Thoughts 29 November 2021

 

An A-Z diagnosis of health and health care in the U.S. 

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

Medical economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford Medicine analyzed millions of medical records, and the factor that most correlated with increasing weight gain in the population was the number of visits to an HMO doctor. Now, that’s correlation, not causation, but you have to wonder. Back in 1970 we spent 6 percent of our GDP on healthcare, and now fifty years later we spend 17.9 percent. Yet the average American’s weight is up, health is down, and wallet is underwater.

An appropriate post-Thanksgiving insight.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Explanation in history is not a matter of establishing relationships between perceived facts, but of treating facts as thoughts which have to be grasped and understood.

An intriguing observation.

The Idea of Nature

R. G. Collingwood

[In discussing ancient Greek culture:] What different legal decisions have in common is not justice itself but an attempt on the part of the courts that make these decisions to arrive at a just decision. Such attempts are never wholly successful, and that is why the pure form remains transcendent. If they were wholly successful, it would be immanent as well as transcendent. Because they are never wholly successful, the transcendent form remains purely transcendent, and the immanent form remains a mere ‘imitation’ or approximation.

Ultrasociety

Peter Turchin

Unlike biological organisms, societies do not grow up and do not grow senile. There is no natural life-cycle for an empire.

True, the biological metaphor for "civilizations" (or other political entities) is overused and no more than a metaphor. And neither are there "laws." But we do see patterns even within wide individual variations. Cf., Turchin, War and Peace and War. (N.B. Niall Ferguson (below) touches on Turchin's work in Doom.)

Doom

Niall Ferguson

What will be the economic consequences of the pandemic? Plainly, it belongs on the list of large economic disasters. If the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is right about U.S. gross domestic product in 2020 (in June, it forecast a decline of 8 percent, though by October its projection was a less drastic minus 4.3 percent), it will be the American economy’s worst year since 1946.

Of course, what is remarkable is how quickly we've rebounded from this precipitous drop. Not entirely and not without changes, but kudos to stimulus & wise monetary policy!

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Sigmund Freud, the last great defender of the Enlightenment (despite his own rediscovery of the irrational), put his finger on the neurotic origin and character of this hostility: “Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by … going over to the attack against nature and subjecting her to the human will.”

Nature as the enemy. A bad attitude in my book!

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Among other things, in [complex] systems small inputs can cause outputs that are disproportionate to the input by triggering a cascade of positive feedback. Or given enough time, small inputs can slowly amplify into large effects.

Societies and climates are complex entities and contain surprises. Be prepared!

After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre

The claim that the major protagonists of the distinctively modern moral causes of the modern world—I am not here speaking at all of those who seek to uphold older traditions which have somehow or other survived into some sort of coexistence with modernity—offer a rhetoric which serves to conceal behind the masks of morality what are in fact the preferences of arbitrary will and desire is not of course an original claim. For each of the contending protagonists of modernity, while for obvious reasons unwilling to concede that the claim is true in their own case, is prepared to make it about those against whom they contend.

Irrational Man

William Barrett

In losing religion, man lost the concrete connection with a transcendent realm of being; he was set free to deal with this world in all its brute objectivity. But he was bound to feel homeless in such a world, which no longer answered the needs of his spirit.

Thoughts 28 Nov 2021

Feel like you're sleeping too soundly, too comfortably with too many sweet dreams? Then read this book. 

The Uninhabitable Earth

David Wallace-Wells

When it comes to global warming, the models are just as good, but the key input is a mystery: What will we do? The lessons there are unfortunately bleak. Three-quarters of a century since global warming was first recognized as a problem, we have made no meaningful adjustment to our production or consumption of energy to account for it and protect ourselves.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

All media present an abstract and selective version of reality, but compared to print television is not an informative medium at all, but a dramatic one: it transmits images, not ideas; it evokes emotions, not thoughts; and it arouses passion, not deliberation. Indeed, at its worst, it is frankly inflammatory. . . . [At best], because it portrays the world in ever small “bites” of sound and image, television creates what is tantamount to a cartoon of reality.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

[C]rowds are moved by simple ideas, striking images, and repeated slogans that drive out deeper thought. To make matters worse, the anonymity of crowds induces individuals to behave viscerally, discarding both prudence and morality. In addition, because crowds are moved by images that are not logically connected or rooted in fact, members of crowds have a hard time distinguishing between reality and illusion. Thus, said Le Bon, crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture—all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realizing.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[I]t’s life’s metaphysical edges that really intrigue me, like those between what we know, more or less, and what we don’t really know at all; between the past, present, and future; between events inside our minds and outside; and between the impossible and the inevitable.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

In his ambitious two-volume work, Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama writes that the fundamental question for every human society is simple: How do you get to Denmark? “By this I mean less the actual country Denmark,” he writes, “than an imagined society that is prosperous, democratic, secure, and well governed, and experiences low levels of corruption.”

Fear Itself

Ira Katznelson

Although the United States provided the globe’s only major example of a liberal democracy successfully experimenting and resisting radical tyranny, it did not—indeed, could not—remain unaffected by its associations with totalitarian governments or domestic racism.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

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

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don’t prove anything one way or another.

The Culture Code

Clotaire Rapaille

Ask most people why they work and they’re likely to answer “To make money.” The Culture Code shows us that this isn’t actually true, but there is a very strong connection between work and money in this culture.

Vernacular Eloquence

Peter Elbow

Because of the power and prestige that Oxford and Cambridge had down through the centuries (graduates were given, in effect, two votes in national elections until 1935), a large portion of prominent politicians, scholars, and leaders of society up till recent times had undergone three years of this weekly ritual: writing essays that they had to read aloud and that were evaluated entirely on the basis of hearing. I think this may explain something I’ve noticed till recently about English scholarly and political writing: it seems more accessible, spoken, and free of jargon than the same genres in German and U.S. academic writing.

Thoughts 27 November 2021

 

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Socrates taught not that we should perfect the world but that we should perfect ourselves within an imperfect world.

But can we not yet seek to perfect (v.) the world even if it will never reach perfection (n.)?

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Reason therefore resembles language. Just as language can never be objective or neutral—for all languages, without exception (mathematics included), express a particular worldview—so too reason is not an independent criterion to which one can appeal in favor of one system rather than another. The instrumental rationality that most moderns believe is the only valid form of reason was not forced on us by nature. It was espoused—in part consciously but in larger part unconsciously—to further the ends of domination inherent in the cultural values of Western civilization.

Everything is embedded.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

An unattractive binary. 

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

All around the world, authorities quite uncoincidentally find that “hateful” and “unsafe” speech is speech which is critical of them—not least in the United States, where, in 1954, the U.S. Postal Service used obscenity laws to censor ONE, a gay magazine whose cover article (“You Can’t Print It!”) just happened to criticize the censorship policies of the U.S. Postal Service.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

The concentration on the inner life . . . especially the sins therein, gave an impetus to conceiving psychology legalistically, in terms of cases of conscience. If conscience is to be identified with the superego, and the passions with the id, then the rational ego that mediates between them and resolves their conflicting demands must essentially perform casuistry.

The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus

Gary Lachman

The difference between the Gnostics and the Hermeticists is that Hermetic man doesn't want to escape from the world, but to realize his full potential within it, in order to embrace his obligations, so that, as Hermes tells Asclepius, he can 'raise his sight to heaven while he takes care of the earth'.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

By this point, there were really two economies: the digital economy and the material economy. Andreessen’s point was that the digital economy was becoming so powerful that it was dominating—eating up—the material economy. Increasingly, new companies were finding that they could use software to enhance their profits dramatically, expand their reach, and sell digital services rather than physical products.

Thoughts 26 November 2021

 

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

As we begin to understand the processes that go into the evolution of complex systems (and what is the human mind, if not a very complex system of processes?), we are recognizing that development isn’t always just slow and steady. Gradualism may be the dominant inclination in scientific circles these days, but both developmental psychology and complexity theory suggests that evolution can also move in leaps and jumps, with periods of relative stasis mixed in with periods of rapid change.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

Called a spiritualist metaphysician by one historian, [James Mark] Baldwin and his interests straddled many worlds, and his work has been described as a bridge between “social and cognitive theories of development,” bringing to mind later theories such as Spiral Dynamics (which we will explore in the next chapter) and the philosophy of Jürgen Habermas, which cross the lines between those two realms.

Last Best Hope

George Packer

It was never going to be easy to negotiate the trade-off between the physical health of teachers and the mental health of children, between the guidance of scientists and the livelihood of waiters, between being alive and being OK. All of this required a society where people encountered one another as fellow citizens of goodwill and a government that heard them, and we had neither.

Lila

Robert M. Pirsig

The reason values seem so woolly-headed to empiricists is that empiricists keep trying to assign them to subjects or objects. You can’t do it. You get all mixed up because values don’t belong to either group. They are a separate category all their own.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

We always condemn most in others, he [Phaedrus] thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

Anxiety, the next  gumption trap (2 words), is sort of the opposite of ego. You’re so sure you’ll do everything wrong you’re afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than “laziness,” is the real reason you find it hard to get started. This  gumption trap (2 words) of anxiety, which results from overmotivation, can lead to all kinds of errors of excessive fussiness. You fix things that don’t need fixing, and chase after imaginary ailments. You jump to wild conclusions and build all kinds of errors into the machine because of your own nervousness.

Made to Stick

Chip Heath & Dan Heath

As we pored over hundreds of  sticky ideas (2 words), we saw, over and over, the same six principles at work. PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.” To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize.

Thoughts 24 November 2021

Published this fall 

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

When on May 21–22, 2020, the two sessions [of the Chinese Communist Party] finally convened in Beijing, the story that the regime had to tell was one of heroic national recovery. The failure of the West handed the CCP a historic triumph.

After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre

What then the conjunction of philosophical and historical argument reveals is that either one must follow through the aspirations and the collapse of the different versions of the Enlightenment project until there remains only the Nietzschean diagnosis and the Nietzschean problematic or one must hold that the Enlightenment project was not only mistaken, but should never have been commenced in the first place. There is no third alternative and more particularly there is no alternative provided by those thinkers at the heart of the contemporary conventional curriculum in moral philosophy, Hume, Kant and Mill. It is no wonder that the teaching of ethics is so often destructive and skeptical in its effects upon the minds of those taught. 

But which ought we to choose? And how ought we to choose? It is yet another of Nietzsche’s merits that he joins to his critique of Enlightenment moralities a sense of their failure to address adequately, let alone to answer the question: what sort of person am I to become? This is in a way an inescapable question in that an answer to it is given in practice in each human life. But for characteristically modern moralities it is a question to be approached only by indirection. The primary question from their standpoint has concerned rules: what rules ought we to follow? And why ought we to obey them? And that this has been the primary question is unsurprising when we recall the consequences of the expulsion of Aristotelian teleology from the moral world.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue (pp. 118-119). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition. 

 

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

Lachman quoting Jurij Moskvitin:

A mind looking into a world external to itself will receive a picture of a world in which there are some phenomena that cannot be explained in terms of the laws generally ruling in that world. The reason is that a mind—any mind—is creating its world by means of a process of selection. The thing that will be missing in that world . . . is the law governing the total system because the mind is a part of the total system, and what it cannot perceive is itself. . . . The world as we see it is determined by the structure of what to us appears as its smallest components. To move deeper in this direction is to change the world. . . . 

[T]he total system of which the point (consciousness) is itself an element will forever remain unknown to the point. It is itself governed by a system of which it can never grasp the totality. . . . Fully to grasp and understand what it is in itself would be to grasp the totality. Therefore there will in itself forever remain something unknown, and so there will remain something unknown in the world that it perceives as external to itself. That unknown will appear as life. The increasing approach to the unknown—the blind spot in itself—is the creation of life itself.

Lachman, Gary. A Secret History of Consciousness (p. 190). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition. 

 

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The nation might bind the people, but what bound the nation? Schmitt’s answer came in the Der Begriff des Politischen (The Concept of the Political, 1927). In sixty pages, Schmitt touched on political obligation, sovereignty, group identity, and life’s purposes. To tie those disparate topics together Schmitt used a single emotive term, “the enemy.” The presence of an enemy, he wrote, engendered the nation, bound people to the state, created need for a sovereign, and lifted politics out of the mundane.