Universe, the modern world upon the inward drama of the Soul. Descartes, in his Meditations, expressly grounds the existence of this inward drama upon the possibility of error. There may be no correspondence with objective fact, and thus there must be a soul with activities whose reality is purely derivative from itself.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The Gilded Age in the United States—the period roughly from the end of Reconstruction to beginning of the new century—had two faces. Epic nation building and massive economic expansion was one; social neglect, city squalor, and a persistent North-South division the other.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

Mayer’s mice did not get fat by overeating. They got fat by eating. Half-starving them didn’t make them lean. It only made them hungry and slightly less fat. So let’s redefine what we mean by obesity. People with obesity are not thin people who couldn’t control their appetites (for whatever reason, psychological or neurobiological) and therefore ate too much. They’re people whose bodies are trying to accumulate excess fat even when they’re half-starved. The drive to accumulate fat is the problem, and it’s the difference between the fat and the lean. The hunger and the cravings, and then the failures and the sins, as Astwood suggested, are the results.