Thoughts 29 January 2022

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Thus the need to sustain two incompatible ‘takes’ on the world simultaneously explains, I believe (and there is no significant competing theory), the extraordinary fact that the brain is so deeply divided, an otherwise inexplicable waste of potential in an organ that exists only to make connexions, and whose power lies, precisely, in the number of connexions it can make.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Attention is not just another ‘cognitive function’: it is, as I say, the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged.

The Way of Zen

Alan W. Watts

In English the differences between things and actions are clearly, if not always logically, distinguished, but a great number of Chinese words do duty for both nouns and verbs–so that one who thinks in Chinese has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events, that our world is a collection of processes rather than entities.

Consider in light of McGilchrist's take, which I find very similar.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

The GOP’s base of electoral support was heavily recruited from the white working class. If we take education as a proxy for class, the single best predictor other than race for voting for Trump was the lack of a college degree. The result was a party unified around themes of cultural identity and affect and riven with contradictions when it came to policy.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Collingwood distinguishes sharply between human life considered as natural process and human life considered as action. Thus, an individual life is in one aspect a structure of biological events containing ‘all the accidents of animal existence’ (IH 304), and in another, action, self-consciousness or thought. Within each single life, as Collingwood puts it, ‘the tides of thought, his own and others’, flow crosswise, regardless of its structure, like sea-water through a stranded wreck’ (IH 304). Individuals can be both biographical and historical subjects, but the limits set by biography are not those set by history.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The political men of letters in Burke’s picture had griped and exaggerated, without presenting a viable alternative. They had delegitimized one institution after another by sapping public faith in social artifice and ignoring the need for a “veil” of unreflecting custom to cloak destructive natural passions. The financiers in their turn had abetted a perilous financial scheme that brought France a ruinous inflation and wrecked public confidence in the state’s fiscal responsibility.

Metaphors We Live By

George Lakoff, Mark Johnson

Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.

Decoding Jung's Metaphysics

Bernardo Kastrup

God is an obvious psychic and non-physical fact, i.e., a fact that can be established psychically but not physically. (AJ: 133, emphasis added) To assert the “obvious psychic and non-physical fact” of God’s existence is a bold step for the metaphysically reticent Jung. The assertion is particularly significant because it happens in a passage wherein Jung also distances himself from psychologism: given the context, it is impossible to argue that Jung is merely psychologizing the notion of God.

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 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 6 Dec. 2021

 

The Wedge

Scott Carney

The goal of the Wedge is to separate stimulus from response.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

When an ecosystem functions well, it’s homeostasis; if it’s in decline or in the midst of unsustainable growth (as with cancer), then it’s heading into trouble. The system could end up in a state of constant vigilance and, to use [Justin] Feinstein’s term, become allostatic [attempting to return to a prior state of homeostasis] and never return to normal.

"The economy" (that most dangerous of abstractions) can be seen as a sub-ecosystem. But then like all such systems, it's never static, completely "in balance." And for the last ~200 years or so it's behaved much like a cancer, has it not?

The Wedge

Scott Carney

So if the immune system uses the same chemical hardware that creates feelings in our brains and influences our behavior in the world, then how much of a stretch is it to say that our immune system is conscious? What if instead of assuming that the immune system is just a machine, we give it a chance to have a semblance of cognition? Obviously the immune system can’t have the sort of complex emotions or thoughts that you or I experience, but even a shard of that subjectivity is powerful.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Alas, in 2020, one story about our collective future that’s becoming increasingly ubiquitous— and maybe even appealing to those inclined to resignation— starts with the opening line “we’re doomed” (or, in the vernacular, that we’re “fucked” or “screwed”). I hear this kind of declaration from a substantial and rapidly growing proportion of the students I teach. I respond to these young people by saying, as I say to Ben and Kate, that humanity is in fact doomed only if we collectively choose to be doomed. [My italics.]

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Society therefore needs ingenuity to get ingenuity, which means it is both an input to and output of the economic system. (Surprisingly, this claim often perplexes people. But a moment’s reflection shows that many economic factors are both input and output—for example, physical and human capital.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

Might humans, or intelligent life in whatever form, play that same role in the cosmological, universal evolutionary scheme of development? Might we in some way represent this feedback loop for the universe itself? Could our reflection on the evolutionary process itself be an essential element not only in fulfilling the next stage of our own development but in creating the next novel stage of cosmogenesis? [James N.] Gardner’s hypothesis is one of the most original—and compelling—evolutionary speculations that I have come across in some time.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Bluntly put, when democracy no longer delivers the goods, it will be consigned to the dustbin of history by an angry mob.

And this was written before January 6. The "angry mob," encouraged by ambitious politicians and special interests, remains in waiting. The outcome--whether democracy and the rule of law will survive in the U.S.--remains open.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Ian Kershaw, has said, “Hitler was no tyrant imposed on Germany. Though he never attained majority support in free elections, he was legally appointed to power as Reich Chancellor just like his predecessors had been, and became between 1933 and 1940 arguably the most popular head of state in the world.” The historian John Lukacs shares this view: Hitler “may have been the most popular revolutionary leader in the history of the modern world. The emphasis is on the word popular because Hitler belongs to the democratic, not the aristocratic, age of history.”

A reminder: Germany went from a democratic state with a model (in many ways) constitution to one of the worst political regimes in history, all without a coup or violent revolution, as Kershaw notes.

Age of Ambition

Evan Osnos

In 1949 the average life expectancy [in China] was thirty-six, and the literacy rate was 20 percent. By 2012,  life expectancy (2 words) was seventy-five, and the literacy rate was above 90 percent.

These figures go a long way in explaining why China is feeling its oats these days.

Bonds That Make Us Free

C. Terry Warner

It is a key sign of danger when we expect that others should change in response to our change. This signals a lapse on our part, back into self-absorption. Why so? Because the moment we begin to feel that we need others to change before we can be free of our troubled, afflicting thoughts and feelings, we have either lost the joy we felt when we experienced our change of heart or else we never experienced that change at all. We’re back in our self-absorbed condition or we never got out of it. Anyone free of that condition enjoys an emotional freedom that no external circumstance can destroy—including the reactions of other people.

Collingwood's The Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Re-enactment, in other words, includes counter-factual discussion as well as the delineation of what actually occurred.

Thoughts 29 November 2021

 

An A-Z diagnosis of health and health care in the U.S. 

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

Medical economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford Medicine analyzed millions of medical records, and the factor that most correlated with increasing weight gain in the population was the number of visits to an HMO doctor. Now, that’s correlation, not causation, but you have to wonder. Back in 1970 we spent 6 percent of our GDP on healthcare, and now fifty years later we spend 17.9 percent. Yet the average American’s weight is up, health is down, and wallet is underwater.

An appropriate post-Thanksgiving insight.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Explanation in history is not a matter of establishing relationships between perceived facts, but of treating facts as thoughts which have to be grasped and understood.

An intriguing observation.

The Idea of Nature

R. G. Collingwood

[In discussing ancient Greek culture:] What different legal decisions have in common is not justice itself but an attempt on the part of the courts that make these decisions to arrive at a just decision. Such attempts are never wholly successful, and that is why the pure form remains transcendent. If they were wholly successful, it would be immanent as well as transcendent. Because they are never wholly successful, the transcendent form remains purely transcendent, and the immanent form remains a mere ‘imitation’ or approximation.

Ultrasociety

Peter Turchin

Unlike biological organisms, societies do not grow up and do not grow senile. There is no natural life-cycle for an empire.

True, the biological metaphor for "civilizations" (or other political entities) is overused and no more than a metaphor. And neither are there "laws." But we do see patterns even within wide individual variations. Cf., Turchin, War and Peace and War. (N.B. Niall Ferguson (below) touches on Turchin's work in Doom.)

Doom

Niall Ferguson

What will be the economic consequences of the pandemic? Plainly, it belongs on the list of large economic disasters. If the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is right about U.S. gross domestic product in 2020 (in June, it forecast a decline of 8 percent, though by October its projection was a less drastic minus 4.3 percent), it will be the American economy’s worst year since 1946.

Of course, what is remarkable is how quickly we've rebounded from this precipitous drop. Not entirely and not without changes, but kudos to stimulus & wise monetary policy!

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Sigmund Freud, the last great defender of the Enlightenment (despite his own rediscovery of the irrational), put his finger on the neurotic origin and character of this hostility: “Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by … going over to the attack against nature and subjecting her to the human will.”

Nature as the enemy. A bad attitude in my book!

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Among other things, in [complex] systems small inputs can cause outputs that are disproportionate to the input by triggering a cascade of positive feedback. Or given enough time, small inputs can slowly amplify into large effects.

Societies and climates are complex entities and contain surprises. Be prepared!

After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre

The claim that the major protagonists of the distinctively modern moral causes of the modern world—I am not here speaking at all of those who seek to uphold older traditions which have somehow or other survived into some sort of coexistence with modernity—offer a rhetoric which serves to conceal behind the masks of morality what are in fact the preferences of arbitrary will and desire is not of course an original claim. For each of the contending protagonists of modernity, while for obvious reasons unwilling to concede that the claim is true in their own case, is prepared to make it about those against whom they contend.

Irrational Man

William Barrett

In losing religion, man lost the concrete connection with a transcendent realm of being; he was set free to deal with this world in all its brute objectivity. But he was bound to feel homeless in such a world, which no longer answered the needs of his spirit.