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 7 Jan. 2022

 

A bestseller! (Well, at least it's sold out its first printing)

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

I believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the left hemisphere’s task is to ‘re-present’ what first ‘presences’ to the right hemisphere. This re-presentation has all the qualities of a virtual image: an infinitely thin, immobile, fragment of a vast, seamless, living, ever-flowing whole. From a standpoint within the representation, everything is reversed. Instead of seeing what is truly present as primary, and the representation as a necessarily diminished derivative of it, we see reality as merely a special case of our representation – one in which something is added in to ‘animate’ it. In this it is like a ciné film that consists of countless static slices requiring a projector to bring it back into what at least looks to us like a living flow. On the contrary, however, reality is not an animated version of our re-presentation of it, but our re-presentation a devitalised version of reality. It is the re-presentation that is a special, wholly atypical and imaginary, case of what is truly present, as the filmstrip is of life – the re-presentation is simply what one might call the ‘limit case’ of what is real. Stepping out of this world-picture and into the world, stepping out of suspended animation and back into life, will involve inverting many of our perhaps cherished assumptions.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

Self-distrust led to more boosting of the Volk, and the fantasy that the people rooted in blood and soil would eventually triumph over rootless cosmopolitans, confirming Germany’s moral and cultural superiority over its neighbours. Thus, [late nineteenth century] Germany generated a phenomenon now visible all over Europe and America: a conservative variant of populism that posits a state of primal wholeness, or unity of the people, against transnational elites, while being itself deeply embedded in a globalized modern world.

Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt

Such fundamental and flagrant contradictions rarely occur in second-rate writers, in whom they can be discounted. In the work of great authors they lead into the very center of their work and are the most important clue to a true understanding of their problems and new insights. In Marx, as in the case of other great authors of the last century, a seemingly playful, challenging, and paradoxical mood conceals the perplexity of having to deal with new phenomena in terms of an old tradition of thought outside of whose conceptual framework no thinking seemed possible at all. It is as though Marx, not unlike Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, tried desperately to think against the tradition while using its own conceptual tools.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The shaken liberal mood was caught with near-despair in an article by the economist John Maynard Keynes in 1923: “We are today the most creedless of men. Every one of our religious and political constructions is moth-eaten.” Keynes did not mean “liberal” in a party-political sense. He was talking of a liberal world that conservative governments had done much to create. In fixing the blame for the 1914–18 war and the harsh peace that followed, mainstream conservatism took a large share, not least from intellectuals on the right.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

The birth of the noosphere, according to Teilhard [de Chardin], coincided with the birth of Homo sapiens sapiens, the birth of self-reflective thought in higher primates, the birth of the animal who knows that he knows and has an interior life unlike any the world had ever seen.

Decoding Jung's Metaphysics

Bernardo Kastrup

As the growth of a crystal is ordered by an abstract lattice structure, the unfolding of both psyche and physical world are ordered according to archetypal patterns. Jung then further conjectures that numbers also have an archetypal foundation or character: they are archetypes of order (cf. S: 57-59). This conjecture—further elaborated upon by Jung’s pupil, psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz, in 1974—allows us to solve a problem that only became widely acknowledged in the last year of Jung’s life: the question of why and how mathematics models and predicts the order of the physical world so accurately and precisely.

Thoughts 15 Dec. 2021

 

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

If a society relied excessively on financial markets to allocate resources, develop research, and improve industry, Keynes believed, it was destined for underperformance, instability, and unemployment. He had designed a theory and a policy agenda in which financial markets were subjugated to the authority of the state, believing the coordinated action of a government was capable of meeting the investment needs of society which financial markets could only secure through fleeting accidents.

Have financial markets become any more successful (in terms of any reasonable understanding of the common good) than they were in Keynes's day?

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

The financial run for safety happened very fast. It made sense individually. But when implemented simultaneously by the men and women who manage tens of trillions of dollars worldwide, it threatened total systemic collapse and forced massive intervention by the state.

Lots of individually rational decisions can result in collective failure (irrationality).

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

The Romantics seeded a whole tradition of Anglo-American criticism in the nineteenth century to which the conservative Dickens belongs as much as Thoreau, who famously asserted in his section on ‘Economy’ in Walden (1854) that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’. This largely moral critique of modernity was broadened by writers in countries playing ‘catch-up’ with the Atlantic West. The Russians, in particular, stressed social facts: the ill-directed energy and posturing of political elites, and the loss of a sense of community and personal identity.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

One does not first acquire a language and then use it. To possess it and to use it are the same. We only come to possess it by repeatedly and progressively attempting to use it.

The Future of History

John Lukacs

“The law is a coarse net; and truth is a slippery fish.” Yes: but a net, however coarse, is better than no net at all. Yet the purpose of law has little (and sometimes nothing) to do with truth. It is the establishment of justice—or, more precisely, the protection against injustice. And justice is of a lower order than is truth (and untruth is lower than injustice. All of Christ’s parables taught people to follow truth, not justice). The administration of justice, even with the best of intentions for correcting injustice, may often have to overlook or even ignore untruths during the judicial process.

Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt

Among Arendt’s chief concerns in Between Past and Future is to convey a concrete sense of the high price traditional thought will pay when a conception of human affairs, of political reality, which no longer conforms to our experience is relinquished. The traditional conception, which lasted for more than two thousand years, derives, as we have seen, from Plato, to whom Arendt refers more than any other thinker in this book, and nowhere more decisively than in her reading of his familiar cave allegory. The heart of her reading is Plato’s justification of the rule of philosopy, “the domination of human affairs by something outside its own realm.”

From the Introduction written by Jerome Kohn.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

In one passage [Buddha] rejects the premise that what is useful is true, what is useless, false. There are statements, he says, which are true but useless. Again, four categories are implied: (1) true and useful, (2) true and useless (like knowing how many insects there are in the world, to use a later Buddhist example), (3) false and useful, (4) false and useless. In this formulation he said that he himself bothered to teach only what was both true and useful.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

In the rationalist and absolutist tradition self-canceling or uroboric formulas were excluded from the discourse about experience, where they were seen as invalid by contradiction, and were applied only in discourse about the transcendent and absolute One. The Neopythagorean Moderatus, for example, used the formula “It is neither this nor that” to describe the transcendent One; Plotinus said of the One, “It is the not-this.” In this tradition it was considered that Plato had shown (primarily, but not exclusively, in the Parmenides) that language must lapse into paradox when it approaches ultimate reality.

Crafting Hypnotic Spells! - Casebook Confessions of a Rogue Hypnotist

The Rogue Hypnotist

Confusion is hypnotic because it creates absorption: that's it! If you are confused you are temporarily trying to understand something – this absorbs your attention.

Thoughts: 9 October 2021

 

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

True understanding is distinguished from public opinion in both its popular and scientific forms only by its refusal to relinquish the original intuition. To put it in a schematic and therefore necessarily inadequate way, it is as though, whenever we are confronted with something frighteningly new, our first impulse is to recognize it in a blind and uncontrolled reaction strong enough to coin a new word; our second impulse seems to be to regain control by denying that we saw anything new at all, by pretending that something similar is already known to us; only a third impulse can lead us back to what we saw and knew in the beginning. It is here that the effort of true understanding begins.

Last Best Hope

George Packer

The cosmopolitan outlook of Smart America overlaps in some areas with the libertarian views of Free America. Each embraces capitalism and the principle of meritocracy: the belief that your talent and effort should determine your reward.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

And even as he urged nationalization of the railroads, Keynes faulted FDR for taking too hard a rhetorical line with business interests, courting unnecessary conflict. They were not “wolves and tigers” but “domestic animals” who “have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish.”

sng: What would Keynes say today about "business interests" such as Big Tech, Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Big Money in general? Are they poorly trained pets or are they beasts that need to be caged and tamed?

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

This cyclical view of history, whether in Joyce, Rattray Taylor, Vico (Joyce’s source), Hegel-and-Marx, etc. is only part of the truth, but it needs to be stressed because it is the part that most people fearfully refuse to recognize. Whether we speak in terms of Taylor’s Matrist-Patrist dialectic, Vico’s cycle of Divine, Heroic and Urbanized ages, the Marx-Hegel trinity of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, or any variation thereon, we are speaking of a pattern that is real and that does repeat.

sng: Patterns: yes. Eternal (or unchanging) patterns: no.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

‘What is the status of mathematical entities, such as numbers for example, in the realm of things?’ The number ‘two,’ for example, is in some sense exempt from the flux of time and the necessity of position in space. Yet it is involved in the real world. The same considerations apply to geometrical notions—to circular shape, for example. Pythagoras is said to have taught that the mathematical entities, such as numbers and shapes, were the ultimate stuff out of which the real entities of our perceptual experience are constructed. As thus baldly stated, the idea seems crude, and indeed silly.

Technopoly

Neil Postman

Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean “ecological” in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Political freedom, Arendt insisted in the book’s [On Revolution] final pages, “means the right ‘to be a participator in government,’ or it means nothing.” The colonial townships and assemblies, building pyramidally to the constitutional conventions, were paradigms of citizen participation, but the popular elections that Americans today consider the hallmark of their democratic republic are hardly the same thing.

sng: An important point. Elections are a necessary but not (at all) sufficient condition for democracy. We in the U.S. would do well to try to reinvigorate local and state governments as decision-making bodies that use more citizen participation, such as sortition.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

Responding to Fukuyama’s thesis [about the end of history arriving] in 1989, Allan Bloom was full of foreboding about the gathering revolts against a world that ‘has been made safe for reason as understood by the market’, and ‘a global common market the only goal of which is to minister to men’s bodily needs and whims’. ‘If an alternative is sought,’ Bloom wrote, ‘there is nowhere else to seek it. I would suggest that fascism has a future, if not the future.’ The English political philosopher John Gray warned of the return of ‘more primordial forces, nationalist and religious, fundamentalist and soon, perhaps, Malthusian’ that the Cold War had tranquillized; he pointed to the intellectual incapacity of liberalism as well as Marxism in this new world order.

sng: I've never quite gotten a handle on Bloom and don't know Gray's book, but I contend that Fukuyama is often sold short. He didn't write The End of History, he wrote The End of History and The Last Man. The Last Man refers to Nietzche's dire prophecy. It takes the shine off of the end of history euphoria, more a popular attitude than Fukuyama's thesis.

Book by Book

Michael Dirda

The novelist’s task, as Joseph Conrad famously said, is simply “to make you see.”

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 31 August 2021

 

Dr. Lustig's most recent comprehensive critique & guidance about our health & health system

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

Politics must pay greater attention to foreseeing new conflicts and addressing the causes which can lead to them. But powerful financial interests prove most resistant to this effort, and political planning tends to lack breadth of vision. What would induce anyone, at this stage, to hold on to power only to be remembered for their inability to take action when it was urgent and necessary to do so?

(Location 647)

For all our limitations, gestures of generosity, solidarity and care cannot but well up within us, since we were made for love. (p.36)

59. At the same time we can note the rise of a false or superficial ecology which bolsters complacency and a cheerful recklessness. As often occurs in periods of deep crisis which require bold decisions, we are tempted to think that what is happening is not entirely clear. Superficially, apart from a few obvious signs of pollution and deterioration, things do not look that serious, and the planet could continue as it is for some time. Such evasiveness serves as a licence to carrying on with our present lifestyles and models of production and consumption. This is the way human beings contrive to feed their self-destructive vices: trying not to see them, trying not to acknowledge them, delaying the important decisions and pretending that nothing will happen. (pp. 36-37)

After you've carefully considered the above, chew (mentally) on these thoughts: 

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

[T]he main reason for high triglycerides has nothing to do with LDL-C; rather, it’s the refined carbohydrates and sugars in your diet. Again, the #1 risk factor for heart disease isn’t LDL-C; it’s the insulin resistance of metabolic syndrome, of which triglyceride is a much better biomarker than LDL-C.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

People were not being asked to believe something they knew to be false; they were being asked to put their faith in something new. “There is an element in the readjustment of our financial system more important than currency, more important than gold, and that is the confidence of the people. Confidence and courage are the essentials of success in carrying out our plan. You people must have faith; you must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses. Let us unite in banishing fear. We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system; it is up to you to support and make it work. “It is your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.”

I'm not sure who Carter is quoting above. My best guess is FDR. Alas, this was a public library read, so I don't have access to go back to check. But in any event, it's the thought that counts, right?

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

The ravaging of Libya, which suffered the world’s first aerial bombing in 1912, confirmed that the emerging New Man, theorized by Nietzsche and Sorel, and empowered by technology, saw violence as an existential experience – an end in itself, and perpetually renewable.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

In courtroom fashion, [James Fitzjames] Stephen bored away at weaknesses in [John Stuart] Mill’s proscription of coercive interference with personal liberty, which Mill himself recognized and had sought to patch. Society had no say over personal conduct, Mill insisted, unless it harmed others. To that “harm principle,” Stephen made familiar objections. The distinction between harm to self and others was unstable. Besides, Mill gave no usable gauge for the wrong of coercion or the worth of liberty. Mill’s arguments for free speech either failed or clashed with his utilitarian principles.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

When a person seeks out an altered state, we reflexively think of it as a moral failing. But what happens when feelings and sensations are the goal? In cases where altering the external stress is impossible, our mindsets can get reflexively fixed, and sometimes the only place to insert a wedge is in the sensory pathways themselves.