This division of attention [between the two hemispheres of the brain] works to our advantage when we use both. However, it is a handicap – in fact, it is a catastrophe – when we use only one.
Surely we all use our brains as a whole, not just one hemisphere? Naturally, this is almost invariably the case. My point is a different one: that each hemisphere has inevitably a distinctive ‘take’ on the structure of the world, which is why we have two hemispheres at all. And each ‘take’ appears, when pondered in the abstract, strictly speaking incompatible with the other. They are each internally consistent, but mutually incompossible.
[I]n 2017, 25 years after the original warning, 15,364 scientists from 184 countries signed World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice. It’s message was blunt: industrial civilization was courting catastrophe and needed a total makeover.
As [Ivan] Illich warned, industrial man has become a slave to his energy slaves, totally addicted to the industrial production of goods and services and unable to envision any other way of life.
The essential meaning of entropy for human life was well stated by Carl Jung: “Everything better is purchased at the price of something worse.”
Like so many others, I had become preoccupied with the Anthropocene, a transformation driven by capitalist economic growth that puts in question the very separation between natural and human history.
Ockham is now best known for the principle of economy in reasoning known as Ockham’s Razor. This is a misnomer for two reasons. First, he did not originate it; there is the inevitable origin in Aristotle. The phrase “We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypotheses possible” is in Ptolemy. Formulations like “It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer” and “A plurality is not to be posited without necessity” are Scholastic commonplaces from the early thirteenth century. Second, though he does repeat these ideas frequently, Ockham’s own contribution is more to restrict the operation of the principle, in the interests of God’s absolute power: “God does many things by means of more which He could have done by means of fewer, simply because He wishes it, and no other cause is to be sought. From the very fact that He wishes it, it is done suitably, and not in vain.”
“Historians,” he writes, “instinctively stop the backward search for the ultimate cause at the point where the state of affairs, whose alteration they seek to explain, flourished.”19 This is a rather clumsy way of stating, for history, a principle paleontologists have more elegantly called punctuated equilibrium.
We do not accept a false choice between individual rights and collective responsibility. We say you can have both. You can’t have either unless you have both. And to win, you must have both. With inalienable rights come inalienable responsibilities.
“Conscious evolution” is a term that can be used in many different ways, but [Barbara Marx] Hubbard captures the broad strokes of its meaning in what she calls “the three C’s:”—new cosmology, new crises, and new capacities.
I have shown that into every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and that this coefficient is no mere imperfection but a vital component of his knowledge.
A third group that could object to the forging of a national unity is made up of those who do not want one of the perquisites of that, a strong federal government. These may be the most vociferous of all, since they think of themselves as Jeffersonian in a sense that denies all but local authority. They may feel betrayed, like the crestfallen fan: "Say it ain't so, Joe." Jefferson is not supposed to have done what he did. That was, in fact, John Randolph's refrain much of the time. But Jefferson's large vision could not be contained in the little boxes of his first commitment. The finally liberating thing about Jefferson is that he was not a Jeffersonian in that initial (one may call it that Albert Jay Nock) sense. Like most great figures, he was larger than his devotees would like.
And, one may add, that he was larger than his detractors would like. Jefferson was a very complex and often internally contradictory individual.
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