Thoughts: 2 Nov 2021

 

2021 publication

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

America’s political dysfunction is ultimately a cultural problem whose solution lies at the level of values. So as we come to discover new methods for promoting the growth of values, the collective goal of cultivating cultural evolution on every front of its development will begin to seem increasingly desirable and achievable.

True but not at all easy or guaranteed to take-off.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The past two centuries have been a period of astonishing material and social progress for much of humanity—why should the future be different from the past? As the late Julian Simon, one of the optimists’ standard-bearers, wrote in 1995, “Almost every absolute change, and the absolute component of almost every economic and social change or trend, points in a positive direction, as long as we view the matter over a reasonably long period of time. That is, all aspects of material human welfare are improving in the aggregate.”

But has the neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich really been defeated (in his bet with Simon)? Homer-Dixon argues that we may very well face ingenuity gaps that we will not quickly or certainly close. Carbon capture, anyone?

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

Because American progressivism is, alongside French conservatism, the most schismatic of all faiths, with lifelong resentments governing everyone in turn and new schisms springing up every minute, Rustin had to exert a full court press to bring everyone together.

See the current Democratic Congress as a reference.

The New Leviathan

R. G. Collingwood

A body politic is a non-social community which, by a dialectical process also present in the family, changes into a society.

RGC sees a "society" as a voluntary group composed of consenting individuals, as a social contract theory and business law.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

What had taken its place was logic, and logic was the weapon of the totalitarians, who began with a fundamental premise from which everything else followed. (“If you believe A, then it necessarily follows that you must believe B . . . ,” and so on, down to the deaths of millions.)

Channeling Hannah Arendt in the quote.

The Big Fat Surprise

Nina Teicholz

Karl Popper, described, “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.”

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

Aretê implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency—or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 31 July 2021

 

The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Gary Lachman

John Horgan’s The End of Science (1996) was subtitled Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. In Grammars of Creation (2001), George Steiner, one of the last European cultural mandarins, laments that “We have no more beginnings” and concludes that there is “in the climate of spirit at the end of the twentieth century, a core tiredness.” “We are, or feel ourselves to be, latecomers.” And in From Dawn to Decadence (2001), an account of the last five hundred years, the historian Jacques Barzun—who died in 2012 at the age of 104—presents a picture of early twenty-first-century man undergoing what he calls the “Great Undoing,” the West’s self-immolation at the hands of chat shows, gangsta rap, and fashionable deconstructionism.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Authoritarianism, by contrast [to fascism], allows independent economic and social bodies, forms of limited representation, and a degree of freedom for religion. Its enemy is democratic participation. It also stifles opposition by violence and fear but stabilizes itself by relying on passive acquiescence in a trade-off of social quiet for loss of political role. The fascist is a nonconservative who takes anti-liberalism to extremes. The right-wing authoritarian is a conservative who takes fear of democracy to extremes.

The Big Fat Surprise

Nina Teicholz

In general, a researcher always has a choice of which studies to select and which to reject in working toward a hypothesis. In this process, it’s hard to overcome the essentially human instinct to select only those observations that conveniently support one’s own hypothesis while rejecting those that do not.

The Great Transformation

Karen Armstrong

In our modern world, ritual is often thought to encourage a slavish conformity, but the Brahmin ritualists [at the beginning of the Axial Age of India] had used their science to liberate themselves from the external rites and the gods, and had created a wholly novel sense of the independent, autonomous self.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

The coherence of Nixon’s own views has not generally been recognized, and for an important reason: this would involve the admission that American liberalism and the emulative ethic cohere—inhere, rather, in each other. All our liberal values track back to a mystique of the earner.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Detecting trustworthiness is a basic life skill in small groups which depend on sharing and reciprocity, and so people have developed good bullshit detectors. The best way around other people’s bullshit detectors is to believe what you say. If your social reputation and group identity depend upon believing something, then you will find a way to believe it. In fact, your brain will help you by readily accepting and recalling congenial information while working to bury and ignore uncongenial information.

Principles

Ray Dalio

“What was most important wasn't knowing the future—it was knowing how to react appropriately to the information available at each point in time.”

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 17 June 2021

 

Greeks ancient to contemporary & Paddy Leigh Fermor 

Natural Born Heroes

Christopher McDougall

Instead of bowing down to saints and miracles, the Greeks worshipped problem solvers and hard how-to. They understood the difference between heroism and impulse, and they devised an easy, two-step test for telling them apart: 1. Would you do it again? 2. And could you?

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

Just as the original sense of the word ‘cause’ is what I have called the historical sense, according to which that which is caused is the act of a conscious and responsible agent, so the original sense of the word ‘necessary’ is an historical sense, according to which it is necessary for a person to act in a certain way: deciding so to act and acting therefore freely and responsibly, yet (in a sense which in no wise derogates from his responsibility) ‘necessitated’ to act in that way by certain ‘causes’, in sense I [#1] of the word ‘cause’.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

The decision the will arrives at can never be derived from the mechanics of desire or the deliberations of the intellect that may precede it. The will is either an organ of free spontaneity that interrupts all causal chains of motivation that would bind it or it is nothing but an illusion.

The Big Fat Surprise

Nina Teicholz

As the accompanying graph shows, the only fats that could be found in any American kitchen up until about 1910 were those that came exclusively from animals: lard (the fat from pigs), suet (the fat from around an animal’s kidneys), tallow (a harder fat from sheep and cattle), butter, and cream.

Fear Itself

Ira Katznelson

He [Walter Lippmann] further identified the rupture between past and present—in the democracies as well as the dictatorships—with two revolutionary developments in modern politics he believed to be “wholly without precedent in history.” First was the active and self-conscious participation in government by “the masses of men,” making of “modern government in our Western World, even under the dictatorships,” something of “a daily plebiscite.” The legitimacy of any government thus had come to depend on its ability to solve problems and formulate policies to which the governed would offer consent, both active and passive.

Sources for Thinking About Climate Change and Diet re Foer's We Are the Weather

 

My spur to deeper inquiry & perhaps some knowledge

This brief bibliography and videography is an addendum to my review of this book. The review was critical (and included praise as well). I stated several contentions that I didn't cite. This brief piece provides some sources of my thinking and my general outlook toward the challenge of climate change, diet, and our political economy. Needless to say, this could be a much, much longer document. But I think it covers sources for particular contentions that I made and informs any reader about my general attitude on these issues. 

1. 1     Climate Change Generally

1. Two thinkers who've most influenced how I think about climate change

1. 1. William Patrick Ophuls. His books (linked to my reviews)

1. Ecology & the Politics of Scarcity Revisited by William Ophuls & A. Stephen Boyan, Jr.

2. Requiem for Modern Politics: The Tragedy of the Enlightenment & the Challenge of the Next Millennium by William Ophuls

3. Back to the Future: A Review of Plato’s Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology by Patrick (William) Ophuls

4. Decline & Fall in the 21st Century: A Review of Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail by William Ophuls

5. Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences by William (Patrick) Ophuls

2. Thomas Homer-Dixon, The following three books by Homer-Dixon create a trilogy of books dealing with climate change and related issues. 

1. The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future? by Thomas Homer-Dixon

2. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization by Thomas Homer-Dixon (to my chagrin, I realize that I haven’t written a review of this fine work. Something to fix). 

3. Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril by Thomas Homer-Dixon

2. My best resource about the current situation & prospects regarding climate change: Uninhabitable Earth; Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (2019)

2. On Diet in General

1. Gary Taubes: Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)) and Why We Get Fat & What We Can Do About It (2011) & all his books published since then. 

2. Nina Teicholz, Big Fat Lie (2014) and this 2021 Youtube video, “The Science & Politics of Red Meat 2021” 

3. On Agriculture, Plant & Livestock

1. Sacred Cow, documentary film available on Amazon & iTunes. (There is a companion book as well, but I haven’t read it yet.) 

2. Kiss the Ground documentary film available on Netflix. 

3. Eating Less Meat Won’t Save the Planet. Here’s Why and   Are Cows really Bad for the Planet? Why did we start blaming them?  From the “What I’ve Learned” video essayist Joseph Everett. (Although somewhat redundant, it’s worth your time to watch both. As usual with Everett, thoroughly researched and well-presented.) 

4. Sustainable/Regenerative Agriculture

1. Changing Paradigms: Regenerative Agriculture: a Solution to our Global Crisis? | Full Documentary. About Australian farmer Charlie Massy about his experience in traditional and regenerative farming. 

2. How regenerative farming can help heal the planet and human health. Charles Massy TEDx talk. 

3. Running out of Time | Documentary on Holistic Management. Zimbabwe farmer Allan Savory on holistic management of his farm. 

4. Cows, Carbon & Climate. Virginia farmer Joel Salatin’s TEDx talk. 

5. Mainstream Press Articles: Recent & Relevant

1. Meat Is Murder. But You Know That Already by Mark Bittman in the NYT is a well-considered review of We Are the Weather that anticipated many of my concerns about Foer’s shortcomings. I still nevertheless disagree with Bittman on some points. He still peddles the “meat is bad for you” line, but he understands the need for pricing accurately (all costs of production of any foods), the problems of industrial plant agriculture, Big Food, & junk food. N.B. I almost didn’t read this review because I found the title insipid, and I feared that the article would prove likewise. I’m happy that this didn’t prove so.  

2. The Washington Post ran three op-ed pieces in one day (15 May), well after I posted my review, but still relevant. They are: 

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/beef-isnt-bhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ditching-meat-isnt-the-answer-for-climate-change-better-farming-is/2021/05/14/86001c36-b426-11eb-ab43-bebddc5a0f65_story.htmleing-banned-but-its-always-a-staple-of-the-culture-war-diet/2021/05/14/6c58919e-b423-11eb-ab43-bebddc5a0f65_story.html

2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-meat-industry-is-doing-exactly-what-big-oil-does-to-fight-climate-action/2021/05/14/831e14be-b3fe-11eb-ab43-bebddc5a0f65_story.html

3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ditching-meat-isnt-the-answer-for-climate-change-better-farming-is/2021/05/14/86001c36-b426-11eb-ab43-bebddc5a0f65_story.html

6. A rebuttal site with a downloadable pdf attachment from “What I’ve Learned” guy Joseph Everett in response to criticisms of his two video essays listed above. This guy does his homework. 

7. As you can imagine, this list could go on forever, and should. We’re still learning and will all have to constantly calibrate our positions as new (dependable) information becomes available. Thanks to Jonathan Safran Foer for starting my internal conversation and the spur to look into the issues his book raised.