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| Dr. (psychiatrist) Iain McGilchrist |
[T]he core of the contemporary world is the reductionist view that we are – nature is – the earth is – ‘nothing but’ a bundle of senseless particles, pointlessly, helplessly, mindlessly, colliding in a predictable fashion, whose existence is purely material, and whose only value is utility.
Reductionism can mean a number of things, but here I mean quite simply the outlook that assumes that the only way to understand the nature of anything we experience is by looking at the parts of which it appears to be made, and building up from there. By contrast I believe that the whole is never the same as the sum of its ‘parts’, and that, except in the case of machines, there are in fact no ‘parts’ as such, but that they are an artefact of a certain way of looking at the world.
Even if contemporary physics did not demonstrate that this is an impossibility, there is a problem with this kind of argument. Reductionists and determinists unerringly fail to take account of the fact that their own arguments apply to themselves. If my beliefs are ‘nothing but’ the mechanical products of a blind system, so are all views, including those of the reductionist. If everything is already determined, the determinist’s tendency to embrace determinism is also merely determined, and we have no reason to take it seriously (since we are all determined either to believe it or not already).
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| William Morris |
The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make. --William Morris
Once men thought Spirit divine, and Matter diabolic. . . . Now science and philosophy recognize the parallelism, the approximation, the unity of the two: how each reflects the other as face answers to face in a glass, nay, how the laws of both are one. . . . We are learning not to fear truth. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Sovereignty of Ethics”
The governmental legitimacy of the townships, which was bequeathed to the framers of the Constitution, existed in “the worldly in-between space by which men are mutually related,” and that in-between space fostered what Leo Strauss also valued so highly—simple common sense.
How could he go to work for a man who, he said, promised to be a “disaster”? Wasn’t this an unworthy, even objectionable use of his talents? What price was one willing to pay to be close to power? What sacrifices of personal honesty would be involved, not to mention personal dignity? Shortly before his meetings with Nixon, Kissinger was already pondering all this, even if nobody else was.
The writers of The Federalist Papers had praised the notion of pitting interest against interest. In fact, the ideal of balance of power was “as old as political history itself.” In an anarchic world, it was “necessary,” an “essential stabilizing factor.” To Morgenthau, it was an “inevitable” arrangement, a “universal principle.” Over centuries of European history, statesmen pursued a balance of power through constantly shifting alliances.
Throughout its [U.S.] history, the country has had its doubters and naysayers, particularly among pessimistic and sophisticated intellectuals and writers like Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, James [Henry, not William?], [Henry] Adams, and Mencken. Repelled by the country’s ambient, oppressive vulgarity, they “refused to identify themselves with America as they found it.” it.” [Hans] Morgenthau, who yielded to no one in either pessimism or sophistication, was not unsympathetic to them. They were, in one sense, the best of the best. “They uncovered in America the human condition, drastically at variance with the American dream.” He could admire their rejection of America’s often fatuous optimism and philistine materialism, could share their “tragic sense of life.” But he perceived an aura of irresponsible aestheticism in their anti-American stance. He could not go along with the rejection of the American ideal. Without it, he said, the country would lose its internal coherence and fall apart, and he was too appreciative of what his adopted land had given him to accept that.
Unlike in the West, there was never any question of conflating SARS-CoV-2 with flu. Letting the disease run through the population unchecked in an attempt to achieve “herd immunity” was not entertained as an option. For Beijing—preoccupied as it was with delivering “output legitimacy”—letting “nature take its course” was unthinkable. To their detriment, European and American policymakers found it harder to detach themselves from the cold-blooded calculus of the flu paradigm.
Stoicism and Zen have certain things in common. They both, for example, stress the importance of contemplating the transitory nature of the world around us and the importance of mastering desire, to the extent that it is possible to do so. They also advise us to pursue tranquility and give us advice on how to attain and maintain it. Furthermore, I came to realize that Stoicism was better suited to my analytical nature than Buddhism was. As a result, I found myself, much to my amazement, toying with the idea of becoming, instead of a practicing Zen Buddhist, a practicing Stoic.
To be great, one must make great work, and making great work is incredibly hard. It must be our primary focus. We must set out, from the beginning, with complete and total commitment to the idea that our best chance of success starts during the creative process.
