As Heather Cox Richardson does so often and so well, she puts current events within the context of history, in this instance, the anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. The current events: the Rittenhouse verdict & reactions to it; the passage of the Build Back Better bill in the House, and efforts in Wisconsin to trash the electoral system. Important reading.
Saturday, November 20, 2021
thoughts: 20 November 2021
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People tend toward inertia and homeostasis, just like any complex adaptive system. But if you apply a little pressure from life—say, a health crisis, an economic crisis, or an emotional challenge—then the dynamics of the system change. Suddenly that human being is thrown into some subtle or gross form of disequilibrium. It could even be a positive challenge—a career promotion, or an unexpected windfall. All of these will disturb the human system to such a degree that new behaviors, new leaps of positive evolution, or higher forms of order may come into existence. Life may self-organize at a new level. So it is right at the edge of chaos that the system has its greatest potential for change, its ripest moment for evolution.
Can we say that it can pay to be a little edgey?
So who is responsible for this overwhelming fecundity of fragmentation? Scapegoats abound, but the person most frequently cited is a six-hundred-year-old philosopher—René Descartes. Truth be told, Descartes is guilty only of articulating an important breakthrough that characterized the changes occurring in his own time period. It was Descartes who announced the radical split between subject and object that the world has been struggling to come to terms with ever since.
Don't take away from the quote that Phipps is another to paint Descartes as a bad guy who let us astray, into the worst aspects of Modernity. Phipps goes on, it's more complex than any simple labeling.
This deprivileging of private revelation may be hard for some more spiritually inclined readers to accept. Indeed, [Michael] Dowd’s science-inspired faith might not satisfy those who like their religious infusions laced with a little more mystical import. His approach to evolutionary spirituality tends to focus on those forms of knowledge that are the current strengths of the sciences—astrophysics, biology, chemistry, psychology—an emphasis that can bypass the subtler interior landscapes of consciousness and culture, which have been late to the party of empirical investigation.
America’s contemporary political dysfunction is primarily a cultural problem, and worldviews are the basic units of culture.
In a sense, it's this simple.
Every sensation I feel bonds with my emotional state to create a library of neural symbols that my lizard brain uses to make sense of the world at large. I’ve found how I can use this underlying mechanism to transform fear into joy and see the world from the perspective of flow.
GROWTH EQUALS FREEDOM. History shows that societies with economies that don’t grow tend to become sclerotic. The inhabitants of pre-modern agrarian empires, for example, had few opportunities to change their status and economic and social roles.
"Growth Equals Freedom" is one of what Homer-Dixon labels "The Three Equivalances" that encapsulate why so many are so enamored with the ideology of economic growth. And as Homer-Dixon acknowledges, not without some reason.
Breaking with the past is part of our past. Leaving tradition behind runs all the way through our tradition.
A key American irony.
Still, the Chile episode has to be seen in terms more complicated than white hats and black hats. It remains an important and never-ending touchstone of debate because it represents with the utmost clarity the possible conflict that can exist between the promotion of democracy and the demands of national security, surely one of the most unnerving, most painful tensions in the conduct of foreign policy.
The story may not be as simple as some (like me) had believed.
Instead of separately considering theology on one side and natural science on the other, or Christianity on one side and Platonic paganism on the other, Ficino and Jung would read all statements whatever the compartment from which they come, for their significance for soul, the “bond and juncture of the universe.”
The idea [of Zen practice] is not to reduce the human mind to a moronic vacuity, but to bring into play its innate and spontaneous intelligence by using it without forcing it.
In this situation past and future are equally present precisely because they are equally absent from our sense; thus the no-longer of the past is transformed by virtue of the spatial metaphor into something lying behind us and the not-yet of the future into something that approaches us from ahead (the German Zukunft, like the French avenir, means, literally What comes toward).
The basic distinction between the individual and the crowd is that the individual acts after reasoning, deliberation, and analysis; a crowd acts on feeling, emotion, and impulses.
Think juries and electorates. Also, it's very hard to separate the "individual" from the crowd. And even without the "crowd" at hand, individuals aren't always to hot at "reasoning, deliberation, and analysis." The deployment of "reasoning, deliberation, and analysis " is always a struggle in any context.
[Burnham writing about Alfredo Pareto's sociological scheme.]
Individuals marked by Class II (Group-Persistences) residues are Machiavelli’s “Lions.” They are able and ready to use force, relying on it rather than brains to solve their problems. They are conservative, patriotic, loyal to tradition, and solidly tied to supra-individual groups like family or Church or nation. They are concerned for posterity and the future. In economic affairs they are cautious, saving and orthodox. They distrust the new, and praise “character” and “duty” rather than wits.
In Steve MacIntosh's Developmental Politics classification, these folks would be archetypal Traditionalists.
[Y]our great-grandmother was as much of a historical person as was President Dwight David Eisenhower; and her remnant “records” are but one proof of that. In sum: there is no difference between a historical source and a “non-historical” source, because there is no difference between a “historic person” and a “non-historic person.” (Shakespeare, in Henry V: “There is a history in all men’s lives.”)
Let me reformulate this: All men’s lives are historic. It is not only that there is some history in their lives. They are components of the history of their times. Now, this is a relatively recent recognition.
Let us now see how we got there.
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