Thoughts: 14 November 2021

 

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

The achievement of imitation – the meta-skill that enables all other skills – may explain the otherwise incomprehensibly rapid expansion of the brain in early hominids, since there would be a sudden take-off in the speed with which we could adapt and change ourselves, and in the range of our abilities. Imitation is how we acquire skills – any skill at all; and the gene for skill acquisition (imitation) would trump the genes for any individual skills. Thus from a gene – the symbol of ruthless competition (the ‘selfish gene'), and of the relatively atomistic and oppositional values of the left hemisphere – could arise a skill that would enable further evolution to occur not only more rapidly but in a direction of our own choosing – through empathy and co-operation, the values of the right hemisphere.

Imitation isn't just the sincerest form of flattery. 

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

There is nothing new about any of this. A chillingly accurate description of spirals of silence was written in 1840 about the United States of America. “I know of no country where, in general, there reigns less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, in the second volume of his masterpiece, Democracy in America. He explained: "In America, the majority draws a formidable circle around thought. Within these limits, the writer is free; but woe to him if he dares to go beyond them. It isn’t that he has to fear an auto-da-fé, but he is exposed to all types of distasteful things and to everyday persecutions. A political career is closed to him; he has offended the only power that has the ability to open it to him. Everything is denied him, even glory. Before publishing his opinions, he believed he had some partisans; it seems to him that he has them no longer, now that he has revealed himself to all; for those who censure him speak openly, and those who think as he does, without having his courage, keep quiet and distance themselves. He gives in; finally, under the daily effort, he yields and returns to silence, as though he felt remorse for having told the truth."

We're not the great individualists that we fantasize we are.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Both constitutions [American & the "constitution of knowledge"] rest, ultimately, on versions of what the American founders thought of as republican virtue: habits and norms like lawfulness, truthfulness, self-restraint, and forbearance. If anything could ruin the American constitutional experiment, they believed, a failure of republican virtue would be the most likely culprit. They understood that the people would be tempted to exercise their constitutional rights without shouldering their constitutional responsibilities. That was why Adams and Franklin and Madison and the other Founders warned that democracy was only fit for a virtuous public.

Query: can we ever enjoy rights without commensurate responsibilities. If our rights come from a social contract (as I'd say best describe the Bill of Rights), then any contractual right--to have a valid contract--must have some "consideration."

Good Calories, Bad Calories

Gary Taubes

[Ansel] Keys had noted associations between heart-disease death rates and fat intake, Yerushalmy and Hilleboe pointed out, but they were just that. Associations do not imply cause and effect or represent (as Stephen Jay Gould later put it) any “magic method for the unambiguous identification of cause.”

The Force of Character

James Hillman

In many indigenous societies, the deeper instructive and affective connections skip a generation. Since both grandparents and grandchildren are partly marginalized, the young fantast joins the old eccentric against a common opponent, the adult generation between them.

Intriguing observation.

The Rambler

Samuel Johnson

The anger which I propose now for my subject, is such as makes those who indulge it more troublesome than formidable, and ranks them rather with hornets and wasps, than with basilisks and lions. I have, therefore, prefixed a motto, which characterises this passion, not so much by the mischief that it causes, as by the noise that it utters.

Most outbursts of anger are more smoke than fire and are more nuisance than threat.

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 for the Day: Sunday 18 April 2021

 

Samuel Johnson

The Rambler

Samuel Johnson

This quality of looking forward into futurity seems the unavoidable condition of a being, whose motions are gradual, and whose life is progressive: as his powers are limited, he must use means for the attainment of his ends, and intend first what he performs last; as by continual advances from his first stage of existence, he is perpetually varying the horizon of his prospects, he must always discover new motives of action, new excitements of fear, and allurements of desire.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

What I would like to do is use the time that is coming now to talk about some things that have come to mind. We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. Now that we do have some time, and know it, I would like to use the time to talk in some depth about things that seem important.

History Man

Fred Inglis

There is never much point, whether in aesthetic or philosophic criticism, in arguing for coherent patterns of thought in the life’s work of a thinker or a poet. The history of all thought is broken up into new starts, blind alleys, reactionary retreats, fake advances, whether in one person’s work or in a collective movement. Yet in a life, as in an epoch, we search out form and direction. A biography is an attempt to place a life against a moral horizon, to frame it with its recognisable landmarks and pathways. One such framing was for Collingwood the long journey to make philosophy and history synonymous.

History Man

Fred Inglis

[Collingwood] also distinguishes between amusement art and art as magic, a useful and long-standing device whereby the magical acts (or arts) “generate in the agent . . . certain emotions considered necessary . . . for the work of living . . . the function of magic is to develop and conserve morale, or [when pointed at one’s enemies] to damage it.”

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

It is only when a man’s historical consciousness has reached a certain point of maturity that he realizes how very different have been the ways in which different sets of people have thought. When a man first begins looking into absolute presuppositions it is likely that he will begin by looking into those which are made in his own time by his own countrymen, or at any rate by persons belonging to some group of which he is a member. This, of course, is already an historical inquiry. But various prejudices current at various times which I will not here enumerate have tended to deceive such inquirers into thinking that the conclusions they have reached will hold good far beyond the limits of that group and that time. They may even imagine that an absolute presupposition discovered within these limits can be more or less safely ascribed to all human beings everywhere and always.

59 Seconds

Richard Wiseman

Time and again, the same pattern emerged. Those who spent a higher percentage of their income on others were far happier than those who spent it on themselves.

Garry Wills on Lawyers & Politicians

The previous post let me back into reading some of the "Elites" chapters that I mentioned in that post. I particularly enjoyed chapter "Politicians", which Wills spells out his understanding of their role (and which anticipates the recent NYRB post about the Unger position). Because this book appears to be out of print (not many of his are!), I thought I should share this quote about lawyers and politicians. I've not been a politician, but I've observed and read a great deal (now in the great Caro biography of LBJ), and I have been a lawyer for over 30 years now, so I think that I can affirm a good deal of what Wills writes.

It is not accidental that most of our politicians were educated as lawyers for do... . Many have criticized the tenets of legal training and its effect on the politicians who share this kind of training. Jimmy Breslin grumbled yesterday, and Macaulay, a hundred years ago. It is easy to understand their objections. The lawyer's skills are negotiatory, technical, mediating, neutral. He acts as an expert adviser for a client, not as a creative thinker or framer of his own views. It is his job to make the maximum claim on his client's behalf -- whether to a jury, an insurance company, the  IRS, a sued or suing  opponent, a partner in divorce proceedings. He speaks for one client today, another tomorrow; one side now, a different one later. The neutral agent is not a friend of one side, and therefore no enemy to the other side. Legal adversaries can exchange their lawyers, and the only difference (if any) will be in their technical skills. Having made the maximum claim for his own client, and expected a similar maximum claim from the other side, a lawyer must forge the terms of settlement and advises clients on them. If our own lawyer made less than the maximum legal claim for us--out of ignorance, or reticence, or rectitude -- we would feel cheated. His services were not fully at our disposal; part was kept to indulge himself.

    So the critics of the lawyer background shared by so many of our politicians are dead wrong. No better training can be found for them. They, too, a struggle with each other, yet be friends the next day; make maximum claims as bargaining points, but aim at a compromise settlement; satisfy most people somewhat rather than a few people fully; represent diversity by muting differences; always be more neutral than hostile; dealing  in increments and margins only, but you'll constantly; always adjusting, hedging, giving in a little, gaining a little; creeping towards one's goals, not heroically striving there; always leaving oneself an out, a loophole, a proviso -- what Willmoore Kendall used to call "a verbal parachute," so that no alliance is irrevocable, no opposition adamant.

 Confessions, 175-176.

The rest of the chapter is well worth it, and, I must say, Wills has always made me want to read the likes of Macaulay, Bagehot,  Belloc, Johnson, Hume, and the like; literary writers who addressed politics.

Lukacs on Patriotism & Nationalism

Today I offer quotes on an insight that John Lukacs has provided many times before. It's not new to me from reading Democracy and Populism: Fear & Hatred (2005), but the distinction he makes bears repeating, especially in light of what so many so-proclaimed "conservative" commentators want people to think. I happily consider myself a patriot, but a nationalist? No. Nationalism, as much or more than any misguided Marxism, was the bane of the 20th century.

When . . . Samuel Johnson uttered his famous (and perhaps forever valid) dictum that Patriotism Is The Last Refuge Of A Scoundrel, he meant nationalism, even thought that word did not yet exist. One of the reasons why there exists no first-rate book about the history of nationalism is that it is not easy to separate it from old-fashioned patriotism. And these two inclinations, patriotism, and nationalism, divergent as they may be, still often overlap in people’s minds. (When, for example, Americans criticize a “superpatriot” what they really mean is an extreme nationalist.) (35-36).

. . . . 

Patriotism is defensive; nationalism is aggressive. Patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a “people”, justifying many things, a political and ideological substitute for religion. Patriotism is old-fashioned (and, at time and in some places, aristocratic); nationalism is modern and populist. In one sense patriotic and national consciousness may be similar; but in anther sense, more and more apparent after 1870, national consciousness began to affect more and more people who, generally, had been immune to that before—as, for example, many people within the multinational empire of Austria-Hungary. It went deeper than class consciousness. Here and there it superseded religious affiliations, too. (36).