Thoughts 31 Jan. 2022

 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

I argued in 1977 that the relatively open, egalitarian, individualistic, and libertarian societies prevailing in the modern world were the luxuriant fruit of an era of unparalleled ecological abundance occasioned first by Europe’s appropriation of the New World’s mostly untapped resources and then by the exploitation of first coal and then petroleum.

Apologies to the Grandchldren

William Ophuls

[Harrison] Brown’s larger point [published in 1954] was that political, social, and economic systems are decisively shaped by the quantity and quality of the available resources, especially the energy resources that are the sine qua non for exploiting every other resource. This was spelled out in more detail by Fred Cottrell in 1955. Using an array of historical examples, he showed that the availability of energy effectively determined the nature and fate of societies. And as the resource base on which it depended deteriorated, industrial civilization would experience a decline in the “net amount of surplus energy.”3 This would compel a painful regression to the mean that existed before the age of fossil fuels—i.e., an agrarian civilization.

Along these same lines, other authors—myself in 1977 and William Catton in 1980—used prose to describe the same predicament: overshoot followed inevitably by collapse unless major remedial actions were taken decisively and soon.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

In the . . . the right hemisphere version [of reality], as in the world the map represents, and in the world revealed to us by physics, by poetry, and simply by the business of living, things are almost infinitely more complex. Nothing is clearly the same as anything else. All is flowing and changing, provisional, and complexly interconnected with everything else. Nothing is ever static, detached from our awareness of it, or disembodied; and everything needs to be understood in context, where, if it is not to be denatured, it must remain implicit.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Long before we had anything other than the most rudimentary knowledge of hemisphere difference, a number of philosophers – Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson and Scheler among them – were able to intuit that there are two fundamentally distinct ways in which we approach the world, what Bergson called ‘two different orders of reality’. I would tentatively suggest that many of the great questions of philosophy in fact turn on which one you choose, an idea I explore throughout the rest of this book. One way of looking at paradox is as an indicator that we are dealing with two apparently valid world-pictures which yet do not concur.

The Enigma of Reason

Hugo Mercier

Is There a Method for Reasoning? Reasoning, as we have described it so far, is rather limited. Humans reason when they are trying to convince others or when others are trying to convince them. Solitary reasoning occurs, it seems, in anticipation or rehashing of discussions with others and perhaps also when one finds oneself holding incompatible ideas and engages in a kind of discussion with oneself. Just as with justifications, the production of arguments proceeds by means of backward inference, from a favored conclusion to reasons that would support it.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Liberal science, by contrast, separates the idea from the person. The critical method, Popper said, “consists in letting our hypotheses die in our stead.” In other words, we kill our hypotheses instead of each other.

Bird by Bird

Anne Lamott

“Do it every day for a while,” my father kept saying. “Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things.”

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

In the first place, there can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an Order of Things, and, in particular, of an Order of Nature. I have used the word instinctive advisedly.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

Evolutionary spirituality is evolution-inspired, world-embracing, and future-oriented. It is a creative, anticipatory spiritual path in which salvation, however we define that word, is to be found not in connection to the ancestral spirits of yesteryear, in promises of a heavenly beyond, in achieving a transcendent state of inner peace, or even in letting go into a timeless present, but in fully embracing the emergent potential contained in the depths of an evolving cosmos.

Thoughts 27 Jan. 2022

 

Ram Dass (1931-2019)

“One of the big traps we have in the West is our intelligence, because we want to know that we know. Freedom allows you to be wise, but you cannot know wisdom, you must be wisdom. When my guru wanted to put me down, he called me ‘clever.’ When he wanted to reward me, he would call me ‘simple.’ The intellect is a beautiful servant, but a terrible master. Intellect is the power tool of our separateness. The intuitive, compassionate heart is the doorway to our unity.”
— Ram Dass

Compare this with what McGilchrist argues in his books. 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

In The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, I aimed to dispel the unscientific fiction, popular at the time, that there was no significant difference between the hemispheres. This misconception was just as popular, and just as absurd, as any of the myths about supposed differences that were, and for all I know still are, being peddled in management seminars, and to which it was a knee-jerk reaction. In reality, as anyone who has worked with neurological and psychiatric patients knows, there is a world of difference between the two hemispheres: literally, since they give rise to two different experiential worlds. The question was not whether there was a difference – that was clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt – but why there was, and of what kind it might be.

My argument was, and is, that the nature of the difference between the hemispheres is far from anything hitherto imagined, and that it fulfils an evolutionary purpose of the utmost importance. It is not a separation of reason from emotion, or language from visuo-spatial skills, or any of the other things that used to be said, since, indeed, each hemisphere deals with absolutely everything – just in a reliably different way. The character and sheer extent of that difference, as well as its significance for the future of our civilisation, formed the subject of that book. And that difference could be seen as rooted in a difference in attention . . . .

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Science is now used to many fine ends; but, alas, inevitably much of the time in the service of the subjugation and destruction of Nature.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Some journalists, especially younger ones, ridicule the idea of objectivity as a “view from nowhere” and call for replacing it with “moral clarity,” by which they seem to mean their own political values.

Last Best Hope

George Packer

His populism brought the cynical cruelty of Jersey Shore to national politics. The goal of his speeches was not to whip up mass hysteria but to get rid of shame. He leveled everyone down together.

N.B. I didn't to back to the book to attempt to ID who the "his" in "His populism" is because we all know, don't we?

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

Biologist David Sloan Wilson captures this concern in his Evolution for Everyone, in which he describes how a young graduate attempting to apply the insights of evolutionary theory to other fields ran into a wall of opposition based on many of these negative presumptions when he tried to discuss his newfound interest with his professors and peers: [He] quickly learned that when [he] spoke of human behavior, psychology and culture in evolutionary terms, their minds churned through an instant and unconscious process of translation, and they heard “Hitler”, “Galton,” “Spencer,” “IQ differences,” “holocaust,” “racial phrenology,” “forced sterilization,” “genetic determinism,” “Darwinian fundamentalism,” and “disciplinary imperialism.”

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

The foundation legends, with their hiatus between liberation and the constitution of freedom, indicate the problem without solving it. They point to the abyss of nothingness that opens up before any deed that cannot be accounted for by a reliable chain of cause and effect and is inexplicable in Aristotelian categories of potentiality and actuality. In the normal time continuum every effect immediately turns into a cause of future developments, but when the causal chain is broken—which occurs after liberation has been achieved, because liberation, though it may be freedom’s conditio sine qua non, is never the conditio per quarn that causes freedom—there is nothing left for the “beginner” to hold on to. The thought of an absolute beginning—creatio ex nihilo—abolishes the sequence of temporality no less than does the thought of an absolute end, now rightly referred to as “thinking the unthinkable.”

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

The fact that certain people live, for example, on an island has in itself no effect on their history; what has an effect is the way they conceive that insular position; whether for example they regard the sea as a barrier or as a highway to traffic. Had it been otherwise, their insular position, being a constant fact, would have produced a constant effect on their historical life; whereas it will produce one effect if they have not mastered the art of navigation, a different effect if they have mastered it better than their neighbours, a third if they have mastered it worse than their neighbours, and a fourth if every one uses aeroplanes.

Thoughts 21 Jan. 22

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

An algorithm is what the left hemisphere wants; the recognition that it’s got to be free of any algorithm, yet not at all random, is characteristic of the understanding of the right hemisphere. We can specify what is not jazz, but not what is. Our knowledge of anything unique is similarly apophatic.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Just as ‘and’ is not merely additive, ‘not’ is not merely negative. Both are creative. Indeed resistance – ‘not-ness’ – is an absolute necessity for creation, another apparent paradox that will become clearer as this book unfolds.

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

This is what is known as the ’âlam al-mithâl, or, as Corbin calls it, the mundus imaginalis, or ‘Imaginal World’. As Corbin writes, this is ‘a very precise order of reality, which corresponds to a precise mode of perception’. This ‘order of reality’ and ‘mode of perception’ is based on a ‘visionary spiritual experience’ that Suhrawardi believed was ‘as fully relevant as the observations of Hipparchus and Ptolemy are considered to be relevant to astronomy’.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

As for the power of reason, it is the servant of what today we call confirmation bias, an idea Montaigne impressively anticipated. “Men’s opinions are accepted in the train of ancient beliefs, by authority and on credit, as if they were religion and law. They accept as by rote what is commonly held about it.… On the contrary, everyone competes in plastering up and confirming this accepted belief, with all the power of their reason, which is a supple tool, pliable, and adaptable to any form. Thus the world is filled and soaked with twaddle and lies.”

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

For sure, self-censorship is part of living together (we call it “courtesy”)—but not when it impedes honest conversation and criticism in university intellectual life, where honest conversation and criticism are the whole point of being there.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

“Demoralization,” I tell Theaetetus, “denies your agency. It makes you feel helpless. Don’t let them do that. You are not helpless.”

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The error is to think of radicals as political types or of radicalism as a set of ideas. The terms “radical” and “moderate” are not substantive but adverbial. Radicalism and moderation bear on pace, posture, and style, not content. The difference turns on how aims are held and acted on: rigidly or flexibly, zealously or temperately, in attacking thrusts or defensively dug in, bent on annihilating opposition or allowing for compromise, unable to live without conquest or able to survive defeat and failure.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

This old standard argument of the opponents of democracy was supported there by an unusually strong tradition of political passivity and by a no less unusually strong tradition of work and pure production. Taken together, these traditions made appear quite plausible a curious equating of purely technical capability with purely human activity, the latter of which has always had to do with questions of right and wrong. Once the moral basis of the knowledge of right and wrong, unarticulated as it was, began to crumble, the next step was to measure social and political actions by technical and work-oriented standards that were inherently alien to these larger spheres of human activity.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

Thinking, no doubt, plays an enormous role in every scientific enterprise, but it is the role of a means to an end; the end is determined by a decision about what is worthwhile knowing, and this decision cannot be scientific.

Be Here Now

Ram Dass

“Early in the journey   you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HERE and you will arrive NOW...so you stop asking.”

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

One reason I and others promote the idea that eating saturated fat from animal products is most likely benign is that we’ve been consuming these fats as a species for as long as humans have been a species. The evidence isn’t compelling enough to convince us that this assumption is likely to be wrong. We may or may not have been consuming as much of these saturated fats, but we can presume we are genetically adapted to eating them.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

Where Heidegger places his Dasein-redeeming confidence in primal anxiety, Benjamin places it in the rapture of different kinds of artificial paradise; the wild roar of rush-hour traffic replaces the experience of the storm high in the Black Forest; aimless flâneuring replaces the ski slope down to the abyss; absorption in outward things replaces the retreat into the interior; apparently random distraction occupies the space of contemplative concentration; the deracinated, disenfranchised masses of the international proletariat replace those people rooted in their homeland . . . Both Benjamin and Heidegger longed for revolutionary change, in everything that they were and had.

Thoughts 6 Jan. 2022

 

Are we seeing dawn or nightfall? 

N.B. Today is a day of remembrance. On 6 January 2021 the U.S. Capitol was sacked by native barbarians, a first. A year later, we must anticipate & respond to further attacks on democracy and the rule of law. I've not selected any special quotes for today, so, as usual, the selection will be a more or less random selection from my past reading. However, in the near future, I do intend to post some reflections about the state of our nation. 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Reductionism envisages a universe of things – and simply material things at that. How these things are related is viewed as a secondary matter. However, I suggest that relationships are primary, more foundational than the things related: that the relationships don’t just ‘connect’ pre-existing things, but modify what we mean by the ‘things’, which in turn modify everything else they are in relationship with. That is because what we are dealing with are, ultimately, relations, events, processes; ‘things’ is a useful shorthand for those elements, congealed in the flow of experience, that emerge secondarily from, and attract our attention in, a primary web of interconnexions. I have nothing against things, provided we don’t see them as primary.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

[W]e must also be prepared to find that, as Niels Bohr recognised, whereas trivial truths manifestly exclude their opposites, the most profound truths do not. This is itself a version of the realisation that what applies at the local level does not necessarily apply in the same way at the global level.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

Seeming—the it-seems-to-me, dokei moi—is the mode, perhaps the only possible one, in which an appearing world is acknowledged and perceived.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Since the 1960s modernity has had to contend increasingly with a new cultural opponent. Within the philosophy of developmental politics, this third major worldview is most frequently called “postmodernism,” although other terms such as the “cultural creatives” or the “green meme” are also sometimes used. Even though the term “postmodern” is itself a battleground of meaning, this word is very useful (and worth fighting for) because it well describes the modernist worldview’s cultural successor. Modernist critics of postmodernism attempt to define it narrowly by equating it with the critical theory of philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson, for instance, characterizes postmodernism as “cultural Marxism.” From Peterson’s perspective, postmodernism is not a new worldview but merely a virulent ideology that has hijacked academia.

Yet while academic critical theory is certainly a feature of postmodern culture, it is only a relatively small part of this larger worldview, and not all postmodernists agree with its tenets. As with modernism and traditionalism, the worldview of postmodernism is not a monolithic belief system. It is a cultural structure of progressive values that contains its own internal contradictions and debates. But as will become increasingly apparent as our discussion unfolds, postmodernism must be recognized, not merely as a critical branch of academia, but as a third major worldview in its own right.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Along the way . . . politicians and other public figures learned how easily they could manipulate journalistic two-sidedness to spread misinformation.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

The Constitution of Knowledge builds reputational credibility over decades; cancel culture demolishes it overnight.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Historians do not proceed by reference to testimony, but by putting testimony to the test.

Like trial lawyers.

Perennial Philosophy

Arthur Versluis

And the sun is also a god, Apollo, or Apollo Helios, whose name, Plotinus and others tell us, is a-pollo, or not-manyness, the god of light and life, of the sun, of prophecy, of truth. We experience the god within us as intelligible, that is, as reality perceptible by us; and this reality is experienced as the overwhelming illumination of light and the warmth and illumination of truth itself. It is also beautiful, even if its beauty is also terrible in its transcendent indifference and blasting light.

Thoughts 30 Dec. 2021

 

Immoderate Greatness

William Ophuls

A money economy takes the disconnection, and therefore the failure, one step further. The higher the level of economic development, the more money tends to become an abstraction rather than a counter for something concrete. Thus the economy can boom as the ecology disintegrates. This is particularly true if the society resorts to currency debasement or loose credit as a way to evade encroaching physical limits and foster an artificial prosperity, for then the economy becomes completely unhinged from concrete ecological reality. Overshoot and collapse is the inevitable result.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Propaganda is a campaign to influence public opinion without regard for truth, often (but not always) conducted by a state actor seeking some political outcome. It can exploit misinformation (false information), disinformation (deliberate falsehoods), and what has recently been called mal-information (information which is true but used misleadingly). Although the means vary widely, the end is this: to organize or manipulate the social and media environment to demoralize, deplatform, isolate, or intimidate an adversary.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

As America has become more unequal over the past five decades, its levels of trust have declined sharply. African Americans feel, with great justification, that they live in a separate and unequal world, one that is subject to different laws, standards, and attitudes than the world of White Americans.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The amount of ingenuity we require to achieve a given goal depends critically on two things: first, the intrinsic difficulty of achieving the goal and, second, the kinds and amounts of resources that we have available and that we can manipulate to achieve the goal.

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

Any food is a dessert if any form of sugar is one of the first three ingredients. Trader Joe’s Beef and Broccoli (32 grams of sugar) is a dessert. Chinese chicken salad is a dessert. We, and especially our kids, are eating and drinking dessert all day long. It captivates our brain’s reward center . . . , similar to drugs, so kids get hooked on sugar early.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

The Fed was a competent, high-functioning piece of the U.S. state apparatus. As such, it had unsurprisingly attracted Trump’s ire in the years prior to 2020.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Many ancient authors extolled the virtues of experiment and observation.9 But the Alexandrians, for all their research grants, found it a good deal harder to learn from experience than to praise doing so. The fields in which the careful recording of observational data perhaps went furthest in antiquity were divination and astrology. Cicero reports the Stoic arguments for divination and their replies to the Skeptics. It is an important passage both for its suggestion that in sciences without certainty a reasonable level of mistakes can be tolerated without that making the science worthless, and also for its use of random phenomena similar to dice throwing as a model of uncertainty.