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 12 Nov 2021

 

After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre

Weber’s understanding of values was indebted chiefly to Nietzsche and that Donald G. Macrae in his book on Weber (1974) calls him an existentialist; for while he holds that an agent may be more or less rational in acting consistently with his values, the choice of any one particular evaluative stance or commitment can be no more rational than that of any other. All faiths and all evaluations are equally non-rational; all are subjective directions given to sentiment and feeling. Weber is then, in the broader sense in which I have understood the term, an emotivist and his portrait of a bureaucratic authority is an emotivist portrait. The consequence of Weber’s emotivism is that in his thought the contrast between power and authority, although paid lip-service to, is effectively obliterated as a special instance of the disappearance of the contrast between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations.

The Enigma of Reason

Hugo Mercier

The defense would argue, citing Descartes, Aristotle, Kant, or Popper, that humans err by not reasoning enough. The prosecution would argue, citing Luther, Hume, Kierkegaard, or Foucault, that they err by reasoning too much.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

The purpose of a hypothesis in science is to propose an explanation for what we observe, either in nature or in the laboratory (ideally, a testable hypothesis): Why did this happen and not that? The more observations a hypothesis can explain or the more phenomena it can predict, the better the explanation, the better the hypothesis. This insistence that we get fat because we overeat is not even wrong, as the legendary physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a man with a gift for memorably pithy criticisms, might have put it. It explains nothing.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

Entropy is a measure of the deadness of a system. Negentropy or information is a measure of the liveliness of a system.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

He ["Phaedrus"] felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.

Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation

Frank R. Ankersmit

The great masterpieces of twentieth-century historical writing rarely mention dates. Think, in particular, of so-called cross-sectional studies, such as Fernand Braudel’s book on the Mediterranean world at the time of Philip II, which does not present us with a development over time but is instead content with describing what that world looked like at one specific temporal cross-section.

The Divine Comedy

Dante Alighieri, translated & notes by John Ciardi

[John Ciardi:] In contrast with the turbulent complexity of Hell, Dante’s Purgatory is simple, regular, and serene. On the lower reaches below the gate are kept in exile for varying lengths of time those souls who, for various reasons and in various conditions, sought salvation at the last moment. Above, within Purgatory, we find not the multifarious crimes by which vice or sin manifests itself in Hell (or on Earth), but simply the seven Capital Vices that lead to sinful acts.

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 6 October 2021

 

An outstanding consideration of Keynes & his legacy.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

Market economies were not a distinct realm, independent of the state, operating according to their own principles. The rhythms of trade, their logic and mechanisms, had to be defined and supported by political authority. His [Keynes's] battle over reparations and inter-ally debt had made him a lifelong enemy of austerity—the doctrine that governments can best heal troubled economies by slashing government spending and paying down debt. When a government was burdened with too much debt, Keynes had come to believe, it was generally better to swear off the debt than to pay it off by burdening the public with a lower standard of living.

N.B. My insight is that all economics, or at least macroeconomics, is political economy.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

I am not suggesting that every Jew go and talk to a neo-Nazi, or that historians reconsider whether the Holocaust happened, or that psychiatry revisit the claim that homosexuals are mentally ill. The Constitution of Knowledge owes its efficiency to producing a body of knowledge, an archive of settled claims which do not need constant relitigating. The reality-based community is conservative, in the sense that it conserves what it has learned and reopens closed accounts reluctantly. When new evidence turns up or experts develop new arguments, then reexamining an established claim may be in order, but the vast majority of claims against settled knowledge do not deserve research budgets or investigative-reporting teams and are rightly ignored.

sng: To wit, it's all a matter of sound judgment, which, like all human endeavors, remains fallible. But we must work with what we've got, knowing all the time that we could be wrong. But not all probabilities of wrongness are the same.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

His [Lorenzo Valla, Italian humanist, 1407-1457] project was to replace Scholastic logic and metaphysics with dialectic and rhetoric, as understood by Cicero, Quintilian, and Boethius. This involved a revival of the arguing on both sides of a question, the urbane skepticism and topical argument of classical rhetoric, in opposition to Scholastic “dogmatism.” As in Cicero, an emphasis on the likely followed. After dividing premises of arguments into the necessary and the likely, Valla draws distinctions among the latter. “But as long as the reason is not plainly true but half-true and half-certain, then the conclusion is not necessary but half-necessary, which when it has much force is called likely and credible, that is, exceedingly possible, and when it has scant force is called possible, that is, scarcely likely or credible.”

sng: Compare this thought with the preceding quote from Rauch. Thinking along the same lines?

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

As civilization has advanced, the pack-bond (the tribe, the extended family) has been broken. This is the root of the widely diagnosed “anomie” or “alienation” or “existential anguish” about which so many social critics have written so eloquently. What has happened is that the conditioning of the bio-survival bond to the gene-pool has been replaced by a conditioning of bio-survival drives to hook onto the peculiar tickets which we call “money”.

sng: Does money equal energy? Food? Status? Prestige? Love? Security? In some way, I would answer a qualified "yes" to each of these questions.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[T]heir [poor Indians'] hardships were primarily derived from inequalities of wealth and power among Bihar’s [an Indian state] castes and from the corrosive effect of these inequalities, when combined with severe resource scarcities, on the state’s political institutions.

sng: If you're not worried about the growing inequalities here in the U.S. and the decline in the efficacy and legitimacy of our governments, then this is an example of why you should be.

Perennial Philosophy

Arthur Versluis

From the perspective of perennial philosophy, time is not separate from but manifests timelessness. The unfolding of patterns in nature has its origin in timeless numbers and geometry that, in turn, are principles radiating from the timeless realm of order prior to the cosmos that we see now.

The Science of Likability

Patrick King

When people subconsciously begin to associate you with positive moods and emotions, you are going to be the bell that makes people smile without realizing why

Thoughts for Later in the Day: Sunday 26 Sept 2021

 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Economic development as we know it started with Europe’s conquest of the New World, a bonanza of found wealth.43 Before the conquest, European societies were politically, economically, and socially closed. But once flooded by a surge of new energy from the Americas, they began to open and develop. All the philosophies, institutions, and values characteristic of modern life, above all liberal democracy, slowly emerged.44 Over time, as the New World bonanza was supplemented and then supplanted by fossil fuels, economic and political development proceeded in tandem to transform the world and to create the luxuries and freedoms we enjoy today. With a return of ecological scarcity, however, what abundance has given will be taken away—to what extent and how rapidly remains to be seen, but we can hardly expect liberal democratic institutions fostered by abundance and predicated on abundance to survive in their current form.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

We are on the cusp of a megacrisis formed by the coincidence of two historical cycles: the lesser geopolitical cycle of war and peace and the greater civilizational cycle of rise and fall. If those who govern us were saints advised by geniuses, and if the populace were eager to embrace change, there might be some possibility of turning this epochal crisis into a grand opportunity to reframe civilization to be both humane and ecological. Unfortunately, it is more likely that events will spin out of control, engendering widespread destruction and chaos. Indeed, we cannot exclude the possibility of a deep collapse entailing the radical impoverishment and simplification of society—in effect, the end of industrial civilization as we know it.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

“At the largest level, depression is all about a person pulling inward, so that they only think about what’s happening inside their own minds, usually in negative ways. But external stimuli like heat and cold force a person to reckon with their environment. It pulls you out of yourself,” he explains. The heat is a wedge that interrupts the things that reinforce feelings of depression. And maybe that is all a depressed person needs: to have a reason to look outward.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

It’s one thing to read about an ice bath, or to imagine what it might feel like to catch a kettlebell in midair as it transforms in your hands from a weapon into a dance. These are things you have to feel to understand.

Imaginal Love

Tom Cheetham

God is not a “being” at all, not even an infinite one. God is Be-ing in the sense that without God, nothing can be. The “being” of God is verbal and transitive‒ the being of God makes everything else be. God says “Be!” and things spring into existence.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

Throughout most of human history and up to 100 years ago — up to 20 years ago, in some parts of the world — a man or woman could lead their entire life snugly within the cocoon of the local tunnel reality. Today, we all constantly collide with persons living in wildly different tunnel realities. This creates a great deal of hostility in the more ignorant, vast amounts of metaphysical and ethical confusion in the more sophisticated, and growing disorientation for all — a situation known as our “crisis of values.”

The Revenge of Geography

Robert D. Kaplan

It was in quest of sea power—the search for a warm-water port on the Indian Ocean—that the Soviets ultimately invaded  Afghanistan, a small part of the Heartland that had eluded its grasp. And by getting entrapped by guerrillas in  Afghanistan  the Kremlin’s whole empire fell apart. Now Russia, greatly reduced in size, tries to reconsolidate that same Heartland—Belarus, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. That, in and of itself, a century after Mackinder put down his theories, constitutes one of the principal geopolitical dramas of our time.