He took comfort in knowing that the world would carry on without him-and, in fact, already had.

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

It is a sad but unavoidable fact of life … that as we age our social circles grow smaller. Whether from increased habit or diminished vigor, we suddenly find ourselves in the company of just a few familiar faces.

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Keynes on Money

The main tenet of liberal socialism is that the state should cut the cord between money and time by taking over as much as three quarters of a country’s capital, bringing the frantic activities of saving and investment that plague capitalist societies under public ownership and control. In tandem with low interest rates and prohibitions on individuals’ and firms’ taking their money out of the country, the state’s management of savings and investment would achieve four goals. First, it would create full employment, which Keynes believed a capitalist economy could not bring about. Second, by funding investments in housing, transportation, and energy, the state would meet social needs that had long been neglected because greater profits were to be had elsewhere. Third, the state would end the scarcity of capital. Keynes thought that the possessor of capital was a social parasite, a “functionless investor” who was able to make money simply because only he had it to lend, much like a feudal landlord in possession of land. The capitalist also had “cumulative oppressive power,” issuing verdicts of life and death to workers and dictating policy to states. Because scarcity was the source of the capitalist’s parasitic power, ending that scarcity would lead to the “euthanasia of the rentier.”

Last, the worthiness of the state’s investments would not be measured by their rate of return but by their contribution to social well-being. Though Keynes imagined a variety of public goods that the state would bring about through its investments, the most important of those goods, for him, was the Smithian virtue of social intercourse:

Why should we not set aside, let us say, £50 millions a year for the next twenty years to add in every substantial city of the realm the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital to our local schools and their surroundings, to our local government and its offices, and above all perhaps, to provide a local centre of refreshment and entertainment with an ample theatre, a concert hall, a dance hall, a gallery, a British restaurant, canteens, cafés and so forth.

Keynes has long been accused of waging a war of economism against politics, elevating the economist above the statesman and thinking that the moral and political disagreements of a democratic society could be sidestepped or overcome by economic technicians and technocratic solutions.

... Keynes conceded that planning of the sort he was proposing “should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers, wholly share [the planner’s] own moral position.” Yet he knew that his moral vision of an economy of cultural greatness and aesthetic excellence was not widely shared. ... Perhaps that’s why he found himself ... retreating to a position long familiar to philosopher-kings, calling for planners whose power could be safely exercised because they were “rightly orientated in their own minds and hearts to the moral issue” and because citizens had been reeducated according to the principles of “right moral thinking.”

... Keynes set out a second path for the future, one that he hoped would diminish the importance not just of money but of economic concerns altogether, without making any assumptions about what people believed or wanted from life. It was a vision of abundance and plenty, a world beyond scarcity, which made the hard power and hard choices of liberal socialism, as well as the requirement of democratic agreement about ultimate ends, unnecessary.

Corey Robin, The Trouble with Money (The New York Review, December 22, 2022)

Our history is as much a product of torsion and stress as it is of unilinear drive. It is amusing that at any given point of time we haven't the slightest idea of what is happening to us. The present wars and ideological changes of nervousness and fighting seem to have direction, but in a hundred years it is more than possible it will be seen that the direction was quite different from the one we supposed.The limitation of the seeing point in time, as well as in space, is a warping lens.

John Steinbeck,  The Log from the Sea of Cortez

Ideas are not dangerous unless they find seeding place in some earth more profound than the mind…. dangerous only when planted in unease and disquietude. But being so planted, growing in such earth, it ceases to be idea and becomes emotion and then religion. 

John Steinbeck,  The Log from the Sea of Cortez

A man -- a viewing-point man -- while he will love the abstract good qualities and detest the abstract bad, will nevertheless envy and admire the person who through possessing the bad qualities has succeeded economically and socially, and will hold in contempt that person whose good qualities have caused failure. When such a viewing-point man thinks of Jesus or St. Augustine or Socrates he regards them with love because they are the symbols of the good he admires, and he hates the symbols of the bad. But actually he would rather be successful than good. In an animal other than man we would replace the term "good" with "weak survival quotient" and the term "bad" with "strong survival quotient." Thus, man in his thinking or reverie status admires the progression toward extinction, but in the unthinking stimulus which really activates him he tends toward survival. Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness: Perhaps, as has been suggested, his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming, bound by his physical memories to a past of struggle and survival, limited in his futures by the uneasiness of thought and consciousness.

 John Steinbeck,  The Log from the Sea of Cortez

Conscious thought seems to have little effect on the action or direction of our species…. We have made our mark on the world, but we have really done nothing that the trees and creeping plants, ice and erosion, cannot remove in a fairly short time.

John Steinbeck,  The Log from the Sea of Cortez

How stands it between God and your soul now?

John Bunyan, The Pilgrims Progress

Educating the electorate in the limits of executive power. No one wants to believe it. And anyway, in a democracy there's always an opposition to tell them that anything is possible.

P.A. James, A Taste for Death

Facts are like cows, if you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.

Bunter’s mother in Clouds of Witness, Dorothy Sayers
 

Blake: From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

The fox condemns the trap, not himself.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.

Expect poison from the standing water.

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

To create a little flower is the labor of ages.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. 

 

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The nations were not sane—rational, composed, aware, but not sane. In each nation, the arsenal included potent distrust and even hatred. 

Greg Bear, Eons

To know good by knowing good is the privilege of the unfallen.

Catherine Nicholson, on Milton in the NYR.  

 

Eloquence and erudition were the twin prerequisites of greatness ... any effort expended in the cultivation of such gifts would surely be rewarded, if not in this world then in the world to come.

Catherine Nicholson, on Milton in the NYR. 

From A Perfect June Day

 Trees are fingers of the earth for the wind to play with.

All women ... were calculating—even if their calculations took place somewhere south of their conscious awareness. All women weighed and measured; did not always listen to the results rationally, but made efforts in that direction that most men I knew could not duplicate or understand. 

Greg Bear,  Legacy

[W]e didn't do much to alter the course of human history, did we?' said Philip. 'As one old spy to another, I reckon I'd have been more use running a boys' club. Don't know what you feel.'

John le Carré, Silverview

If a machine can think, it might think more intelligently than we do, and then where should we be? Even if we could keep the machines in a subservient position, for instance by turning off the power at strategic moments, we should, as a species, feel greatly humbled. … This new danger … if it comes at all … is remote but not astronomically remote, and is certainly something which can give us anxiety. It is customary, in a talk or article on this subject, to offer a grain of comfort, in the form of a statement that some particularly human characteristic could never be imitated by a machine. It might for instance be said that no machine could write good English, or that it could not be influenced by sex-appeal or smoke a pipe. I cannot offer any such comfort, for I believe that no such bounds can be set.

Alan Turing, quoted by Sebastian Sunday Grève in AI’s first philosopher:  https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-should-remember-alan-turing-as-a-philosopher

Someone else’s fool is a joke, your own fool a calamity.

A folk proverb quoted by Solzhenitsyn.

Time does not precede . . . the world. . . . Time is something that accompanies motion and bodies.”

 

The necessary connection of movement and time is real and time is something the soul (dhihn) constructs in movement.

 

Ibn Rushd (Averroes)

[I]n a large house, formerly a house of state ... in those shrunken fragments of its greatness, lawyers lie like maggots in nuts. 

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

We must not expect to find reason anywhere in Nature, but only the evidence of will!

Pliny the Elder, Natural History 

From a wonderful and beautiful book

Life is hard. Everyone believes the world is ending all the time. But so far, all of them have been wrong.... The truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

 

[From] a line from Roberto Bolaño’s novel Distant Star: “…as if time were not a river but an earthquake happening nearby.” It’s an arresting thought: What if time’s ravages compelled our attention with the same ineluctable force as an earthquake? What if time were experienced not as a flow but as a phenomenon whose energy overcomes you, terrifies you, forces you to reach out in search of balance?

Jonathan Mingle, The Unimaginable Touch of Time  (NYRB, February 10, 2022)