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 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.
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.
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.
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.
