Thoughts 26 Jan. 2022

Dictator currently threatening to invade the Ukraine

[I]t’s worth noting the words of Dmitry Muratov, the courageous Russian journalist who remains one of the few independent voices standing up to Mr. Putin and who just received the Nobel Prize for Peace. At a news conference after the awards ceremony in Oslo, as Russian troops and armour were massing on Ukraine’s borders, Mr. Muratov spoke of the iron link between authoritarianism and war. “Disbelief in democracy means that the countries that have abandoned it will get a dictator,” he said. “And where there is a dictatorship, there is a war. If we refuse democracy, we agree to war.”

Thomas Homer-Dixon, "The American Polity Is Cracked, and Might Collapse. Canada and the World Must Prepare" 18 Jan. 2022

A couple of comments. First, read the Homer-Dixon article. It's sobering. He advises the Canadian government to contemplate the collapse of responsible government in the U.S. (By the way, Homer-Dixon is an MIT-trained political scientist and a "scholar of violent conflict. . . .  I’ve studied and published on the causes of war, social breakdown, revolution, ethnic violence and genocide," as well as an expert on the repercussions of climate change & other forms of ecological degradation. Note also that this Muratov spoke his words in early December. Americans should ask themselves, do we want our own Putin? 

On Liberty

John Stuart Mill

There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is ‘firmed up’ – and brought into being.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

What, then, is attention? Is it really just another ‘cognitive function’ of that supposed ‘machine’, the brain? It’s clearly something pretty special if it takes part in the creation of the only world we can know. Is it a thing? Hardly. Is it something we do? Nearer, but not exactly. Perhaps a manner of doing? Or even a manner of being?

The best way I can put it is that it is the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists. The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences. ‘Love’, said the French philosopher Louis Lavelle, ‘is a pure attention to the existence of the other’.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

Instead of harmonizing socially mediated interests, an increasingly industrialized economy created class antagonisms and gross inequalities – an outcome that none of the salon philosophes could have anticipated in their own pre-industrial age.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Any policy of withdrawal would have required what critics—and the troops in the field—would call meaningless sacrifice and needless deaths. There was no “correct” or “just” policy, only bad choices.

N.B. This is written about Viet Nam, but it no doubt applies to Afghanistan as well. In both, we lost long before we left, making for a messy end. (Although to be fair, while Kabul looked in many ways like Saigon in 1975, on the whole, the exit was much less blotched & traumatic for the U.S. and to the locals.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.

Thoughts 22 Jan. 22

 

Last Best Hope

George Packer

More than anything, Trump was a demagogue—a thoroughly American type, familiar to us from novels like All the King’s Men and movies like Citizen Kane. “Trump is a creature native to our own style of government and therefore much more difficult to protect ourselves against,” the Yale political theorist Bryan Garsten wrote. “He is a demagogue, a popular leader who feeds on the hatred of elites that grows naturally in democratic soil.” A demagogue can become a tyrant, but it’s the people who put him there—the people who want to be fed fantasies and lies, the people who set themselves apart from and above their compatriots. So the question is not who Trump was, but who we are

The Enigma of Reason

Hugo Mercier

Facts, as we are using the term, are true propositions, abstract objects without causal powers. It is not, strictly speaking, the fact that some plums are ripe that causes them to fall from the tree; it is their ripeness itself or, to be more precise, it is the chemical and physical changes that define ripeness. Objective reasons, being facts, are themselves without causal powers. From our empirical point of view, it doesn’t matter whether objective reasons exist in the world independently of human interests and what well-defined criterion of objectivity they meet, if any. If we talk about objective reasons at all, it is because they are represented both in what people think and in what they say and, unlike facts, representations of facts do have causal powers.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

At one point I was going to call this book There Are No Things. I changed my mind when I saw that it might align me with a nihilistic trend in post-modernism that I deplore. It also gave the impression that I was arguing for ‘truth-as-correctness’ rather than ‘truth-as-unconcealing’. My aim is to clear away the assumptions that cloud our vision: and the assumption of a materialist world composed of ‘things’ is the greatest impediment we face.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

...ἡμεῖς δέ – τίνες δὲ ἡμεῖς; But we – who are we? —Plotinus

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Morgenthau may have been the philosopher of power politics, but he was also at pains to explain what power was not. The crucial point, often forgotten even by his own Realist disciples, was that violence was not political power. The threat of force might be necessary in international relations, but its use signaled the failure of political power and its displacement by military power, which was a very different thing.

Very near the thinking of Morgenthau's friend, Hannah Arendt.

Thoughts 11 Jan 2022

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Total independence is an imaginary construct, the limit case of interdependence, which is universal. And the whole is shot through with purpose (a notion, by the way, that has nothing to do with some sort of engineering God), and endlessly creative, not pointless and passive. This cosmos is one from which we are never separate, but out of which we arise, in which we dwell, and to which, finally, we return.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

My ultimate aim is to contribute a new perspective from which to look at the fundamental ‘building blocks’, as we think of them, of the cosmos: time, space, depth, motion, matter, consciousness, uniqueness, beauty, goodness, truth, purpose and the very idea of the existence or otherwise of a God. . . . Of course, these are vast topics, ones that have been grappled with by the ablest human minds for millennia; naturally I don’t presume to try to settle the disputes that have arisen. Moreover, I am very far from being the first person to argue that the prevailing view is badly mistaken. But I do believe that the [brain] hemisphere hypothesis casts a very revealing new light on those disputes and strongly suggests that the view that has prevailed – a view heavily indebted to a belief in reductionism – very seriously distorts the evidence of the nature of reality that is before our eyes if only we would attend to it fully. It provides a genuinely new and compelling context in which to revisit these issues, one that may encourage us toward very different conclusions.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

“Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself,” Friedman wrote. “A free market” was “a system of economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom.”

This equation of the "free market" and "economic freedom" as a "necessary condition for political freedom" bamboozled a lot of people. In short: it isn't. This isn't to say that markets aren't often useful (they are) or that decentralized economic decision-making implied by markets isn't efficient (it can be), but to equate economic decision-making with political decision-making is a category mistake.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

Zeno, or possibly Chrysippus, introduced yet another distinction within the “indifferent” class, that of appropriate and inappropriate actions (making, finally, seven categories of actions: virtuous, preferred, appropriate, indifferent, inappropriate, avoided, vicious). The distinction between appropriate and inappropriate actions is again one which the Cynics rejected. It was primarily a concession to social stability, a concern of the Stoics which the Cynics did not share.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Indeed, anyone who had lost patience with traditional politics and was looking for a new direction was a potential Nazi. They were the “catchall party of protest,” calling for people to put aside social divisions and class differences for the sake of a larger ideal, the nation, the Volk. The message had enormous appeal to any unaffiliated (and non-Jewish) voter, and to students and the young, who provided the party with its bustling energy, it was a political elixir.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Coming from a country [Germany] where “the people” had overridden all legal processes for the sake of what was viewed as the common good, she [Hannah Arendt] was highly sensitive to maintaining the role of law in society. And that role, pace [Sidney] Hook, was definitely not to enforce some notion of morality, which was a private matter and which she knew—obviously with Nietzsche whispering in her ear—could be defined any which way, depending on the momentary mood of the public. Hook’s government-enforced morality was a path on the way to the thought police and the midnight knock at the door. Against the vicissitudes of popular opinion, the law, developed through reason, persuasion, and judgment, provided stability and protection for the individual. The critics never really did understand her distinction between state and society. “Metaphysical mumbo jumbo,” one of them contemptuously called it. But then he had never experienced—or couldn’t even imagine—the damage that a tyranny of the majority could wreak (and he received an even more contemptuous flick of the wrist from Arendt in response).

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

Where is this unconscious today? Where do the roots suffer? Where are the sparks of Sophia buried in our present world’s darkness? Attention to them is Jung’s therapy of culture.

Doom

Niall Ferguson

Contrary to popular belief, Chesterton did not say, “When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in anything.” The nearest thing is in his short story “The Miracle of Moon Crescent”: “You hard-shelled materialists [are] all balanced on the very edge of belief—of belief in almost anything.”

Thoughts 5 Jan. 2022

 

Dr. (psychiatrist) Iain McGilchrist 

The Matter With Things

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.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

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.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

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).

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

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

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 Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

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.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

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 Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

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.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

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.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

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.

A Guide to the Good Life

William B. Irvine

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.

Perennial Seller

Ryan Holiday

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.

Thoughts 3 Jan. 2022

 

Published November 2021

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

This book is an attempt to convey a way of looking at the world quite different from the one that has largely dominated the West for at least three hundred and fifty years – some would say as long as two thousand years.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

We have been seriously misled, I believe, because we have depended on that aspect of our brains that is most adept at manipulating the world in order to bend it to our purposes. The brain is, importantly, divided into two hemispheres: you could say, to sum up a vastly complex matter in a phrase, that the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it – see it all for what it is. The problem is that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

By employing the dialectical insights of polarity theory, the political philosophy I’m arguing for here brings together the polarity of self-interest and greater-than-self-interest with [Charles] Taylor’s polarity of immanence and transcendence. These two polarities are integrated through the following steps of logic: At the micro-level of individual motivation, the pursuit of self-interest, when relatively successful, moves toward forms of self-actualization that can only be found through self-transcendence.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

Fiscal policy was even larger and more prompt. Central bank interventions were even more spectacular. If one married the two in one’s mind—fiscal and monetary policy together—it confirmed the essential insights of economic doctrines once advocated by radical Keynesians and made newly fashionable by doctrines like Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). State finances are not limited like those of a household. If a monetary sovereign treats the question of how to organize financing as anything more than a technical matter, that is itself a political choice.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

That [appreciating the reality of contingencies; the unexpected], not the application of predetermined formulas, was the mark of a great general. But accepting contingency did not mean forsaking planning or reasoned thinking. It simply meant that rationality was no panacea, that one always stood in the middle of life, not outside it, assessing and reassessing based on immediate circumstances and the best knowledge that was available at any given moment. Improvisation should be employed only when improvisation was required, and then rationally. The quality of independent, unsupported thinking that goes by the hard-to-pin-down name of “intuition” was an important element in victory.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

[Arthur] Schlesinger was left with clumsy quantitative tests—it was all right to get involved in Vietnam, but not too far; to bomb, but not too much; to engage in minor warfare but not with major casualties. Yet killing is never minor—there is no minor war, any more than there is minor murder. The question is, Do you kill out of self-defense or not? Is there a real threat to the people’s existence? When that threat becomes actual (not merely possible), we can take the minimum necessary means to preserve ourselves. When the threat ceases, so should our response.