Thoughts: 16 Nov. 2021

The Wedge

Scott Carney

We may not always think about our death, but we sense death constantly on a cellular level. Evolution gave us this morbid gift. We are built to propagate the species. Every hormonal response, reflex, sensation and cognitive ability exists to serve this purpose. Every emotion, from fear, love and happiness to sadness, ambivalence and ennui, confers critical information that helps us stay alive.

The push of stayin' alive. But what about the pull? What are we stayin' alive for? To listen to the Bee Gees?

Doom

Niall Ferguson

This is not to dismiss the potential risks that may arise from rising global temperatures, but simply to suggest that obsessive discussion of those risks in 2019 and early 2020 led to myopia. For the average American on the eve of the pandemic, the chance of dying from an overdose was two hundred times greater than the chance of being killed by a cataclysmic storm, and the chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident was fifteen hundred times higher than the chance of being killed by a flood. The threat of climate-related disaster lay in the future; the threat of pandemic was proximate. In 2018, the number of Americans killed by influenza and pneumonia (59,120) was substantially higher than the number who died in car crashes (39,404). 

Per the immediately preceding quote, we have a strong instinct to stay alive, but we're often quite deluded about the relative levels of threat from a wide variety of sources. 

The Enigma of Reason

Hugo Mercier

Does all this suggest that psychological reasons, whether “implicit” or conscious, have no reality whatsoever, that they are a pure construction? No, reasons are indeed constructed, but under two constraints that ensure that they have some degree of both psychological and social reality. The reasons we invoke for justification have to make psychological sense. Talk of reasons need not—in fact, we have argued, cannot—provide an accurate account of what happens in our minds, but it tends to highlight factors that did play a causal role. Reasons are typically constructed out of bits of psychological insight.

Ah, yes, our strength of reason isn't what we'd like to to be, and comes from unreliable places.

Trust and the Competition Delusion - Griffith Review

griffithreview.com

Increasingly, in our current system, the public only gets to choose which oligarchic faction they support. And they’re turning off in droves – that is, when they’re not enraged. By pioneering a life for ourselves beyond the competition delusion, we could make our way once again towards the ancient Athenian vision of democracy as a system in which every citizen takes turns in ruling and being ruled.

Two Essays on Colin Wilson

Gary Lachman

Colin Wilson’s approach lies somewhere between the passive receptivity of the Jungian work and the strenuous super-efforts of Ouspensky. He argues that it is essential to realize that our conscious attitudes have a powerful effect on how we see the world.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

“What’s new?” is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question “What is best?,” a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

The first argument is an argument from experience. Those societies that glorify militarism almost invariably lose wars.

If you get in a lot of fights, you're gonna lose some. Simple. Ask the U.S. military. No one individual or entity is invincible. Ask Michael Jordan.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

There was a pervasive sense that, in the phrase Margaret Thatcher famously used to shut down debate over free-market economics, “there is no alternative.” She used the slogan so much that some of her cabinet colleagues began to call her “TINA.” That phrase captured the spirit of the times, an almost Marxist idea of historical inevitability—except that capitalism, rather than socialism, was the ideology lying at the “end of history.” And it wasn’t just Thatcher.

This line of thinking, of "no alternative," of "invincibility," is deluded when applied to any plan, institution, or ideology. And markets are not the least exception: some work well, some horribly. But all require constant attention and inputs of energy (such as regulation).

Thoughts: 15 Nov 2021

A 2020 publication but very today. 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Seneca emphasized the close association of hope with fear. “Both,” he wrote, “belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.”

Trust and the Competition Delusion - Griffith Review

griffithreview.com

We’re falling for the ‘competition delusion’ by which I mean this: in our embrace of private competition as a goal, we mostly pass over a prior issue – which is the terms on which that competition takes place. This is undermining trust in a remarkably wide range of institutions in our economic and public life.

Cooperation and competition are polarities they create energy via the exchanges between them. Fruitful competitions are bounded in cooperation. Like athletic games, markets prosper only when properly bounded by rules and rule enforcement. "All competition all the time" creates chaos and leads to self-destruction.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

The irreconcilable clashes in American politics reflected a polarization between those who affirmed the many transformations America has undergone since the tumultuous 1960s and had done well out of those changes and those who hankered after a return to the 1950s, or at least their vision of that bygone era. Trump had satisfied that craving, and though he lost the national vote, red-state America had not repudiated him. He gained more votes than in 2016. Indeed, he gained more votes than any presidential candidate before him in history, other than Biden. And Trump, being Trump, thought he had won.

I question the insinuation that Trump voters are led by nostalgia; more recent developments--the relative decline in many regions of the country--are more causal. The nostalgia is a symptom, not a cause.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

The advantage of the reality-based community is not that it catches every error immediately, but that it catches most errors eventually, and many errors very quickly. No other regime can make that claim, or come anywhere close.

Crucial.

On Revolution

Hannah Arendt

A theory of war or a theory of revolution, therefore, can only deal with the justification of violence because this justification constitutes its political limitation; if, instead, it arrives at a glorification or justification of violence as such, it is no longer political but antipolitical.

Arendt is the anti-Clauswitz in this particular: war isn't the continuation of politics ("by other means") but the cessation of politics.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

Biology and economics form our basic Western model. Ideas of soul, of individual character, and the influence of awareness on life processes have become accessory decorations to lighten the despair and disguise the “real truth” about old age.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

[Henry] Kissinger begins this part of [Kissinger's book] Diplomacy with the most unequivocal of declarations: “Hitler’s advent to power marked one of the greatest calamities in the history of the world.” Few would disagree. Still, in recent years many writers on the Nazis have tried to achieve a kind of “objective” distance by stepping away from stressing that Hitler was one of humankind’s great monsters to a more analytic posture—not, one must hasten to say, to rehabilitate him (though some have undeniably moved in that direction) but to be able to “historicize” the Third Reich and understand it in context.

In the preface to his expansive study The Coming of the Third Reich, the historian Richard J. Evans writes, “It seems to me inappropriate for a work of history to indulge in the luxury of moral judgment. For one thing, it is unhistorical; for another, it is arrogant and presumptuous. I cannot know how I would have behaved if I had lived under the Third Reich.” Commendably, Evans is not so self-righteous as to assume that he would have been among the small minority of Germans who were immune to Hitler’s appeal. But unlike Evans, a Jewish German might indeed “indulge in the luxury of moral judgment.” As someone driven out of Germany, Kissinger does not and cannot share Evans’s doubts or qualms, either his well-intentioned modesty or, as it were, his over-evenhandedness. Kissinger belongs to the old school of moral history and lets his emotions do the talking. His words for Hitler are “demonic” and “psychotic.”

This quote raises a fascinating issue: should we pass moral judgment on persons in the past? In one sense, we certainly do and should. If one isn't morally outraged by Hitler, then one should fear for one's moral bearings. On the other hand, Hitler is dead. Our condemnation can't change him or more specifically, his position and behavior. Thus, shouldn't history be more concerned with understanding the man and his actions? In the end, both attitudes--of moral judgment and understanding--have their place. We must beware because moral judgment can be cheap, while understanding is almost alaways dear.

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.

Thouoghts: 13 Nov. 2021

 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Simply stopping the slide— just keeping things from getting worse— isn’t enough. Reversing it means aggressively addressing our world’s agonizing social and economic injustices; and most importantly, it means rebuilding nature. We must commit to fixing the hideous environmental mess we’ve made— with all the science, technology, economic investment, and intellectual, artistic, and emotional creativity we can muster.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Those values and rules and institutions do for knowledge what the U.S. Constitution does for politics: they create a governing structure, forcing social contestation onto peaceful and productive pathways. And so I call them, collectively, the Constitution of Knowledge.

Fooled by Randomness

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only his failure.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

The internet has been excellent at telling us about the actual, not so much about the contingent, although policymakers necessarily operate in an arena of uncertainty and unpredictability.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

“Nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations [read, today: Russia?] and passionate attachments for others [read, perhaps: South Vietnam?] should be excluded.” Washington’s text argues that “the nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.”

This was published in 1970, perhaps we'd substitute "China" for "Russia," and perhaps "Saudia Arabia."

The Way to Love

Anthony De Mello

This is what happened: First your society and your culture taught you to believe that you would not be happy  without certain persons and certain things. Just take a look around you: Everywhere people have actually built their lives on the unquestioned belief that  without certain things—money, power, success, approval, a good reputation, love, friendship, spirituality, God—they cannot be happy. What is your particular combination?

“Evolution doesn’t have a purpose in the human sense, as far as I know. But because we are human, we can give it a purpose. We are now in the position of being responsible for evolution, for life. It’s no longer just a mindless universe. I mean, it is just a mindless universe, which has generated through complexity a mind that now has to decide where we want to go. So, in that sense, now it has a purpose, it seems to me. It’s our purpose. And we have to decide what that purpose is.” —“Flow With Soul: An Interview with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi," What Is Enlightenment? Magazine, Issue 21, Spring/Summer 2002

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.