Thursday, April 21, 2022
Monday, April 18, 2022
Tuesday, April 12, 2022
[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
Friday, February 18, 2022
We must not expect to find reason anywhere in Nature, but only the evidence of will!
Pliny the Elder, Natural History
Wednesday, February 09, 2022
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
Saturday, January 22, 2022
[From] a line from Roberto BolaƱo’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)
Thursday, December 30, 2021
Umberto Eco on nationalism
National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion…. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery.
Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery
Tuesday, December 28, 2021
Umberto Eco on religion
People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.
Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery
Saturday, December 25, 2021
Umberto Eco on conspiracy
Who knows how many ... people in this world still think they are being threatened by some conspiracy? Here's a form to be filled out at will, by each person with his own conspiracy.... What does everyone desire, and desire more fervently the more wretched and unfortunate they are? To earn money easily, to have power (the enormous pleasure in commanding and humiliating your fellow man) and to avenge every wrong suffered (everyone in life has suffered at least one wrong, however small it might be).... But why; everybody asks, am I not blessed by fortune (or at least not as blessed as I would like to be)? Why have I not been favored like others who are less deserving? No one believes their misfortunes are attributable to any shortcomings of their own; that is why they must find a culprit..... [T]he explanation for their failure. It was some one else... who planned your ruin.
Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
People without a sense of humor will never forgive you for being funny.
Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
What’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?
Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons
Sunday, November 14, 2021
Per Spinoza
The human mind is not simply an instrument of conscious cognition that can be detached from its organic base. It is a locus of feeling, conscious and unconscious, flowing directly from a somatic foundation.... Where humans differ most from other animals may be in our capacity and need for illusion.
John Gray, The Mind’s Body Problem (NYRB, December 2, 2021)
Thursday, November 04, 2021
Origins of our American culture
American culture in this early period [the 17th and early 18th Centuries] becomes most fully comprehensible when seen as the exotic far western periphery, a marchland, of the metropolitan European culture system.
This whole world ... was a borderland, a part of the expanding periphery of Britain's core culture; and its inner quality derived from that fact. Like the Welsh borderland two hundred years earlier, like the Scottish middle marches a century earlier, like Ireland and the Caribbean islands in the colonists' own time, and like Australia later, the mainland North American colonies formed a typically disordered border country in which ... "violence [was] a way of life." Concentrating, as American historians have done, on the origins of a later American civilization, and hence viewing the colonial world as a frontier -- that is, as an advance, as a forward and outward-looking, future-anticipating progress toward what we know eventuated, instead of as a periphery, a ragged outer margin of a central world, a regressive, backward-looking diminishment of metropolitan accomplishment --looking at the colonies in this anachronistic way, one tends to minimize the primitiveness and violence, the bizarre, quite literally outlandish quality of life in this far-distant outback of late seventeenth-century Britain.
Partly this wildness, extravagance, and disorder were simply the products of the inescapable difficulties of maintaining a high European civilization in an undeveloped environment. Partly, too, they were products of the hostility that developed between the Europeans and the native peoples. But in large part, too, they were products of the common European, and indeed British, conception of America as an uncivil place on the distant margins of civilization -- a place where the ordinary restraints of civility could be abandoned in pell-mell exploitation, a remote place where recognized enemies and pariahs of society -- heretics, criminals, paupers--could safely be deposited, their contamination sealed off by three thousand miles of ocean, and where putatively inferior specimens of humanity, blacks and Indians, could be reduced to subhuman statuses, worked like animals, and denied the most elemental benefits of law and religion, those fragile integuments which even in England could barely contain the savagery of life.... This mingling of primitivism and civilization, however transitory stage by stage, was an essential part of early American culture, and we must struggle to comprehend it.
What did it mean to Jefferson, slave owner and philosophe, that he grew up in this far western borderland world of Britain, looking out from Queen Anne rooms of spare elegance onto a wild, uncultivated land? We can only grope to understand.
Saturday, October 30, 2021
The Singularity
The Grand Singularity and A.I. autonomy
Building the superman
Minus the man
Yes, Minus the Man (from The Quest)
Monday, October 04, 2021
Patience under duress is rarely appreciated by the politically immature.
Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings
Sunday, September 19, 2021
To the Etruscan all was alive; the whole universe lived; and the business of man was himself to live amid it all. He had to draw life into himself, out of the wandering huge vitalities of the world. The cosmos was alive, like a vast creature. The whole thing breathed and stirred…. The whole thing was alive, and had a great soul, or anima: and in spite of one great soul, there were myriad roving, lesser souls: every man, every creature and tree and lake and mountain and stream, was animate, had its own peculiar consciousness. And has it today…. The cosmos was one, and its anima was one; but it was made up of creatures….
The old idea of the vitality of the universe was evolved long before history begins, and elaborated into a vast religion before we get a glimpse of it. When history does begin, in China or India, Egypt, Babylonia, even in the Pacific and in aboriginal America, we see evidence of one underlying religious idea: the conception of the vitality of the cosmos, the myriad vitalities in wild confusion, which still is held in some sort of array: and man, amid all the glowing welter, adventuring, struggling, striving for one thing, life, vitality, more vitality: to get into himself more and more of the gleaming vitality of the cosmos…. This was the idea at the back of all the great old civilizations. It was even, half-transmuted, at the back of [King] David's mind, and voiced in the Psalms. But with David the living cosmos became merely a personal god. With the Egyptians and Babylonians and Etruscans, strictly there were no personal gods. There were only idols or symbols. It was the living cosmos itself, dazzlingly and gaspingly complex, which was divine, and which could be contemplated only by the strongest soul, and only at moments.
D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places
Tuesday, September 14, 2021
Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness….. It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass…. Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.
D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places
Monday, September 13, 2021
In current Catholic dogma, [purgatory] is a state of being rather than an actual realm between Hell and Heaven: an inner fire in the conscience of sinners that refines their impurities.
Judith Thurman, Reading Dante’s Purgatory While the World Hangs in the Balance, The New Yorker (September 13, 2021)
Wednesday, September 08, 2021
Friday, August 20, 2021
No one starts a war--or rather, no one in his sense ought to do so--without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by the war and how he intends to conduct it.
Carl Von ClausewitzWednesday, August 18, 2021
On Consciousness as MetaThinking about Thinking
It seems much more accurate to say that consciousness is along for the ride — watching the show, rather than creating or controlling it. In theory, we can go as far as to say that few (if any) of our behaviors need consciousness in order to be carried out…. the obstacle we face here once again seems to be a case of confusing consciousness with the concept of a self....[we are] machines that think about thinking.
Annaka Harris, Conscious : exploring the mystery of consciousness
Sunday, August 01, 2021
Popular delusions occur when appealing but baseless stories spread contagiously from one person to another. Some ideas are more virulent than others: people have been found to react most enthusiastically to narratives of fear.
Edward Chancellor, "Waiting to Deflate" New York Review (August 19, 2021)
Tuesday, July 06, 2021
Monday, June 14, 2021
If studying history mainly makes you feel happy and proud, you probably aren’t really studying history.
Quoted without attribution by Fara Dabhoiwala in the New York Review (July 1, 2021)
Tuesday, May 25, 2021
Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child's life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad.
Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
Saturday, May 15, 2021
The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.
Thursday, March 25, 2021
A life is not such a tremendous time to learn to express your ideas.
Henry Adams
Monday, March 22, 2021
Politics is the systematic organization of hatreds.... Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Henry Adams
Wednesday, March 03, 2021
The market could only reward ideas that turned a profit. Nobody stood to profit from clean parks; they were just nicer to live with than dirty parks. But if nobody made the political judgment that clean parks were better, a society organized around profit incentives from production alone would almost automatically end up with dirty parks. The market was not an impartial guide to the beliefs of the public, and some of its verdicts were crazy…. When public goods fell into disorder or neglect, people found them unpleasant and satiated their desires with what the market had to offer…. The economic organization of society was devoted not to maximizing social comfort and harmony but to satisfying the consumer desires created by advertising and production itself. And that in turn was hampering society’s ability to grapple with poverty.
Kenneth Galbraith, according to Zachary D.Carter in The Price of Peace
Tuesday, March 02, 2021
Though his American followers would pursue fine-tuned tax-and-spending plans to lift demand during recessions, Keynes instead called for the government to manage future stages of overall economic scarcity through direct investment spending…. the government should seek “to prevent large fluctuations” in employment by enacting “a stable long-term programme” that would spend money on things like infrastructure, factory equipment, and scientific research.
Zachary D.Carter in The Price of Peace
Monday, March 01, 2021
Keynes had come to believe that the problem was really much simpler: Unemployment was a breeding ground for fascism. It created dangerous political instability and a source of anger that could easily be weaponized. The terms of trade might help or hurt efforts to establish international goodwill, but tariffs or no tariffs, the legitimacy of an international economic order depended entirely on whether it did, in fact, provide for mutual prosperity.
Zachary D.Carter in The Price of Peace
Saturday, February 27, 2021
According to Keynes
Uncertainty about the future—not irrationality or stupidity—makes crowds prone to calamity in both finance and politics, particularly under conditions of significant anxiety. Markets are no more self-correcting than a mob hailing a demagogue.
Zachary D.Carter in The Price of Peace
Friday, February 26, 2021
[Keynes argued that] money...was an inherently political tool. It was the state that determined what substance—gold, paper, whatever—actually counted as money—what “thing” people and the government would accept as valid payment. The state thus created money and had always regulated its value.... The very idea of capitalism required active state economic management—the regulation of money and debt.
Zachary D.Carter in The Price of Peace
Wednesday, February 24, 2021
It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest.
John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire, as quoted by Zachary D.Carter in The Price of Peace
Saturday, January 30, 2021
Self knowledge, however, cannot itself redeem.
Jeremy Black, England in the Age of Shakespeare
Saturday, January 23, 2021
It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.
NiccolĆ² Machiavelli, The Prince
Friday, January 08, 2021
Humans were one lucky tribe of apes with just enough intelligence and creativity to build a badly functioning civilization. And being only barely competent, there was no reason to believe that humanity's greatest achievements amounted to anything more than the average anthill lost on the infinitely intriguing savanna.
Robert Reed, "Integral Nothings" (Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February, 2021)
Wednesday, December 16, 2020
Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.
H.G.Wells, The Time Machine
Friday, November 27, 2020
Democracy or Globalization?
Global markets suffer from weak governance and are therefore prone to instability, inefficiency, and weak popular legitimacy…. If you want more and better markets, you have to have more (and better) governance. Markets work best not where states are weakest, but where they are strong.... Even though it is possible to advance both democracy and globalization…this requires the creation of a global political community that is vastly more ambitious than anything we have seen to date or are likely to experience soon. It would call for global rule making by democracy…. Democracies have the right to protect their social arrangements, and when this right clashes with the requirements of the global economy, it is the latter that should give way.
Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
Saturday, September 12, 2020
It rarely paid to frighten people but it never paid to confuse them.
Lifted & spun a bit from Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata
Thursday, September 10, 2020
Everyone but an economist knows without asking why money shouldn’t buy some things.
Arthur Okun, (cited in in the New York Review)
Sunday, September 06, 2020
THE MASS of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, gaolers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.
Others—as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders—serve the State chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God.
A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.
Henry David Thoreau, The Duty of Civil Disobedience
Friday, August 28, 2020
Saturday, July 11, 2020
Theodore Sturgeon in his wonderful short story, The Widget, The Wadget, and Boff
Friday, June 12, 2020
Alfred Noyes, The Unknown God
Sunday, May 24, 2020
Life in the COVID-19 Age
Monday, May 18, 2020
Life During COVID-19
Albert Camus, The Plague
Sunday, May 03, 2020
A.A. Milne
Friday, May 01, 2020
Thursday, April 16, 2020
Montaigne
Montaigne, in his 54th year at the end of his magisterial Essays. He died at age 59 after suffering some years of kidney stones.
This ends submissions from my reading of the Essays over the last three years. They can be found here.
Tuesday, April 14, 2020
Montaigne
Sunday, April 12, 2020
Montaigne
Thursday, April 09, 2020
More Life During COVID-19
Seneca, as quoted by Montaigne
Tuesday, April 07, 2020
'Tis a misfortune to be at such a pass, that the best test of truth is the multitude of believers in a crowd, where the number of fools so much exceeds the wise.
Montaigne
Monday, April 06, 2020
Life During COVID-19
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
Montaigne
Monday, March 09, 2020
Montaigne
Friday, February 28, 2020
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (VIII,52)
Wednesday, February 26, 2020
Contemplate the courses of the stars, as one should do that revolves along with them. Consider also without ceasing the changes of elements, one into another. Speculations upon such things cleanse away the filth of this earthly life.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Book 7)
Monday, February 17, 2020
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (V,23)
Thursday, February 13, 2020
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (III,1)
Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Montaigne
Monday, February 10, 2020
Thursday, February 06, 2020
Montaigne
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
Adam Tooze (quoting Katharina Pistor), "How ‘Big Law’ Makes Big Money," NYRB Feb. 13, 2020
Monday, January 27, 2020
Montaigne
Saturday, December 28, 2019
Ted Chiang, Exhalation
Wednesday, December 25, 2019
The Gospel of Thomas, as noted by Elaine Pagels
Tuesday, December 24, 2019
Saturday, December 21, 2019
Protagoras (the Sophist)
Wednesday, December 11, 2019
For if everything that is were unlimited, there would not be anything of such a character that it could be recognized.
Philolaus (a Pythagorean)
Monday, December 09, 2019
Tuesday, December 03, 2019
The principal use of reading to me is, that by various objects it rouses my reason, and employs my judgment, not my memory.
Montaigne
Wednesday, November 27, 2019
Montaigne
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
Sunday, November 03, 2019
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Montaigne
Thursday, October 24, 2019
Montaigne
Sunday, October 20, 2019
Montaigne
Thursday, October 10, 2019
Parmenides, (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)