Thoughts 31 Jan. 2022

 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

I argued in 1977 that the relatively open, egalitarian, individualistic, and libertarian societies prevailing in the modern world were the luxuriant fruit of an era of unparalleled ecological abundance occasioned first by Europe’s appropriation of the New World’s mostly untapped resources and then by the exploitation of first coal and then petroleum.

Apologies to the Grandchldren

William Ophuls

[Harrison] Brown’s larger point [published in 1954] was that political, social, and economic systems are decisively shaped by the quantity and quality of the available resources, especially the energy resources that are the sine qua non for exploiting every other resource. This was spelled out in more detail by Fred Cottrell in 1955. Using an array of historical examples, he showed that the availability of energy effectively determined the nature and fate of societies. And as the resource base on which it depended deteriorated, industrial civilization would experience a decline in the “net amount of surplus energy.”3 This would compel a painful regression to the mean that existed before the age of fossil fuels—i.e., an agrarian civilization.

Along these same lines, other authors—myself in 1977 and William Catton in 1980—used prose to describe the same predicament: overshoot followed inevitably by collapse unless major remedial actions were taken decisively and soon.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

In the . . . the right hemisphere version [of reality], as in the world the map represents, and in the world revealed to us by physics, by poetry, and simply by the business of living, things are almost infinitely more complex. Nothing is clearly the same as anything else. All is flowing and changing, provisional, and complexly interconnected with everything else. Nothing is ever static, detached from our awareness of it, or disembodied; and everything needs to be understood in context, where, if it is not to be denatured, it must remain implicit.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Long before we had anything other than the most rudimentary knowledge of hemisphere difference, a number of philosophers – Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson and Scheler among them – were able to intuit that there are two fundamentally distinct ways in which we approach the world, what Bergson called ‘two different orders of reality’. I would tentatively suggest that many of the great questions of philosophy in fact turn on which one you choose, an idea I explore throughout the rest of this book. One way of looking at paradox is as an indicator that we are dealing with two apparently valid world-pictures which yet do not concur.

The Enigma of Reason

Hugo Mercier

Is There a Method for Reasoning? Reasoning, as we have described it so far, is rather limited. Humans reason when they are trying to convince others or when others are trying to convince them. Solitary reasoning occurs, it seems, in anticipation or rehashing of discussions with others and perhaps also when one finds oneself holding incompatible ideas and engages in a kind of discussion with oneself. Just as with justifications, the production of arguments proceeds by means of backward inference, from a favored conclusion to reasons that would support it.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Liberal science, by contrast, separates the idea from the person. The critical method, Popper said, “consists in letting our hypotheses die in our stead.” In other words, we kill our hypotheses instead of each other.

Bird by Bird

Anne Lamott

“Do it every day for a while,” my father kept saying. “Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things.”

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

In the first place, there can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an Order of Things, and, in particular, of an Order of Nature. I have used the word instinctive advisedly.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

Evolutionary spirituality is evolution-inspired, world-embracing, and future-oriented. It is a creative, anticipatory spiritual path in which salvation, however we define that word, is to be found not in connection to the ancestral spirits of yesteryear, in promises of a heavenly beyond, in achieving a transcendent state of inner peace, or even in letting go into a timeless present, but in fully embracing the emergent potential contained in the depths of an evolving cosmos.

Thoughts 30 Jan 2022

 

Apologies to the Grandchldren

William Ophuls

Civilization is, by its very nature, a long-running Ponzi scheme. It lives by robbing nature and borrowing from the future, exploiting its hinterland until there is nothing left to exploit, after which it implodes. While it still lives, it generates a temporary and fictitious surplus that it uses to enrich and empower the few and to dispossess and dominate the many. Industrial civilization is the apotheosis and quintessence of this fatal course. A fortunate minority gains luxuries and freedoms galore, but only by slaughtering, poisoning, and exhausting creation. So we bequeath you a ruined planet that dooms you to a hardscrabble existence, or perhaps none at all.

In addition to my stroll through McGilchrist's The Matter with Things (the most recent installment below), I'm going to add a stroll through Ophuls's Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, & Its Political Consequences. It consists of strong words from a wise elder. I think we ignore his warnings at our peril.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

The narrow-beam, precisely focussed, piecemeal attention of the left hemisphere, aimed at a particular object of interest, is, as we have seen, the kind paid by an animal locking onto its prey. In humans the left hemisphere is designed for grasping, controls the right hand with which we grasp (as well as those aspects of language which enable us to say we have ‘grasped’ something – pinned it down) and helps us manipulate, rather than understand, the world. It sees little, but what it does see seems clear. It is confident, tends to be black and white in its judgments, and jumps to conclusions. Since it is serving the predator in us, it has to if it is to succeed. It sees a linear relationship between the doer and the ‘done to’, between arrow and target.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

There is nothing about the hemispheres that is symmetrical. . . . [T]he idea that there is no significant difference is simply a non-starter. It’s just a question of what the differences are – and why they are there.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Your Life claimed that the secret to longevity rested in breathing through the nose as well as a healthy dose of temperature variation. [19th-century explorer of the American West & native Indian culture, George] Catlin encouraged people to train themselves to sleep with their mouths closed, arguing that the nose is a natural filter of pathogens.

Time and Narrative, Volume 1

Paul Ricoeur

We have, in fact, a proposal for three schemas of historical explanation, without having been shown how the first two are incorporated into the third one. Moreover, an important scattering factor appears on the causal level. In a properly analytic approach, we are led to distinguish between “external” factors (climate, technology, etc.) and “internal” ones (motives, reasons, etc.), without being able to say which are “causes” and which are “effects.” An integrating factor appears to be lacking here, whose importance and perhaps unavoidability are indicated by ideologies.

Ricoeur should have read his Collingwood more carefully. Collingwood recognizes--indeed emphasizes--the distinction between "external" & "internal" factors (between "events" and "actions" in Collingwood's parlance). Collingwood argues that by "re-enacting" the thought behind the acts (i.e., the thoughts that guide and prompt the actions), we know the causes.

Thoughts 29 January 2022

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Thus the need to sustain two incompatible ‘takes’ on the world simultaneously explains, I believe (and there is no significant competing theory), the extraordinary fact that the brain is so deeply divided, an otherwise inexplicable waste of potential in an organ that exists only to make connexions, and whose power lies, precisely, in the number of connexions it can make.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Attention is not just another ‘cognitive function’: it is, as I say, the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged.

The Way of Zen

Alan W. Watts

In English the differences between things and actions are clearly, if not always logically, distinguished, but a great number of Chinese words do duty for both nouns and verbs–so that one who thinks in Chinese has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events, that our world is a collection of processes rather than entities.

Consider in light of McGilchrist's take, which I find very similar.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

The GOP’s base of electoral support was heavily recruited from the white working class. If we take education as a proxy for class, the single best predictor other than race for voting for Trump was the lack of a college degree. The result was a party unified around themes of cultural identity and affect and riven with contradictions when it came to policy.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Collingwood distinguishes sharply between human life considered as natural process and human life considered as action. Thus, an individual life is in one aspect a structure of biological events containing ‘all the accidents of animal existence’ (IH 304), and in another, action, self-consciousness or thought. Within each single life, as Collingwood puts it, ‘the tides of thought, his own and others’, flow crosswise, regardless of its structure, like sea-water through a stranded wreck’ (IH 304). Individuals can be both biographical and historical subjects, but the limits set by biography are not those set by history.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The political men of letters in Burke’s picture had griped and exaggerated, without presenting a viable alternative. They had delegitimized one institution after another by sapping public faith in social artifice and ignoring the need for a “veil” of unreflecting custom to cloak destructive natural passions. The financiers in their turn had abetted a perilous financial scheme that brought France a ruinous inflation and wrecked public confidence in the state’s fiscal responsibility.

Metaphors We Live By

George Lakoff, Mark Johnson

Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.

Decoding Jung's Metaphysics

Bernardo Kastrup

God is an obvious psychic and non-physical fact, i.e., a fact that can be established psychically but not physically. (AJ: 133, emphasis added) To assert the “obvious psychic and non-physical fact” of God’s existence is a bold step for the metaphysically reticent Jung. The assertion is particularly significant because it happens in a passage wherein Jung also distances himself from psychologism: given the context, it is impossible to argue that Jung is merely psychologizing the notion of God.

Thoughts 28 Jan. 2022

 

Last Best Hope

George Packer

None of this appealed to the party’s old base. Culture usually beats class in American politics, and a tolerant, inclusive Democratic Party would have needed better policies and politicians to hold on to culturally conservative voters.

N.B. Italics added.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

[M]y thesis [that the two hemispheres of the brain attend to the world in different ways], though it depends on neuroscience, has no reductionist agenda. I do not claim for an instant that our experience merely is some function in the brain. Quite the contrary, in fact, since my thesis implies that only one part of our brains – the part that understands less – would pursue such an agenda in the first place. Some philosophers deny that scientific research can tell us anything at all about human experience, on the grounds that experience is an ‘inward’ matter (which is undeniably the case).

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

[T]he hemisphere hypothesis is deceptively simple: the bi-hemispheric structure of the brain makes possible attending to the world simultaneously in two otherwise incompatible ways. It is the implications of this that are manifold.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Every animal, in order to survive, has to solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten. It has to pay precisely focussed, narrow-beam attention that is already committed to whatever is of interest to it, so as to exploit the world for food and shelter. Put at its simplest, a bird must be able to distinguish a seed from the background of gravel on which it lies, and pick it up swiftly and accurately; similarly, with a twig to build a nest. Yet, if the bird is to survive, it must also, at one and the same time, pay another kind of attention to the world, which is the precise opposite of the first: broad, open, sustained, vigilant attention, on the lookout for predators or for conspecifics, for friend or foe, but also, crucially, open to the appearance of the utterly unfamiliar – whatever may exist in the world of which it had no previous knowledge.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

I’ve come to recognize how value or “the good” is really more of a verb than a noun.

The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Gary Lachman

Paracelsus’s “direct knowledge” sounds very much like the kind of “direct perceiving” Stan Gooch suggests our Neanderthal ancestors enjoyed and which allowed them “a real knowledge of aspects of human life and human biology, of some of the functions of the planet’s geology and perhaps some knowledge even of atomic and molecular structure.” It is also reminiscent of Schwaller de Lubicz’s “intelligence of the heart,” Bergson’s “intuition,” and the other variants of these we have come across in this book.

Doom

Niall Ferguson

The problem with all this is that, in reality, nation-states are not that much like individual people. It would be much more accurate to say that, like any large-scale polity, they are complex systems. As such, they are not governed by the same broadly Gaussian rules as individual members of our species.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

But at the beginning of the modern period Da Vinci and Bacon stand together as illustrating the various strains which have combined to form the modern world, namely, legal mentality and the patient observational habits of the naturalistic artists.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

The logical statements entered into the notebook are broken down into six categories: (1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments.

Thoughts 27 Jan. 2022

 

Ram Dass (1931-2019)

“One of the big traps we have in the West is our intelligence, because we want to know that we know. Freedom allows you to be wise, but you cannot know wisdom, you must be wisdom. When my guru wanted to put me down, he called me ‘clever.’ When he wanted to reward me, he would call me ‘simple.’ The intellect is a beautiful servant, but a terrible master. Intellect is the power tool of our separateness. The intuitive, compassionate heart is the doorway to our unity.”
— Ram Dass

Compare this with what McGilchrist argues in his books. 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

In The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, I aimed to dispel the unscientific fiction, popular at the time, that there was no significant difference between the hemispheres. This misconception was just as popular, and just as absurd, as any of the myths about supposed differences that were, and for all I know still are, being peddled in management seminars, and to which it was a knee-jerk reaction. In reality, as anyone who has worked with neurological and psychiatric patients knows, there is a world of difference between the two hemispheres: literally, since they give rise to two different experiential worlds. The question was not whether there was a difference – that was clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt – but why there was, and of what kind it might be.

My argument was, and is, that the nature of the difference between the hemispheres is far from anything hitherto imagined, and that it fulfils an evolutionary purpose of the utmost importance. It is not a separation of reason from emotion, or language from visuo-spatial skills, or any of the other things that used to be said, since, indeed, each hemisphere deals with absolutely everything – just in a reliably different way. The character and sheer extent of that difference, as well as its significance for the future of our civilisation, formed the subject of that book. And that difference could be seen as rooted in a difference in attention . . . .

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Science is now used to many fine ends; but, alas, inevitably much of the time in the service of the subjugation and destruction of Nature.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Some journalists, especially younger ones, ridicule the idea of objectivity as a “view from nowhere” and call for replacing it with “moral clarity,” by which they seem to mean their own political values.

Last Best Hope

George Packer

His populism brought the cynical cruelty of Jersey Shore to national politics. The goal of his speeches was not to whip up mass hysteria but to get rid of shame. He leveled everyone down together.

N.B. I didn't to back to the book to attempt to ID who the "his" in "His populism" is because we all know, don't we?

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

Biologist David Sloan Wilson captures this concern in his Evolution for Everyone, in which he describes how a young graduate attempting to apply the insights of evolutionary theory to other fields ran into a wall of opposition based on many of these negative presumptions when he tried to discuss his newfound interest with his professors and peers: [He] quickly learned that when [he] spoke of human behavior, psychology and culture in evolutionary terms, their minds churned through an instant and unconscious process of translation, and they heard “Hitler”, “Galton,” “Spencer,” “IQ differences,” “holocaust,” “racial phrenology,” “forced sterilization,” “genetic determinism,” “Darwinian fundamentalism,” and “disciplinary imperialism.”

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

The foundation legends, with their hiatus between liberation and the constitution of freedom, indicate the problem without solving it. They point to the abyss of nothingness that opens up before any deed that cannot be accounted for by a reliable chain of cause and effect and is inexplicable in Aristotelian categories of potentiality and actuality. In the normal time continuum every effect immediately turns into a cause of future developments, but when the causal chain is broken—which occurs after liberation has been achieved, because liberation, though it may be freedom’s conditio sine qua non, is never the conditio per quarn that causes freedom—there is nothing left for the “beginner” to hold on to. The thought of an absolute beginning—creatio ex nihilo—abolishes the sequence of temporality no less than does the thought of an absolute end, now rightly referred to as “thinking the unthinkable.”

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

The fact that certain people live, for example, on an island has in itself no effect on their history; what has an effect is the way they conceive that insular position; whether for example they regard the sea as a barrier or as a highway to traffic. Had it been otherwise, their insular position, being a constant fact, would have produced a constant effect on their historical life; whereas it will produce one effect if they have not mastered the art of navigation, a different effect if they have mastered it better than their neighbours, a third if they have mastered it worse than their neighbours, and a fourth if every one uses aeroplanes.