Thoughts for the Day: Monday 23 August 2021

 

Continuing our journey with Pope Francis re our environmental crisis

I [Pope Francis] will point to the intimate relationship between the poor and the fragility of the planet, the conviction that everything in the world is connected, the critique of new paradigms and forms of power derived from technology, the call to seek other ways of understanding the economy and progress, the value proper to each creature, the human meaning of ecology, the need for forthright and honest debate, the serious responsibility of international and local policy, the throwaway culture and the proposal of a new lifestyle. (Location 366)

Technology, which, linked to business interests, is presented as the only way of solving these problems, in fact proves incapable of seeing the mysterious network of relations between things and so sometimes solves one problem only to create others.

(Location 391)

The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth. In many parts of the planet, the elderly lament that once beautiful landscapes are now covered with rubbish. Industrial waste and chemical products utilized in cities and agricultural areas can lead to bioaccumulation in the organisms of the local population, even when levels of toxins in those places are low. (Location 395)

And now some other voices: 

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Undoubtedly, the relative equality of women is an objective marker of the degree of evolution achieved by any society.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

[T]he fundamental question for all four philosophers [Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Benjamin, & Cassirer) was whether all the various natural languages are themselves based on a single, unifying, and unified language. If so, what is the nature of that form? And on what does its ultimate meaning rest? What does language do to us? Do we give our words sense and meaning, or is it the world-shaping power of the words and signs themselves, which call us into life, thought, and questioning? Who shapes whom? In what form? And above all: With what objectives?

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Fourth, the mathematical theory of probability can be, and usually has been, developed without reference to what kind of probability is being spoken of. This is because the mathematical theory of, say, dice throwing depends only on the symmetry or equiprobability of certain outcomes, allowing equal numbers to be assigned to them. One can say that there is symmetry between all of the six possible outcomes of a single throw of a die, and hence they each have probability , without needing to say in what respect they are symmetrical or what kind of probability is being considered—whether one is discussing properties of the die or uncertainty about the outcome.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

Here were the beginnings of the public sphere and civil society, two of the great spurs of modernity; but Rousseau saw them as centres of soul-destroying hypocrisy. ‘In the midst of so much philosophy, humanity, and civilization, and of such sublime codes of morality,’ he wrote, ‘we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.’

Breath

James Nestor

As molecules of breath descend deeper, they switch on parasympathetic nerves, which send more messages for the organs to rest and digest. As air ascends through the lungs during exhalation, the molecules stimulate an even more powerful parasympathetic response. The deeper and more softly we breathe in, and the longer we exhale, the more slowly the heart beats and the calmer we become.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 22 August 2021

 

Pairs nicely with Laudato Si

Pope Francis. Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality [Laudato Si] Melville House. Kindle Edition.

I will begin by briefly reviewing several aspects of the present ecological crisis, with the aim of drawing on the results of the best scientific research available today, letting them touch us deeply and provide a concrete foundation for the ethical and spiritual itinerary that follows.

I will point to the intimate relationship between the poor and the fragility of the planet, the conviction that everything in the world is connected, the critique of new paradigms and forms of power derived from technology, the call to seek other ways of understanding the economy and progress, the value proper to each creature, the human meaning of ecology, the need for forthright and honest debate, the serious responsibility of international and local policy, the throwaway culture and the proposal of a new lifestyle. These questions will not be dealt with once and for all, but reframed and enriched again and again.

18. The continued acceleration of changes affecting humanity and the planet is coupled today with a more intensified pace of life and work which might be called “rapidification.”

19. Following a period of irrational confidence in progress and human abilities, some sectors of society are now adopting a more critical approach.

And now some other voices:

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

An upsurge of irrationality is a mortal threat to democratic polity. Political truth is always biased to some extent, but there is a profound and crucial difference between limited rationality and complete irrationality, relative objectivity and pure fantasy, demonstrable facts and blatant lies. A sane information environment is a precondition for a workable democracy. Once reality has been hijacked, there can be no reasonable basis for either voting or legislating.

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

Reinhold Niebuhr

The social and historical optimism of democratic life, for instance, represents the typical illusion of an advancing class which mistook its own progress for the progress of the world. [Published in 1944]

Apologies to the Grandchldren

William Ophuls

"Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." — Friedrich Nietzsche

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 21 August 2021

 

We have forgotten that “man is not only a freedom which he creates for himself. Man does not create himself. He is spirit and will, but also nature.”

(Location 288)

“[T]o commit a crime against the natural world is a sin against ourselves and a sin against God.” [Quoting Patriarch Bartholomew]

(Location 304)

[Patriarch Bartholomew] asks us to replace consumption with sacrifice, greed with generosity, wastefulness with a spirit of sharing, an asceticism which “entails learning to give, and not simply to give up. It is a way of loving, of moving gradually away from what I want to what God’s world needs. It is liberation from fear, greed and compulsion.”

(Location 307)

And now from some other folks

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[A]s we try to improve the efficiency and performance of . . . systems, we tend to erode the very characteristics that make them highly reliable. And as these systems become more automated and complex and contain more unknown unknowns, we frequently don’t understand them well enough to maintain their reliability.

Dark Star Rising

Gary Lachman

Like Nietzsche, Heidegger saw that the West was heading into an age of nihilism and that the history of Being would end, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, not with a bang but a price tag. It was out of what Heidegger called the “destruction of metaphysics,” his attempt to undo the damage, that movements like deconstructionism and postmodernism emerged.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

[Hans] Morgenthau was not championing “irrationalism,” as some of his critics charged. Rationality was required for the solution or, more accurately, the management of social problems even if people were behaving irrationally. Human interactions could be understood through reason, which could encompass un-reason (just as un-reason could encompass reason), but it was a mistake to project reason as a template onto nonrational reality itself by developing mechanical equations to explain and predict behavior. Each situation was unique, to be interpreted according to its own particularity and evaluated on its own terms.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Liberal education, [Leo Strauss] said, is the effort to establish “an aristocracy within democratic mass society.” Western civilization, as Strauss understood it, was the property of an educated minority. But that didn’t make it unworthy of defense against the nihilistic Nazis. Quite the contrary.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

The exact observational methods of science are all contrivances for limiting these erroneous conclusions as to direct matters of fact.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

The Constitution of Knowledge relies on independent observers; cancel culture relies on mob action.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

“When complete agreement could not otherwise be reached,” wrote the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in his great 1877 essay, The Fixation of Belief, “a general massacre of all who have not thought in a certain way has proved a very effective means of settling opinion in a country.”

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Your Life claimed that the secret to longevity rested in breathing through the nose as well as a healthy dose of temperature variation. Catlin encouraged people to train themselves to sleep with their mouths closed, arguing that the nose is a natural filter of pathogens.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 20 August 2021

 

More from Pope Francis via Naomi Oreskes: 

[Naomi Oreskes] So perhaps this is the pope’s most important message: that we must move past the ideology of no ideology, the morality of amorality. 

The idea of promoting a different cultural paradigm … is nowadays inconceivable. The technological paradigm has become so dominant that it would be difficult to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them without being dominated by their internal logic. It has become countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology, of its costs and its power to globalize and make us all the same … Our capacity to make decisions, a more genuine freedom and the space for each one’s alternative creativity are diminished. [Laudato Si]

Many people will of course misread this message. Already, conservatives are condemning the Encyclical for its failure to celebrate the rewards of capitalism and extol the virtues of carbon markets. Others have misread the letter depriving “people of the [technological] tools humanity will need to prevent climatic upheaval.”These reactions demonstrate why this Encyclical is so important. The pope is not asking us to reject markets or technology. He is asking us to reject the (il)logic that insists that only markets can decide our future and that technology is politically and morally neutral. He is asking us to reject the creed of market fundamentalism, and to recognize that the system has levers. Individuals, institutions, and governments are all making choices, and we have the capacity to make different ones.

End of the Introduction by Naomi Oreskes. Now into text of Laudato Si directly: 

“LAUDATO SI,’ mi’ Signore”—“Praise be to you, my Lord.” In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs.” 

2. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.

[3.] . . . . In this Encyclical, I would like to enter into dialogue with all people about our common home.

Now, a few words to ponder from some other sources: 

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

Language did not appear at some point in a world already given; language and ‘the world’ that we know emerged simultaneously as two separate phenomena as a result of the loss of original participation, that is of a prior unity encompassing both. And that loss of original participation itself resulted in the polarity of inner and outer worlds that we experience today. Consciousness, from being spread out and interfused – as Wordsworth would say – with its world began to contract, to become more definite by becoming more limited, finding its home more and more within the confines of our skulls.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

But since it had become evident by 1968 that the war could not be won, the only question that remained was how to get out. “The real issue in South Vietnam is, who shall govern, the Communists or their opponents,” and since Kissinger/Rockefeller continued to support the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government, they were trapped in the same dilemma that had swallowed up the Johnson administration, trying to uphold an ally that had neither genuine legitimacy nor the will to fight for itself, and one that the Communist enemy was determined to overthrow.

Does this ring a bell? Applicable to current events?

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

But if an epistemic community follows the fallibilist and empirical rules, what it is doing will look like liberal science. And that is because what its members are doing will look like organized social persuasion.

Behold the Spirit

Alan W. Watts

One can but reiterate the point that the mystic is negating only concepts and idols of God, and in this way cleansing the doors of perception in the faith that, if God is real, he need not be sought in any particular direction or conceived in any special way. To see the light, it is only necessary to stop dreaming and open the eyes.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

Historically, this kind of withdrawal from doing is the oldest condition posited for the life of the mind. In its early, original form it rests on the discovery that only the spectator, never the actor, can know and understand whatever offers itself as a spectacle.

Lila

Robert M. Pirsig

Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive, when they demand blind obedience and suppress Dynamic change. But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from degeneration. Although Dynamic Quality, the Quality of freedom, creates this world in which we live, these patterns of static quality, the quality of order, preserve our world. Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without the other.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Inequality may be inevitable. But in the most fundamental, moral sense, all human beings are equal.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Like any persuasive gospel, no element is without some small truth. Taken as a whole, the radical gospel sets itself as at war with a conservatism of prudence and moderation.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 18 August 2021

 

But first, a few words from Pope Francis & Naomi Oreskes in his encyclical Laudato Si and her Introduction thereto (and then MacIntosh, et. al.): 

The pope calls for an “integral ecology,” by which he means a vision of the world founded fundamentally on respect for Creation, and a renewed emphasis on our mutual interconnection with one another and with nature in all its complexity. This ecology must necessarily include science and technology, but a science that moves past reductionism and a technology that is more focused on authentic needs. As the pope puts it: “We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.”

(Location 213)

An integral ecology must also include also good governance, including “the establishment of a legal framework which can set clear boundaries and ensure the protection of ecosystems.” It must replace a culture of rampant individualism with a culture of care rooted in “love for society and commitment to the common good.” And it must not only reclaim the idea of the common good, but also recognize it as the centerpiece of civil society, environmental protection, religious communion, and, finally, human dignity, happiness, and love. Loc. 223

Crucially, this 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 … Intergenerational solidarity is not optional, but rather a basic question of justice, since the world we have received also belongs to those who will follow us.” Loc. 224.

And now to give the Pope a rest: 

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Within the realm of politics, the ascendency of modernism has created the cultural pressure that has helped consolidate most of America’s divergent religious outlooks into a coherent political block that often stands in opposition to modernity. This loosely affiliated cultural segment of American society embraces many religious communities, including Evangelical Protestants, Conservative Catholics, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and many similar subcultures.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

“Resist,” I advise Theaetetus. “There may be political reasons to claim that transgender women of color initiated the 1969 Stonewall riot, or that American colonists declared their independence in order to protect the institution of slavery, or that a Black man invented the light bulb, or any number of other factually challenged propositions. Fight the temptation. George Orwell (a socialist) understood that subordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win. In the reality-based community, accuracy is the only game in town. It is our common denominator and the taproot of our integrity.”

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

The reason liberals like laws is because they give us more time for everything in life that isn’t law-like. When we aren’t fighting every minute for minimal rights, or reasserting our territory, or worrying about the next clan’s claims, we can look at the stars and taste new cheeses and make love, sometimes with the wrong person. The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

Breath

James Nestor

The [Native American] tribes attributed their vigorous health to a medicine, what [19th-century lawyer, painter, & traveler George] Catlin called the “great secret of life.” The secret was breathing. The Native Americans explained to Catlin that breath inhaled through the mouth sapped the body of strength, deformed the face, and caused stress and disease. On the other hand, breath inhaled through the nose kept the body strong, made the face beautiful, and prevented disease.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 17 August 2021

 

Continuing from the Introduction to Laudato Si by Naomi Oreskes:

The environment is one of those goods that cannot be adequately safeguarded or promoted by market forces.”

(Location 167)

Carbon markets have been widely advocated as the solution to climate change, but the pope has grave concerns here as well. The strategy of buying and selling “carbon credits” can lead to a new form of speculation which would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide. This system seems to provide … the guise of a certain commitment to the environment, but in no way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require. Rather, it may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.

(Location 173)

N.B. I'd refine the Pope's comments here. I believe that he's talking about a cap-and-trade regime, which has been tried in Europe (and perhaps elsewhere) with little to say for it. The other way to approach this problem, not mentioned above, is a price on carbon  and then to pay our the proceeds from the price paid as dividends. This scheme recognizes that dumping carbon into the atmosphere has a cost and that cost is recognized (at least to some extent) by its price. The price (or "fee") collected by the government will then be paid as a "dividend" to individuals on a per capita basis, which would aid lower-and middle-income individuals and families. 

[A] great deal of environmental wreckage has been inflicted by multinational corporations operating in developing nations in ways that would not be acceptable in the developed world. When these companies cease their operations, frequently they leave substantial damage in their wake, damage that is not an accident or oversight but the consequence of an ideology in which “ ‘whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenceless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.’

(Location 183)

Thus the pope’s two themes are in fact one: our failure to care for creation is the result of a world-view that defines everything in consumerist terms and looks for solutions solely in things that can be bought and sold. The market economy and the culture of consumption are locked in a dance of death, leading to spiritual impoverishment for those who control it, material impoverishment for those who don’t, and environmental impoverishment across the globe.

(Location 204)

THE ALTERNATIVE: AN INTEGRAL ECOLOGY

Some may shrug and say that environmental damage is the price of progress, but the pope refuses to accept that conclusion as rational. On the contrary, viewed dispassionately, it comes to look a bit insane. “The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand. An outsider looking at our world would be amazed at such behaviour, which at times appears self-destructive.” The pope does not go so far as to label the technological paradigm religion, but his use of the phrase “deified market” certainly suggests that thought. Loc 208.

And now back to our regularly scheduled program: 

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

“The principle of accumulation based on inequality was a vital part of the pre-war order of Society and of progress as we then understood it,” Keynes wrote. “This principle depended on unstable psychological conditions, which it may be impossible to recreate. It was not natural for a population, of whom so few enjoyed the comforts of life, to accumulate so hugely. The war has disclosed the possibility of consumption to all and the vanity of abstinence to many.”

The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt

Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt

Kierkegaard knew that the incompatibility of modern science with traditional beliefs does not lie in any specific scientific findings, all of which can be integrated into religious systems and absorbed by religious beliefs for the reason that they will never be able to answer the questions which religion raises. He knew that this incompatibility lay, rather, in the conflict between a spirit of doubt and distrust which ultimately can trust only what it has made itself, and the traditional unquestioning confidence in what has been given and appears in its true being to man’s reason and senses.

Arms and Influence

Thomas C. Schelling

“Compellence” is more like “offense.” Forcible offense is taking something, occupying a place, or disarming an enemy or a territory, by some direct action that the enemy is unable to block. “Compellence” is inducing his withdrawal, or his acquiescence, or his collaboration by an action that threatens to hurt, often one that could not forcibly accomplish its aim but that, nevertheless, can hurt enough to induce compliance.