Thoughts 11 Dec. 2021

 

The Uninhabitable Earth

David Wallace-Wells

Climate change will accelerate two trends already undermining that promise of growth: first, by producing a global economic stagnation that will play, in some areas, like a breathtaking and permanent recession; and second, by punishing the poor much more dramatically than the rich, both globally and within particular polities, showcasing an increasingly stark income inequality, unconscionable already to more and more.

Think of the of how this is playing out.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

As a child, Keynes celebrated the British Empire as a humaynitarian, democratic force in world affairs. When the Great War and the Paris Peace Conference taught him an uglier truth, he began an intellectual project to create a new global order that would fulfill the ideals of his youth, hoping to transform an international system founded on predation into a scheme of justice, stability, and aesthetic brilliance—without resorting to war. If nineteenth-century empire couldn’t do it, Keynes would devise a system that would.

Can Keynes's dream be realized in light of what Wallace-Wells argues in the preceding paragraph? I doubt it. Cf. William Ophuls.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Each time society, through unemployment, frustrates the small man in his normal functioning and normal self-respect, it trains him for that last stage in which he will willingly undertake any function, even that of hangman.

Consider Arendt's contention in light of what Wallace-Wells said & Carter on Keynes above. This bodes trouble ahead.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

While there are many examples of the kind of creative leaps [Howard] Bloom described, consciousness certainly qualifies as Exhibit A on the how-the-heck-did-evolution-come-up-with-that? list. You don’t have to spend too much time at conferences where people are trying to explain human consciousness before you understand the appeal of the “God created it” point of view.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

The reality is that science does not yield one simple answer, especially not with a new phenomenon like the coronavirus.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Factory farms are also ground zero for new, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, as animals are bombarded with antibiotics that kill most bacteria but leave those that survive highly potent. Johns Hopkins professor Robert Lawrence calls antibiotic-resistant bacteria “the biggest human health risk of factory farms.”

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

The prophecy of Francis Bacon has now been fulfilled; and man, who at times dreamt of himself as a little lower than the angels, has submitted to become the servant and the minister of nature.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Nixon campaigned from the right but governed (with a Democratic Congress) from the center. His administration brought in affirmative action in federal hiring, big increases in spending and borrowing, wage and price controls, a dollar devaluation, détente with Soviet Union, and the opening of China, as well as disengagement from Vietnam, however grudging and brutal.

Thoughts 10 Dec. 2021

 

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

A.R. Orage, the literary critic and student of the esoteric teacher Gurdjieff, believed with [George Bernard] Shaw that imagination is the propellant of evolution. ‘Evolution is altogether an imaginative process,’ he wrote. ‘You become what you have been led to imagine yourself to be’.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

There are two problems with Keynes’s vision. 

First, we have attained a level of material abundance approximately double the eight-fold increase posited by him as more than sufficient for economic nirvana. Yet we have by no means exited the tunnel of necessity, because economic growth seems inevitably to produce more mouths, more wants, and, above all, more complexity. So the tunnel continuously extends itself before us. In fact, thanks to diminishing returns and an inexorable increase in the cost of complexity, we find ourselves running harder to stay in the same place. Thus growth is a flawed and self-defeating strategy for achieving economic nirvana. 

The second concern was anticipated by Keynes: “If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose.” And this was no small matter: “I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades.” Only the uncommon few “who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself . . . will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.” Hence 

there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.

 

Last Best Hope

George Packer

The narrative of Free America remained as inflexible as any ideology: tax cuts and deregulation = freedom and prosperity. Decade after decade you encountered its mantra, like the rituals of a cargo cult, on the website of the Cato Institute, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, broadcasts of The Rush Limbaugh Show, and the platform of the Republican Party. The facts said otherwise.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

“There exists in our society,” Arendt complained, “a widespread fear of judging.” The genuine statesman had no choice but to judge, and judgment, Kissinger said, demanded “character and courage . . . vision and determination . . . wisdom and foresight.” And where did correct judgment come from? Insofar as policy depended on nonquantifiable choices, there was no avoiding questions of morality. “All political action,” Strauss said, “implies thought of the good.” Kissinger wrote that “the great human achievements must be fused with enhanced powers of human, transcendent and moral judgment.” If artificial intelligence came to dominate or replace human thinking, “What is the role of ethics?”

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

However, we are of the world and not merely in it; we, too, are appearances by virtue of arriving and departing, of appearing and disappearing; and while we come from a nowhere, we arrive well equipped to deal with whatever appears to us and to take part in the play of the world.

The New Leviathan

R. G. Collingwood

Whatever is thus immediately given is removed from the sphere of argument.

What's RGC talking about? Perceptions, such as what we sense or feel.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

If we confine ourselves to certain types of facts, abstracted from the complete circumstances in which they occur, the materialistic assumption expresses these facts to perfection. But when we pass beyond the abstraction, either by more subtle employment of our senses, or by the request for meanings and for coherence of thoughts, the scheme breaks down at once. The narrow efficiency of the scheme was the very cause of its supreme methodological success.

Thoughts 9 December 2022

 

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

Fresh drinking water is an issue of primary importance, since it is indispensable for human life and for supporting terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.

This may seem a trite observation--dah! But for those living in the Mountain West and many other places around the globe, it's becoming an existential issue.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Economists have shown, through detailed research, that profit opportunities created by market demand are the usual motive for technological innovation. (But they are not the only motive: social idealism, the quest for power, and the desire to achieve intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction also drive technological innovation.)

Last Best Hope

George Packer

There’s a strain of class prejudice in Just America. “A hairdresser has to go to school for longer than you do!” a shirtless young man taunted a line of police officers during a protest in New York.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Allowing for national differences, four general things may be said about the hard right. First, it had a common character. The hard right combined economic libertarians and aggrieved nation-firsters, united in opposition, as they saw things, to self-serving, out-of-touch elites that had perverted true conservatism. The hard right showed a radical willingness, where in power, to upset familiar norms and arrangements all at once. In or out of power, the hard right used a shared repertoire of rhetorical appeals that skillfully disguised its inner tensions.

Why Nations Fail

Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

This book will show that while economic institutions are critical for determining whether a country is poor or prosperous, it is politics and political institutions that determine what economic institutions a country has.

Perennial Philosophy

Arthur Versluis

But intellect participates in that which it perceives; intellection is participation. Although from a limited sensory perspective, it appears that we perceive objects separate from ourselves, this is true only at the outermost level of experience. As our attention is turned inward and our consciousness ascends, if we may so put it, we also begin to recognize that we participate in beings and beings participate in us; intellection of the intelligible is recognition of what is within us and of what we must be able to recognize as in the continuum of our own field of knowing.

If you've read Bernardo Kastrup, compare this to what Kastrup argues.

After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre

The Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition of the virtues is, like some, although not all other moral traditions, a tradition of enquiry. It is characteristic of traditions of enquiry that they claim truth for their central theses and soundness for their central arguments.

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

This curious phenomenon of permeability, this fact that the human mind is always subject to influences, invasions, inspirations, that it is distracted from its purposes, washed over and windswept by all sorts of flotsam and scraps — fantasies, voices, spirits and angels — seems its basic condition.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

Thoughts 8 Dec 2021

 

Last Best Hope

George Packer

When Trump ran for president, the party of Free America collapsed into its own hollowness. The mass of Republicans were not constitutional originalists, libertarian free traders, members of the Federalist Society, or devout readers of The Wall Street Journal. They wanted government to do things that benefited them—not the undeserving classes below and above them. Party elites were too remote from Trump’s supporters and lulled by their own stale rhetoric to grasp what was happening.

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

Francis helps us to see that an integral ecology calls for openness to categories which transcend the language of mathematics and biology, and take us to the heart of what it is to be human.

American Philosophy

John Kaag

“He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity,” [William] James wrote, “loses the prize as surely as if he had tried and failed.”

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

What you’ve got here, really, are two realities, one of immediate artistic appearance and one of underlying scientific explanation, and they don’t match and they don’t fit and they don’t really have much of anything to do with one another. That’s quite a situation. You might say there’s a little problem here.

"The determining factor in the self is consciousness; i.e., self – consciousness. The more consciousness the more self; the more consciousness the more will, the more will the more self. . . . The self is the conscious synthesis of the limited and the unlimited which is related to itself and the task of which is to become a self, a task which can be realized only in relation to God. To become a self means to become concrete. But to become concrete means to be neither limited nor unlimited, for that which must becomes concrete is a synthesis. Therefore development consists in this: that in the eternalization of the self one escapes the self endlessly and in the temporization of the self one endlessly returns to the self."

Kierkegaard, quoted in Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: Vol. 1 Human Nature.

[T]he nation is a corporate unity held together much more by force and emotion than by mind. Since there can be no ethical action without self-criticism and no self-criticism without the rational capacity for self-transcendence, it is natural that national attitudes can hardly approximate the ethical.

Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 88.

Thoughts 7 Dec. 2021

 

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

[A]s Napoleonic armies battled on the streets of Jena, Hegel completed his first major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, in which he declared that “the Truth is not only the result [of philosophy] . . . the truth is the whole in the process of development.” 

Let us examine that last statement for a moment. Hegel is, for lack of a better word, evolutionizing the idea of philosophical truth. Truth is the whole in the process of development. He is liberating truth from the spell of solidity. Truth is not just found in this insight or that revelation; it is to be found in the very process of one idea giving way to another, and then being transcended by yet another, in the rough-and-tumble struggle of history. Truth is not static, he is saying, it is a process, a developmental unfolding. In order to appreciate any current philosophical idea, we need to understand its tributaries; we need to recognize the developmental process that has given it life. We need to take into account the give and take, the back and forth, the dialectical process, as Hegel calls it, as one stage of understanding gives way to another. “Hegel was the first to recognize that consciousness develops through a series of distinct stages,” writes Steve McIntosh, “[and] among the first to understand that this process of development or ‘becoming’ is the central motif of the universe.”

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

The Constitution of Knowledge relies on independent judgment; cancel culture relies on bullying.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

In analyzing a shock, economists like to disentangle changes in supply from changes in demand. The distinction matters because different causes require different remedies. If production, employment, and income contract because of a supply shock, then what is required to restore economic activity is an adjustment in the way we produce, deliver, and consume goods and services. This is what economists tend to call a “real” adjustment. If the problem is inadequate demand, then the system of production and distribution can remain as it is. What we need to do is to stimulate more spending by loosening budget constraints, for instance, through lower taxes, government spending, or easier credit.

Technopoly

Neil Postman

The fact is, there are very few political, social, and especially personal problems that arise because of insufficient information. Nonetheless, as incomprehensible problems mount, as the concept of progress fades, as meaning itself becomes suspect, the Technopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is yet more information.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

The Greek view of nature, at least that cosmology transmitted from them to later ages, was essentially dramatic. It is not necessarily wrong for this reason: but it was overwhelmingly dramatic. It thus conceived nature as articulated in the way of a work of dramatic art, for the exemplification of general ideas converging to an end. Nature was differentiated so as to provide its proper end for each thing. There was the centre of the universe as the end of motion for those things which are heavy, and the celestial spheres as the end of motion for those things whose natures lead them upwards.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

The direct influence of Greek literature vanished. But the concept of the moral order and of the order of nature had enshrined itself in the Stoic philosophy. For example, Lecky in his History of European Morals tells us ‘Seneca maintains that the Divinity has determined all things by an inexorable law of destiny, which He has decreed, but which He Himself obeys.’ But the most effective way in which the Stoics influenced the mentality of the Middle Ages was by the diffused sense of order which arose from Roman law. Again to quote Lecky, ‘The Roman legislation was in a twofold manner the child of philosophy. It was in the first place formed upon the philosophical model, for, instead of being a mere empirical system adjusted to the existing requirements of society, it laid down abstract principles of right to which it endeavoured to conform; and, in the next place, these principles were borrowed directly from Stoicism.’

Thoughts 6 Dec. 2021

 

The Wedge

Scott Carney

The goal of the Wedge is to separate stimulus from response.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

When an ecosystem functions well, it’s homeostasis; if it’s in decline or in the midst of unsustainable growth (as with cancer), then it’s heading into trouble. The system could end up in a state of constant vigilance and, to use [Justin] Feinstein’s term, become allostatic [attempting to return to a prior state of homeostasis] and never return to normal.

"The economy" (that most dangerous of abstractions) can be seen as a sub-ecosystem. But then like all such systems, it's never static, completely "in balance." And for the last ~200 years or so it's behaved much like a cancer, has it not?

The Wedge

Scott Carney

So if the immune system uses the same chemical hardware that creates feelings in our brains and influences our behavior in the world, then how much of a stretch is it to say that our immune system is conscious? What if instead of assuming that the immune system is just a machine, we give it a chance to have a semblance of cognition? Obviously the immune system can’t have the sort of complex emotions or thoughts that you or I experience, but even a shard of that subjectivity is powerful.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Alas, in 2020, one story about our collective future that’s becoming increasingly ubiquitous— and maybe even appealing to those inclined to resignation— starts with the opening line “we’re doomed” (or, in the vernacular, that we’re “fucked” or “screwed”). I hear this kind of declaration from a substantial and rapidly growing proportion of the students I teach. I respond to these young people by saying, as I say to Ben and Kate, that humanity is in fact doomed only if we collectively choose to be doomed. [My italics.]

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Society therefore needs ingenuity to get ingenuity, which means it is both an input to and output of the economic system. (Surprisingly, this claim often perplexes people. But a moment’s reflection shows that many economic factors are both input and output—for example, physical and human capital.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

Might humans, or intelligent life in whatever form, play that same role in the cosmological, universal evolutionary scheme of development? Might we in some way represent this feedback loop for the universe itself? Could our reflection on the evolutionary process itself be an essential element not only in fulfilling the next stage of our own development but in creating the next novel stage of cosmogenesis? [James N.] Gardner’s hypothesis is one of the most original—and compelling—evolutionary speculations that I have come across in some time.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Bluntly put, when democracy no longer delivers the goods, it will be consigned to the dustbin of history by an angry mob.

And this was written before January 6. The "angry mob," encouraged by ambitious politicians and special interests, remains in waiting. The outcome--whether democracy and the rule of law will survive in the U.S.--remains open.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Ian Kershaw, has said, “Hitler was no tyrant imposed on Germany. Though he never attained majority support in free elections, he was legally appointed to power as Reich Chancellor just like his predecessors had been, and became between 1933 and 1940 arguably the most popular head of state in the world.” The historian John Lukacs shares this view: Hitler “may have been the most popular revolutionary leader in the history of the modern world. The emphasis is on the word popular because Hitler belongs to the democratic, not the aristocratic, age of history.”

A reminder: Germany went from a democratic state with a model (in many ways) constitution to one of the worst political regimes in history, all without a coup or violent revolution, as Kershaw notes.

Age of Ambition

Evan Osnos

In 1949 the average life expectancy [in China] was thirty-six, and the literacy rate was 20 percent. By 2012,  life expectancy (2 words) was seventy-five, and the literacy rate was above 90 percent.

These figures go a long way in explaining why China is feeling its oats these days.

Bonds That Make Us Free

C. Terry Warner

It is a key sign of danger when we expect that others should change in response to our change. This signals a lapse on our part, back into self-absorption. Why so? Because the moment we begin to feel that we need others to change before we can be free of our troubled, afflicting thoughts and feelings, we have either lost the joy we felt when we experienced our change of heart or else we never experienced that change at all. We’re back in our self-absorbed condition or we never got out of it. Anyone free of that condition enjoys an emotional freedom that no external circumstance can destroy—including the reactions of other people.

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.