Thoughts 23 Jan 2022

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

But truth, like reality, is an encounter. It is in the nature of an encounter that more than one element is involved. And what I find in whatever-it-is does not pre-exist my encounter with it. There must be a potential, true enough, but it is actualised only in my encounter with it. The encounter is genuinely creative. The whole universe is constantly creative – but not out of nowhere.

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

[T]his culture of care must include not just those of us alive today, but also future generations—a point the pope makes more than once, in both economic and moral terms. Our current economic models literally dis-count the future, insofar as damage in the future is counted as costing less than damage today, but what sort of a calculus is it that concludes that our needs are greater than our children’s? The notion of the common good, the pope concludes, also extends to future generations: “We can no longer speak of sustainable development apart from intergenerational solidarity …" [Naomi Oreskes writing in the Introduction.]

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

In general, the net effect of tax and welfare systems in all countries is to reduce inequality at least to some degree. However, welfare can also serve a conservative function. Indeed, the historic purpose of the welfare state as it emerged in Bismarckian Germany in the 1880s was precisely that—to preserve the social status hierarchy across the vicissitudes of sickness, old age, and, eventually, unemployment.34 That was the principal logic of spending in 2020. The crisis affected the entire economy. No one was to blame. Everyone should be made whole. So the range of potential claimants on state support exploded.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Our minds don’t have direct control over every autonomic process. We can’t just think the word “adrenaline” and trigger the hormonal release we want. But we can put ourselves in situations that trigger that same predictable hormonal release. When we choose stressors, we choose our biological reactions. The same goes for the immune system: We can’t think it into action, but we can certainly change the environment that the immune system responds and reacts to.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

The meta-programming circuit — known as the “soul” in Gnosticism, the “no-mind” (wu-hsin) in China, the White Light of the Void in Tibetan Buddhism, Shiva-darshana in Hinduism, the True Intellectual Center in Gurdjieff — simply represents the brain becoming aware of itself.

Time and Narrative, Volume 3

Paul Ricoeur, trans. by Kathleen Blamey, and David Pellauer

[F]rom an Augustinian point of view, the future and the past exist only in relation to a present, that is, to an instant indicated by the utterance designating it. The past is before and the future after only with respect to this present possessing the relation of self-reference, attested to by the very act of uttering something.

Immoderate Greatness

William Ophuls

Unfortunately, although naturally clever, human beings are not innately wise, especially in crowds.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

Emerson begins his essay “Character” with four paragraphs on morals, three of them opening with that very word. “The will constitutes the man,” he writes. In this Emerson is little different from the most influential of all Victorian philosophers, John Stuart Mill: “A character is a completely fashioned will.”

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 2 Jan. 2022

 

On Tyranny

Timothy Snyder

What is truth?” Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Change can be unwelcome or challenging even when there is no particular reason to fear its consequences. But if it threatens stability, order, or an established way of life, then fear, anger, and hatred can become epidemic. Aversion to even trivial losses is another well demonstrated trait of the human mind; how much more so if one’s entire way of life is threatened.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

Political responsibility is measured against forward-looking projections, forecasts, and warnings of what is to come. The greater the future threat, the greater the responsibility. There are good reasons that states have often passed laws against fortune-tellers and prophets of doom. It is not just that their methods are suspect. Their predictions right or wrong are apt to endanger the public peace of mind. And yet, in the twenty-first century, there are no laws against social scientists and epidemiologists predicting catastrophe. Indeed, those wielding power and money cling to whatever foresight they can offer.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

Steady GDP growth is the duct tape holding together this jerry-rigged social order in which low-income Americans have little to no emergency savings, many basic welfare benefits are contingent on employment, and the threadbare safety net is patchy by design. This top-heavy, gold-plated jalopy of a political economy can pass as road safe in fair weather; try to ride it through a once-in-a-century epidemiological storm and it starts to break apart.

The Wedge

Scott Carney,

Why not try to treat autoimmune illnesses in the same way that we do anxiety—by interrupting external feedback loops and allowing the body to return to its original baseline? Just because autoimmune illness takes place in the body doesn’t mean that’s where the conditions start.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Keynes’s fellow countryman Lord Bryce, one of the keenest observers of the age, declared in 1902 that “for economic purposes all mankind is fast becoming one people.” Later that decade, Norman Angell’s best-selling book The Great Illusion argued that the major European countries had become so interdependent that starting a war would evidently be self-defeating.

And yet the war came.

A Secret History of Christianity

Mark Vernon

We become what we are, as Nietzsche put it, so it’s crucial today to adjust what you imagine you are, because it is already determining your perception of tomorrow.

Impeachment

Cass R. Sunstein

At the same time, bad decisions, or politically objectionable decisions, are not sufficient grounds for impeachment, even if much of the nation is up in arms. The United States, unlike some other democracies, does not allow votes of no confidence.

Collingwood's The Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Historical sequences take this as their model, each action standing non-causally to the other. In the chess example, however, the freedom to move one way or the other is dependent on accepting the authority of the rules of chess. Historical sequences are both rule-governed and expressive of freedom, but the rules change over time, and so, as Collingwood writes, ‘it is the task of the historian to discover what principles guided the actions of the persons he is studying, and not to assume that these have always been the same’ (IH 475).

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

Let us give the six their right names ["art falsely so-called;" "crafts"]. Where an emotion is aroused for its own sake, as an enjoyable experience, the craft of arousing it is amusement; where for the sake of its practical value, magic (the meaning of that word will be explained in chapter IV). Where intellectual faculties are stimulated for the mere sake of their exercise, the work designed to stimulate them is a puzzle; where for the sake of knowing this or that thing, it is instruction. Where a certain practical activity is stimulated as expedient, that which stimulates it is advertisement or (in the current modern sense, not the old sense) propaganda; where it is stimulated as right, exhortation.

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

Perhaps we, as therapists and as patients, can live with both eyes open and travel both roads, alternately or even both at once. T. S. Eliot wrote, “Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still” (Ash Wednesday), which could be translated for us as: “Teach us to grow and not to grow. Teach us simply to look.” Or, as Goethe said, “Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but not as interesting as looking” (Maxims and Reflections).

Thoughts 22 Dec 2021

 

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

[Henry, if I'm recalling correctly] Ford was channeling the attitude of [Herbert] Hoover’s recently reassigned Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, who had advocated a response to the Depression that amounted to financial nihilism: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate,” he told Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness from the system…people will work harder, live a more moral life.” That had been [Frederick] Hayek’s position in his attack on A Treatise on Money. A bust was the inevitable consequence of a reckless boom, and any government sugarcoating of the necessary losses would only make matters worse.

To wit, burden everyone with a depression to purge the system; pre-Keynesian economics performing the work of 18th-century physicians: don't have a cure? Then bleed the patient! No wonder Hoover (who didn't buy into Mellon's extremism) didn't win re-election with advisors like Mellon! 

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Feedback can be positive or negative. By “positive” feedback, complexity theorists don’t mean that the feedback is always a “good” thing. Instead, they mean that the feedback reinforces or amplifies the initial change, and in the process it creates a virtuous or vicious circle.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

“Briefly, what I am proposing,” [Clare] Graves writes in the article that first introduced [Don] Beck to his work, “is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as man’s existential problems change.”

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

A long process of trial and error has weeded out the bad innovations, leaving behind what has stood the test of time. The result may not be perfect, but it is probably the best that can be accomplished with the materials at hand. Evolution or ecology should not be used to justify wealth and privilege or inherited evils, but it does imply a Burkean stance toward change. There is a kind of wisdom contained in the system—biological or social—that we would be wise to study and understand before we launch “reforms” based on our “progressive” ideas.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Even today, now that it has achieved stability and strength (if on the bodies of millions of victims), it is not clear that the leaders in Beijing accept the Westphalian concept of a community of nations in which each country is left alone to pursue its own national interest as long as it does not upset the world order by threatening others.

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

Caponigri, Time and Idea, 131: “ ‘Ricorsi’ appears in Vico, in the first instance, as a methodological notion. It designates a methodological device for making effective his discovery of the primacy of poetry and, with this, of the genuine time-structure and movement of history. It consists in the employment of the categories of poetic wisdom for the interpretation of the cultural and social structures of post-poetic times. By this employment there is determined abstract contemporaneity between time-form structures.” In other words: archetypal persons transcend historical limitations even as they manifest themselves in historical time. These poetic figures are the ultimate categories for understanding human existence.

Thoughts 9 December 2022

 

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

Fresh drinking water is an issue of primary importance, since it is indispensable for human life and for supporting terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.

This may seem a trite observation--dah! But for those living in the Mountain West and many other places around the globe, it's becoming an existential issue.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Economists have shown, through detailed research, that profit opportunities created by market demand are the usual motive for technological innovation. (But they are not the only motive: social idealism, the quest for power, and the desire to achieve intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction also drive technological innovation.)

Last Best Hope

George Packer

There’s a strain of class prejudice in Just America. “A hairdresser has to go to school for longer than you do!” a shirtless young man taunted a line of police officers during a protest in New York.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Allowing for national differences, four general things may be said about the hard right. First, it had a common character. The hard right combined economic libertarians and aggrieved nation-firsters, united in opposition, as they saw things, to self-serving, out-of-touch elites that had perverted true conservatism. The hard right showed a radical willingness, where in power, to upset familiar norms and arrangements all at once. In or out of power, the hard right used a shared repertoire of rhetorical appeals that skillfully disguised its inner tensions.

Why Nations Fail

Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

This book will show that while economic institutions are critical for determining whether a country is poor or prosperous, it is politics and political institutions that determine what economic institutions a country has.

Perennial Philosophy

Arthur Versluis

But intellect participates in that which it perceives; intellection is participation. Although from a limited sensory perspective, it appears that we perceive objects separate from ourselves, this is true only at the outermost level of experience. As our attention is turned inward and our consciousness ascends, if we may so put it, we also begin to recognize that we participate in beings and beings participate in us; intellection of the intelligible is recognition of what is within us and of what we must be able to recognize as in the continuum of our own field of knowing.

If you've read Bernardo Kastrup, compare this to what Kastrup argues.

After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre

The Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition of the virtues is, like some, although not all other moral traditions, a tradition of enquiry. It is characteristic of traditions of enquiry that they claim truth for their central theses and soundness for their central arguments.

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

This curious phenomenon of permeability, this fact that the human mind is always subject to influences, invasions, inspirations, that it is distracted from its purposes, washed over and windswept by all sorts of flotsam and scraps — fantasies, voices, spirits and angels — seems its basic condition.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.