Thoughts for the Day: 24 August 2021

 

Coming later this year to a bookstore near you! (9 November in the UK)

The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all. At the global level, it is a complex system linked to many of the essential conditions for human life. A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system.

(Location 408)

In recent decades this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon.

(Location 409)

Perhaps the pope should update this in light of the most recent IPCC report. To wit, we can now gauge more accurately the ties between extreme and persistent weather events with human-caused climate change. 

It is true that there are other factors (such as volcanic activity, variations in the earth’s orbit and axis, the solar cycle), yet a number of scientific studies indicate that most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity.

(Location 412)

Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded.

(Location 435)

And now from some other voices: 

"To me, a universe with tendencies towards beauty, complexity, and the rich unfolding of uniqueness is already teleological. It is a verb with many adverbs, not just a matter of nouns chasing nouns."

The Matter with Things (to be published this fall in the UK)

Iain McGichrist

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The beliefs in the unlimited substitutability of resources, in the primacy of economic institutions and policies, and in the exceptionalism of human beings and their modern markets often combine to produce what I can only call unbridled hubris.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Culture is an amorphous concept at best, but the scholars Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson provide the definition I’ve found most succinct and useful: according to them, culture is “information—skills, attitudes, beliefs, values—capable of affecting individuals’ behavior, which they acquire from others by teaching, imitation, and other forms of social learning.”

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

Frederick Douglass, in his once-famous Fifth of July oration, delivered on July 5, 1852, could combine a militant rejection of slavery with a bow to the moral possibilities inherent in the Constitution to annihilate it—and this wasn’t just a rhetorical gambit designed to win support for his cause: “In that instrument, I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither.”

The Road to Unfreedom

Timothy Snyder

What has already happened in Russia is what might happen in America and Europe: the stabilization of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda, the shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity. Russian leaders could invite Europeans and Americans to eternity because Russia got there first. They understood American and European weaknesses, which they had first seen and exploited at home.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

MODERNITY: Condition of society from late eighteenth ceTimntury, marked by rapid growth of population, spread of industrial and then finance capitalism, division of labor, literacy, and mobility. Intellectually, a climate of ideas marked by secularization and enlightened thought. Modernity cut loose natural science from the divine and the supernatural; philosophy from alone explaining the world; morality from the task of human redemption; law from the putative universal order of nature. Modernity entered political thought via Machiavelli and Hobbes, who lifted from rulers any duty beyond ensuring a safe, stable frame for people to flourish in and pursue worldly concerns. To liberals, modernity was a liberation, to conservatives a loss of anchorage and human shelter for which they blamed liberals, hence the term, “liberal modernity.” “Many old works become fragments. Many modern works start out as fragments” (Friedrich Schlegel).

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Like cultural conservatives before him and after, [Carl] Schmitt was also disturbed by the apparent loss of compass and bleak purposelessness in liberal modernity. The oddity, for a conservative, was Schmitt’s looking to politics to fill the gap. A more natural filler—one sought by [John Henry] Newman, for example—was an authoritative religion. Schmitt’s correspondent and interlocutor, Leo Strauss, pointed that out to Schmitt, who acknowledged the religious element in his thinking.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

The contradictory of ‘metaphorical’ is ‘literal’; and if the distinction between literal and metaphorical usages is a genuine distinction, which in one sense it is, both kinds of usage are equally proper. There is another sense in which all language is metaphorical; and in that sense the objection to certain linguistic usages on the ground that they are metaphorical is an objection to language as such, and proceeds from an aspiration towards what Charles Lamb called the uncommunicating muteness of fishes. But this topic belongs to the theory of language, that is, to the science of aesthetic, with which this essay is not concerned.

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.