Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 17 June 2021

 

Greeks ancient to contemporary & Paddy Leigh Fermor 

Natural Born Heroes

Christopher McDougall

Instead of bowing down to saints and miracles, the Greeks worshipped problem solvers and hard how-to. They understood the difference between heroism and impulse, and they devised an easy, two-step test for telling them apart: 1. Would you do it again? 2. And could you?

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

Just as the original sense of the word ‘cause’ is what I have called the historical sense, according to which that which is caused is the act of a conscious and responsible agent, so the original sense of the word ‘necessary’ is an historical sense, according to which it is necessary for a person to act in a certain way: deciding so to act and acting therefore freely and responsibly, yet (in a sense which in no wise derogates from his responsibility) ‘necessitated’ to act in that way by certain ‘causes’, in sense I [#1] of the word ‘cause’.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

The decision the will arrives at can never be derived from the mechanics of desire or the deliberations of the intellect that may precede it. The will is either an organ of free spontaneity that interrupts all causal chains of motivation that would bind it or it is nothing but an illusion.

The Big Fat Surprise

Nina Teicholz

As the accompanying graph shows, the only fats that could be found in any American kitchen up until about 1910 were those that came exclusively from animals: lard (the fat from pigs), suet (the fat from around an animal’s kidneys), tallow (a harder fat from sheep and cattle), butter, and cream.

Fear Itself

Ira Katznelson

He [Walter Lippmann] further identified the rupture between past and present—in the democracies as well as the dictatorships—with two revolutionary developments in modern politics he believed to be “wholly without precedent in history.” First was the active and self-conscious participation in government by “the masses of men,” making of “modern government in our Western World, even under the dictatorships,” something of “a daily plebiscite.” The legitimacy of any government thus had come to depend on its ability to solve problems and formulate policies to which the governed would offer consent, both active and passive.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 16 June 2021

 

This book becomes more important with each passing day

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

We are not yet ready to admit that the destruction of nature is the consequence not of policy errors that can be remedied by smarter management, better technology, and stricter regulation but rather of a catastrophic moral failure that demands a radical shift in consciousness.

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

Hitherto, the natural landscape and the human world took a backseat to the essentially spiritual and religious subjects of paintings. Prior to perspective, the mundane world was merely a reflection of the spiritual realms, a hieroglyphic backdrop to celestial events and figures. But with perspective, this changed. The represented world now became what was perceived from the point of view of a single human consciousness. The world was now what we saw.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

To be an elder, benefactor, conservator, and mentor calls for a learning about shadows, an instruction from the “dead” (that is, from what has gone before, become invisible, yet continues to vivify our lives with its influences). The “dead” come back as ancestors, especially in times of crisis, when we are at a loss.

The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Gary Lachman

“Imaginal” is the world that lies between the purely intelligible—that is, conceptual—world of Plato’s Forms (the Intellect in Plotinus’s philosophy) and the purely material world of the senses. It is, as Corbin writes, “ontologically as real as the world of the senses and that of the intellect.” It partakes of and informs both in the sense that in it, the pure abstract Ideas are clothed in symbols, and the brute objects of the physical world can become imbued with symbolic significance. We enter it every night when we dream, and some intrepid explorers have entered it while fully conscious. To jump ahead somewhat: C. G. Jung’s “descent into the unconscious,” Swedenborg’s journeys to heaven and hell, Rudolf Steiner’s “readings” of the “Akashic record,” to name perhaps the most well-known modern journeys into the interior, all took place within the Mundus Imaginalis.

A Guide to the I Ching

Carol K. Anthony

The suspension of disbelief becomes a humble acceptance of whatever is going on as part of the zigzag workings of the Creative. These two attitudes combine in an unshakable modesty which exemplifies The Receptive. While they appear to be passive attitudes, they are not. The secret is that they perfectly arouse the powers of the Creative to work out all things correctly.

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam

“For there was no doubt in Bundy’s mind about his ability to handle... the world. The job was not just a happenstance thing; he had, literally and figuratively, been bred for it, or failing this, Secretary of State. He was the  brightest  light in that glittering constellation around the President [Kennedy], for if those years had any central theme, if there was anything that bound the men, their followers and their subordinates together, it was the belief that sheer intelligence and rationality could answer and solve anything.”

Thoughts for the Day: 15 June 2021

 

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Sorel wrote prolifically, but he is remembered chiefly for Réflexions sur la violence (Reflections on Violence, 1906) and Illusions du progrès (Illusions of Progress, 1908). The first was a collection of essays on liberalism and socialism, the second a history of progress as a political idea. They shared powerful common themes: politically, the derision of liberal-democratic trust in public reason, elections, and parliamentary government; and socially, the castigation of middle-class flabbiness on which liberal-democratic politics rested. In the hostility of the working class, Sorel saw both a means for unmasking the liberal-democratic sham and an energy-source to reinvigorate a decadent society.

N.B. This received a highlight because I wrote two undergrad papers about Sorel, one of which was a comparison of him and Frantz Fanon (of Wretched of the Earth fame). Both saw violence as a means of purgation, cleansing, & energizing. The 20th century displayed how well that plan worked. (#irony, #sarcasm).

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Another way of dealing with a tangled problem is simply to do nothing, or at least nothing large, centralized, and carefully planned.

And how well does this work? (Not that THD is endorsing it.)

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Capitalists had to listen to clerics during sermons, and courts could find a loan usurious and declare that it need not be repaid. The many deathbed “restitutions” of profits show at least a partial acceptance of the content of the sermons. It is a further question whether the usury laws impeded or assisted the economy. A number of the many discussions of this topic have been vitiated by the assumption that any attempts to restrict business for moral reasons must impede the development of capitalism. Plainly this is not so in general: if everything is for sale, then bribery, slavery, the sale of judicial decisions, of industrial secrets and misinformation, and so on, will flourish, none of which is likely to encourage economic growth.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

[Addressed to Arendt's teacher & friend Karl Jaspters] What I have personally never forgotten is your attitude—so difficult to describe—of listening, your tolerance that is constantly ready to offer criticism but is as far removed from skepticism as it is from fanaticism; ultimately, it is simply the realization of the fact that all human beings are rational but that no human being’s rationality is infallible.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

The Stoic system overall is like a miniature version of Brahminical Hinduism. Still, there are differences: The Stoics did not teach reincarnation; their successive cycles of manifestation, unlike those of India, are exact repetitions; they did not teach a period of quiescence exactly equal in length to the period of cosmic activity (for when the cosmos ends, in the Stoic view, there is no longer anything to measure); finally, and most importantly, the Stoics seem no more than other Greek schools to have taught meditation and bodily discipline in anything like the Indian yogic manner.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

The parallelism between these traditions in Greece and in India is intimate and thoroughgoing. The cumulative heritage of seven hundred years of Greek dialectic was summed up in handbooks in and before the time of Sextus, and the contents of such a handbook, or their equivalent, may all be found in the Madhyamika texts.

Happiness

Matthieu Ricard and Daniel Goleman

Wealth, pleasures, rank, and power are all sought for the sake of happiness. But as we strive, we forget the goal and spend our time pursuing the means for their own sake. In so doing, we miss the point and remain deeply unsatisfied. This substitution of means for ends is one of the main traps lying across the pursuit of a meaningful life.

“Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.”
— Anton Chekhov

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 14 June 2021

 

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

Marx may have said that the proletarian has no country; it is well known that the proletarians have never shared this point of view. The lower social classes are especially susceptible to nationalism, chauvinism, and imperialistic policies. One serious split in the civil-rights movement into “black” and “white” came as a result of the war question: the white students coming from good middle-class homes at once joined the opposition, in contrast to the Negroes, whose leaders were very slow in making up their, minds to demonstrate against the war in Vietnam This was true even of Martin Luther King. The fact that the army gives the lower social classes certain opportunities for education and vocational training naturally also plays a role here. The fact that the army gives the lower social classes certain opportunities for education and vocational training naturally also plays a role here.

The Idea of Nature

R. G. Collingwood

Just as the stream of life presupposes the topography of a material world through which it flows, so the stream of consciousness presupposes the topography of logical and conceptual forms, categories, or ideas in the Platonic and Hegelian sense; and Bergson’s attempt to deny these two presuppositions leaves him in the dilemma of either tacitly asserting what he professes to deny or else asserting nothing except the existence of a force which does nothing and of an intuition which apprehends that nothingness.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

These were things that could be proved to exist using the methodical foundation of this essentially scientific vision of the world—logical analysis. That is, so-called facts. But Wittgenstein was able to show that the truth was in fact precisely the reverse. Everything that gives meaning to life, and the world in which we live, already lies within the boundaries of what can be directly said.

The Wedge

Scott Carney,

We’ve seen these values before in how people who are over-sensitive to CO₂ reinforce constant feelings of anxiety. This internal awareness is what neuroscientists call interoception. It’s a critical sense to hone the Wedge because it allows people to identify subtle sensations inside their body that they don’t often notice consciously. Feinstein’s research indicates that even brief periods of turning down external stimuli can force people to turn their attention inward—heightening their interoceptive abilities—and break the feedback cycle that reinforces anxiety.

Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 13 June 2021

 

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Broadly speaking, working with the immune system and our inner worlds means paying more attention to the bounty of sensations that are available to us. This includes the five main senses—sight, smell, touch, taste and sound—but also the interoceptive sense that we develop when we quiet the outside world and look inward.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

As T.S. Eliot famously wrote, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

As industrial civilization begins to implode, we will witness an upsurge of prophecy of all kinds—fantastic, salvational, millenarian, apocalyptic, and reactionary.

Impeachment

Cass R. Sunstein

Under English law, the House of Commons took the term “misdemeanor” to refer to distinctly public misconduct, including but not limited to actual crimes. Thus “high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” the standard basis for impeachment, represented “a category of political crimes against the state.”

A Vision So Noble

Daniel Ford

“Undermine guerrilla cause and destroy their cohesion by demonstrating integrity and competence of government to represent and serve needs of people – rather than exploit and impoverish them for the benefit of a greedy elite.” And the footnote: “If you cannot realize such a political program, you might consider changing sides!”

Vernacular Eloquence

Peter Elbow

When we read writing aloud it increases our chance of noticing any mismatches or friction between the outer physical experience of hearing the sound of our words and the inner mental or cognitive experience of feeling the meaning. After practicing the activity of reading aloud to revise, we begin to learn to notice when the fit is not so good between words and meaning—a sense of our feet swimming a bit in shoes that are too large—a sense of sounds sort of flapping around a bit and slightly muffling the meaning.

The World Beyond Your Head

Matthew B. Crawford

The image of human excellence I would like to offer as a counterweight to freedom thus understood is that of a powerful, independent mind working at full song. Such independence is won through disciplined attention, in the kind of action that joins us to the world. And-this is important-it is precisely those constraining circumstances that provide the discipline.

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 12 June 2012

 

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

A different kind of humanistic project in history is that of Machiavelli’s Discourses. He attempts to make history a science by extracting maxims from history: generalizations that are summaries of and lessons taught by the many individual events of the past. A typical example is “Dictatorship is advantageous in times of emergency.” Naturally, there are continual problems with the wealth of counterexamples to the maxims; Machiavelli attempts to explain them away individually, rather than saying that the maxims only hold true for the most part. His advice on what action to take in case of doubt is unhelpful: “In all discussions one should consider which alternative involves fewer inconveniences and should adopt this as the better course; for one never finds any issue that is clear cut and not open to question." To consider only the payoff, and not the probability of occurrence, will not lead to a satisfactory decision theory.

Trust and the Competition Delusion - Griffith Review

griffithreview.com

Courtesy of the competition delusion, the internet was colonised largely for institutional and private benefit.

The Immortality Key

Brian C. Muraresku 

The women and their Eucharist had to go. It may have started by altering John’s Gospel and getting rid of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. But the campaign against women and drugs would last for a very long time. As we will see toward the end of this investigation, it is a war that still very much continues to this day.

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

Cognition and creation are not only identical in the divine act of intuitus originarius (Kant); this identity is a demonstrable fact, independent of all revelation and present in man’s “duty of creation,” in which he must “endlessly repeat the creation of the universe,” a duty which can be proven by logical-positivist arguments. This is the logos which will take the place of mythos in a “future unitary science” and which will restore a world out of joint to the orderliness of a “system,” will lead man lost in anarchy back to the constraints of necessity.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Weaver was writing in the same monitory spirit as Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (1946) and Victor Klemperer’s study of fascist discourse, Lingua Tertii Imperii (1947). Taking their speeches as his material, Weaver disapproved of Burke’s rhetorical overkill, argumentative fluidity, and sense of expediency; he praised Lincoln’s lawyerly insistence on clearly stated definitions and principles.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Liberals, to put it in summary terms, took society to be competitive and conflicted. They distrusted power and questioned customary authority. They believed in human progress and social equality, with its requirement of civic respect for all. They had high expectations of political action.

Once More Exploring the Niall: A Review of Niall Ferguson's Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

 

Niall Ferguson, as I noted a few years ago in my review of The Great Derangement, seems to consist of two or more authorial personas. Having now read Doom, his most recent book, I can confirm and expand this observation. Ferguson indeed has multiple authorial personalities, and I believe that he gives voice to most of them in this book. (Although it's thoroughly footnoted and referenced, I find the archive-digging, monograph-writing historian is the missing persona in this book). But we do experience the scholar-data-digger; the purveyor of sweeping narrative; the innovative analyst; the philosopher of (and about) history; and the political commentator. Reading this book, I sensed that while quarantined by the pandemic, Ferguson performed a mind-dump into this book. But I say this not by way of criticism. The contents of Ferguson's mind never prove boring. Aggravating at times, yes; but never dull. When I went back in my blog over the last twelve years, I find many considerations of his work, some enthusiastic and some critical; but--at least to my mind at the time--certainly worth having read and commenting upon. This work doesn't disappoint, even if it is a bit unwieldy and unfocused. 

The overarching theme of the book concerns the human reactions to catastrophes and how responses can vary for good or ill. Catastrophes happen; some are natural disasters, some man-made. We can't control earthquakes or volcanic reactions in the least bit, nor can we hope to completely tame droughts and floods and hurricanes, although we've certainly--if unwittingly--learned how to exacerbate them. So while we have little or no control over the occurrence of some events, we do have a measure of control over how we humans anticipate and respond to natural and man-made disasters. ("Man-made"? Think "accidents" like Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island, Fukushima, Bhopal, mining disasters, plane crashes, and famines as examples.) Ferguson provides abundant examples and analyses of such occasions. Ferguson sometimes gets a bit long-winded with statistics and lists, but you come away with a comparative appreciation of the many events that have challenged humankind. 

As Ferguson turns to the recent pandemic (now likely to morph into endemic status), he compares it to the 1957 "Asian flu." The comparisons and contrasts are intriguing. The response to the arrival of the Asian flu in the U.S. was more or less business as usual in terms of risk avoidance and daily life. Of course, in writing about COVID-19, Ferguson must shift from history to the journalism of current events (he completed his manuscript in late summer 2020), so some of these observations and anticipations don't have the benefit of hindsight that history offers. Here he treads on less solid ground, and he allows his contrarian and (politically) conservative instincts freer rein. 

Toward the end, Ferguson explores The Three-Body Problem as manifest not only in Liu Cixin's sci-fi novel but also as a metaphor for the rise of China and its relation to the U.S. and the rest of the world. He also wonders (not unprofitably) off into Mary Shelley's The Last Man, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Margaret Atwood's MaddAdam Trilogy, and Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, among others. Even the very learned historian must turn to the imagination of fiction, especially science fiction, to try to peer more deeply into the fog of the future. 

I also want to mention that Ferguson talks about some who've written about the patterns of history. Of course, there is the older school, represented by the likes of Spengler and Toynbee. But more recently we find the work of sociologist Jack Goldstone and biologist-turned-historical theorist, Peter Turchin, both of whom have promoted the "structural-demographic theory" of social and political patterns of historical events. Ferguson thinks highly of this line of thinking, but he notes (correctly, in my opinion) that such patterns are not inevitabilities but likelihoods, given the "black swan" nature of events outside the dynamics of the patters, such as natural catastrophes (earthquakes, volcanos, droughts, floods, etc.) or wars. Ferguson also touches on the recent work of investor Ray Dalio, who's posted his claim of identifying a pattern of political-economic change. The same reservations--about the effects of exogenous shocks to the system (pattern)could modify or even destroy the pattern Dalio identifies (assuming he's in some measure accurate). Ferguson, as a historian and someone who seems to appreciate history as a way of knowing, has developed some interesting ideas of his own about the contingency of history and the use of counterfactuals. (In a future blog, I intend to explore more deeply Ferguson's ideas about history, his relation to the work of R.G. Collingwood (whom he's often cited), and criticisms of Ferguson's work in relation to Collingwood's, especially as set forth by my fellow Collingwood enthusiast, David Pierce (here and here). 

Doom is a big, detailed work about what has and will no doubt continue to go seriously wrong in our world. It displays Ferguson's skills as an analyst, the breadth of his knowledge, his narrative skill, and his willingness to wade into controversy. It's classic Ferguson in one big book. And given that catastrophes of various sorts are unlikely to disappear by some magic of good fortune, we'd do well to consider what Ferguson has revealed, take heed, and govern ourselves accordingly. I don't recommend adopting a sense of doom, but we certainly could use a strong dose of prudence.