Thursday, November 14, 2024

What is the use of a house?

 "They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all." — Luke 17 

"What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" — Thoreau

"The same things, in fact, are wealth or not wealth, according as a man knows or does not know the use to make of them. ... Money itself in the pockets of a man who does not know how to use it is not wealth. ... But now comes a puzzle. What of people who have got the knowledge and the capital required to enhance their fortunes, if only they will put their shoulders to the wheel; and yet, if we are to believe our senses, that is just the one thing they will not do, and so their knowledge and accomplishments are of no profit to them? Surely in their case there is but one conclusion to be drawn, which is, that neither their knowledge nor their possessions are wealth." — Socrates via Xenophon, The Economist

"Using" things ... a question of power or truth?

In a simple but shocking message that impacts the hearer much like Jesus' prophecy about the end of the world [set out above], but with the scientific instead of the religious community called upon to act as the "watchman", Peter Carter warns that we face Tough Cimate Times Ahead:

"The emergency is getting way way worse and very rapidly  ... which the [subsidized] fossil fuel industry, the [subsidized] banking corporations and the [subsidizing] big economy governments deny in various ways ... they must be held accountable for all this, but so far they are getting away with mass murder on a scale that we've never seen before. It's not only an unprecedented evil crime, it's completely absurd,  it's completely insane that this should be happening.

"Everything that we are seeing is irreversible ... the reason for that is not just that we're not doing anything to stop [it]  .... it's also the great momentum of the climate system.

"Peaceful protesters are being dealt [with] harshly by their governments and the courts ... they're incarcerated [without] getting very much public support.

"And the response of the scientific community to the accelerating rapid deteriorating climate emergency [is] not very good ... it has decided not to actually tell the truth of where we're at because it's so terrible ...the global carbon sinks in the ocean and on the land are losing efficiency ... and that's terrifying, believe me, absolutely terrifying ... the world is tracking the worst case scenario ... yes it's time to panic ... it really is time to panic !! But I don't detect any panic out there at all.

"So what is our hope? ... you and me ... that's the real hope for the future ... we just have to work ... the resiliency of nature will not come into effect until we have stopped [doing what we're doing] ... we know everything that has to be done and we've known it for decades."

 Sounds like somebody is mis-"using" [ie. abusing] something in a BIG way. Any ideas?

The 3E's of disaster



There are three elements common to every disaster ... and no disaster is "natural".

Economy - customary use - power

By this we mean the Greek oikos-nomos ... household-management ... the customary use of things which is determined by our ideas and actions. And so, as Socrates and Xenophon remind us above, we are all eco-nomists. This is what Carter means by "you and me". We have power as economists to change things for better or for worse. But most of us don't know what to do or refuse to do what we know. We look for somebody to blame ... and we look for somebody to solve our problems ... we think we can escape our assignment as economists. And so, as Jesus predicted and Carter affirms, we face our doom doing what we have always done ... convinced it will somehow suffice ... even when we know better.

Ecology - proper use - truth

By this we mean the Greek oikos-logos ... household-reckoning ... the proper use of things which is determined and enforced by Nature's limits and consequences. This is what Carter means by the resiliency of nature. With the advent of the Reformation and Enlightenment, humanity turned away from its duty to Nature in its broadest sense and turned each one towards his/her/their/its own individual intentionalities [ie. preferences] as the standard for determining  the "use" of things. By redefining "use" we thought we were freeing ourselves from Nature. But this exercise in hubristic power did not actually change the truth, it merely put our relationship with truth on a different course ... a collision course, as Carter claims is now clear.

Education - reducing abuse - reconciling power and truth

And yet, in the face of an approaching and potentially fatal collision with Ecology, we cling tenaciously to our Economy. And, as Socrates noted, we do so even when we KNOW it is the wrong thing to do and that we have POWER as economists to do otherwise. This is certainly a failure of Education ... the worst case scenario ... even the unforgivable sin ??

Culture [ie. Economy]is activity [ie. actions] of thought [ie. ideas], and receptiveness [ie. Education]to beauty and humane feeling [ie. Ecology]. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it.  A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.
...
We can be content with no less than the old summary of educational ideal which has been current at any time from the dawn of our civilisation. The essence of education is that it be religious.
Pray, what is religious education?
A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity. — Whitehead

"Why halt ye between two opinions?" Elijah
"A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways." James


Wednesday, July 31, 2024

A good story is not too complex for the human brain

 

    In the beginning, God ...
    ... Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, and over all the earth itself and every creature that crawls upon it."
    So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that crawls upon the earth.
    Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every seed-bearing plant on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit contains seed. They will be yours for food. And to every beast of the earth and every bird of the air and every creature that crawls upon the earth—everything that has the breath of life in it—I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God looked upon all that He had made, and indeed, it was very good. ...
    ... And the twenty-four elders who sat on their thrones before God fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying: "The time has come to destroy those who destroy the earth."

Featured:
Exceeding Earth's Safe Limits with Johan Rockström | TGS 134
 

Comprehending the Complex

gospel — good news — PIE *ghedh- "to unite, be associated, suitable" + Gothic spill- "report, story, tale, fable, myth"
news — from early 15c — a story about something that has recently taken place

The key to understanding any story is only found by going back to the beginning. Aristotle taught this and that, by doing so, we will see that the story is, by necessity, good ... good news.

There must be from the first a cause which, being unmoved itself, will move things and bring them together. ... The first mover, then, exists of necessity; and in so far as it exists by necessity, its mode of being is good. ... And to seek this is to seek ... that from which comes the beginning of the movement.
By failing to go back far enough, the story we hear can often appear to be bad ... bad news. And we often settle for bad news, because going back to the beginning is complex in two ways:

  1. It involves the arduous work of reducing complexity by unraveling and retracing myriad unfolded [even broken] threads of movement of things which, although once vitally and obviously connected, may appear discrete and unrelated ... this is the realm of science.
  2. But, even as science succeeds, there are obstacles [including ultimately the unmoved mover] which remain [temporarily or permanently] irreducibly complex and require the use of narrative to bridge gaps in understanding ... this is the realm of religion.

Thus mankind has always needed the complementary capacities of both science and religion working together in the quest to understand and retell the good [albeit complex] story in which we find ourselves. Both disciplines are performing the same function ... the uniting of all things by reconciling all the elements of the story ... and they do it by using different methods.

But is the human story just too complex for the human brain?

"It's like knowing about our home."

God — "that from which comes the beginning of movement"
Wisdom is to know the thought by which all things are steered through all things. DK B41
Men that love wisdom must be inquirers into very many things indeed. DK B35

In a remarkable example of scientific analysis and religious synthesis working together, Nate Hagens and Johan Rockstrom recount an intriguing story presenting very good news that we can at least understand [and potentially do] more about the existential complexities impacting life on earth today ... news that simultaneously and irresistibly draws us [both backwards and forwards] to God.

    Is this too complex for a human brain to understand?
    I would, adamantly with all my heart, say no, it's not too complex. Admittedly, it is complex, but we have to learn many complex things in life. Just tax regulation in any country is quite a complex matter, and we have laws and regulations we have to learn and try to follow.
    So I would say that understanding the fundamentals of why the oceans and the land systems and the ice sheets function as cooling systems on planet Earth that can buffer stress and help us to keep temperatures at a livable level [is something] everyone should know.
    It's like knowing about our home. It's like knowing about our body and our health. You want to know something about how to avoid a heart attack. Everyone has an interest in understanding how your lungs and your liver and your heart [work]. ... Well, think of planet Earth as the organs of your body. [22:00 minutes]

Housekeeping: overcoming ignorance and resistance

unwise — "Fools do not know what they do is evil." Ecc 5:1
unfaithful —"Sinners do not do what they know is good.
" James 4

"Who is the wise and faithful servant, whom the master has put in charge of his household? ... Therefore keep watch because you do not know the day on which your Lord will come." Matt 24

Now, every successful house-keeper must overcome ignorance [via science] and resistance [via religion]. Hagens and Rockstrom explain.

"We are in a deep crisis situation with regards to the overall health of the planet. How can a vast majority of humans alive today not know this? The scientific community has not been able to communicate [that we] have now come to the end of the road [and] need to transform the entire logic and structure of the global economy. But there are many vested interests ... resisting change." [5:00 minutes]

These are the twin dilemmas faced by prophets/seers of doomed cultures throughout the ages. The difference is that today it is not only the culture that is doomed but much more of the planet's household than at any time in previous human history.

  • Science without religion is purposeless power.
  • Religion without science is powerless purpose.

Any attempt to use one without the other must be either fatal or futile.

Is it of the very essence of truth to be impotent and of the very essence of power to be deceitful? And what kind of reality does truth possess if it is powerless in the public realm, which more than any other sphere of human life guarantees reality of existence to natal and mortal men – that is, to beings who know they have appeared out of non-being and will, after a short while, again disappear into it? Finally, is not impotent truth just as despicable as power that gives no heed to truth? These are uncomfortable questions, but they arise necessarily out of our current convictions in this matter. — Arendt

Boundaries: where power and purpose meet

tēréō – keep, hold in custody, maintain, guard, observe, preserve, protect
"teach them to
observe all things" ... Matt 28

Ancient religion tells us that mankind was commissioned to serve as the keepers [teros] of God's household [oikos]. This involves using the power given to us for the purposes entrusted to us. Modern science tells us what we have done, where we are headed and what we can do.

If we would fulfill our great commission, we need religion and science working together to systematically discover and keep the boundaries within which to exercise our power so the house holds everything together. Anything less is dereliction of duty.

The modern notion that religion and science ... Church and State ... can be engaged and conducted separately assures that the resulting story each produces will be no more than a half-truth ... and that is not sufficient for a good ending.

Thursday, May 9, 2024

Re-Imagining objective value

"The welfare of a people, like the happiness of a man, depends on a great many things that can be provided in an infinite variety of combinations. It cannot be adequately expressed as a single end, but only as a hierarchy of ends, a comprehensive scale of values in which every need of every person is given its place. ... [And this] presupposes, in short, the existence of a complete ethical code in which all the different human values are allotted their due place. ... The essential point for us is that no such complete ethical code exists. ... This is the fundamental fact on which the whole philosophy of individualism is based. It does not assume, as is often asserted, that man is egoistic or selfish, or ought to be. It merely starts from the indisputable fact that the limits of our powers of imagination make it impossible to include in our scale of values more than a sector of the needs of the whole society, and that, since, strictly speaking, scales of value can exist only in individual minds, nothing but partial scales of values exist, scales which are inevitably different and often inconsistent with each other." — Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Planning and Democracy

The destruction of imagination

“What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing.” ― Pablo Picasso
Beginning with Ockham [c. 1300] whose nominalism reasoned that only individuals "exist in reality" and that universals "exist only in the mind" ... and continuing thru the Reformation with its emphasis on every individual relating directly to God with nothing between ... the Enlightenment's increasingly anthropocentric, dualistic universe eventually spawned an ex-Catholic priest turned psychologist-philosopher named Brentano [c. 1875] who taught that the relationship between mental acts of perception and the external world being perceived was based solely on the individual's intentions for the object rather than on any properties or methods intrinsic to the object in the external world ... an understanding he called "intentional inexistence". Brentano's disciples included classmates who became famous in their own rights ... psychologist Sigmund Freud and economist Carl Menger ... who were faithful to their master's belief in the preeminence of the subjective over the objective when attempting to make sense of reality:
  • intention replaced imagination.
As late as Adam Smith in 1776, the ancient ethical idea of objective and subjective values co-existing and diverging were entertained by philosopher-scientists from Aristotle to Aquinas with conviction:
"The word VALUE, it is to be observed, has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys. The one may be called ‘value in use;’ the other, ‘value in exchange.’ The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; and, on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water; but it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it." — Wealth of Nations
But by 1900 objective value had disappeared from the imagination of economists:
“Despite his intellectual roots in Aristotlean thought, Carl Menger  was wise enough to see that Aristotle had erred in regards to exchange. One can make no sense of the relationship of value to market prices if one regards value as a property of goods themselves. Since the properties posited as ‘inhering’ in goods, such as land and labor, are themselves traded on the market, such explanations must always beg the question as to how those ‘determinants’ of value are priced. Menger's breakthrough insight was to realize that ‘[v]alue is… nothing inherent in goods, no property of them, but merely the importance that we first attribute to the satisfaction of our needs... and in consequence carry over to economic goods as the… causes of the satisfaction of our needs.’ (Principles of Economics). In other words, value is the name of an attitude or disposition that a particular person adopts toward a good: he chooses to value it.” Carl Menger: The Nature of Value, Mises Daily Articles, Gene Callahan, 10/17/2003
Ockham's nominalism [ie. "value is only a name we assign"] had redefined natural as positive law, justice as profit, detached economy from ecology and delinked nominal/fiat money from real resources.

Bad grammar

“My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.” ― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
A great part of the blame for the subversion of sound thinking about value is attributable to the simple failure of communicants to use good grammar. They persistently conflated terms like "needs, wants, desires, happiness, welfare, ethics and value" as if they were merely nuanced synonyms which they are not ... as anyone who reads the ancients including Cicero's On Duty will quickly and easily discern. The metabolism of nature sovereignly determines needs based on life and disposes of everything beyond needs as waste to be recycled ... the best intentions of humans [paving the road to hell] notwithstanding.
 
But, once established, such "half-truths" become accepted and serve as foundations of sand for towering, intentional human edifices that must sooner or later fall in the storm:
"In the infancy of science, when the main stress lay in the discovery of the most general ideas usefully applicable to the subject-matter in question, philosophy was not sharply distinguished from science. To this day, a new science with any substantial novelty in its notions is considered to be in some way peculiarly philosophical. In their later stages, apart from occasional disturbances, most sciences accept without question the general notions in terms of which they develop. The main stress is laid on the adjustment and the direct verification of more special statements. In such periods scientists repudiate philosophy; Newton, justly satisfied with his physical principles, disclaimed metaphysics. ... One aim of philosophy is to challenge the half-truths constituting the scientific first principles." — Whitehead, Process and Reality
And, if the truth be told, these notions were only "half-true" from the start, because they were only "half-brained" as neuropsychologist Iain McGlichrist is now explaining in his ground-breaking work on the hemispherical functioning and significance of the brain ... another indication that value [and thus ethics] is firmly grounded in nature after all.

Good food

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien
Even absent speculating skeptics like Hume and Proudhon, had Locke [Of Property], Jefferson and the new economic liberals stopped to think comprehensively and coherently about the cosmology they were implicitly assuming, they might have seen their mistake soon enough to avoid the ethical and environmental disasters we now see playing out due to their dogmatic rejection of natural, objective value and our cultural acceptance [nomos] of positive, subjective value.

But it was not until 1926, that philosopher-scientist AN Whitehead, in pursuit of a comprehensive and coherent cosmology, examined the simple but real and natural concept of food, curiously missing from the grandiose Declaration of Independence [from nature?] of the new liberals, and explained why the morally-laden words "property" and "robbery" come [as Proudhon, Marx and others tried to explain] from the same root word [privo] and from the same source [life ... not human intentions or even human labor]:
"Another characteristic of a living society is that it requires food. In a museum the crystals are kept under glass cases; in zoological gardens the animals are fed. Having regard to the universality of reactions with environment, the distinction is not quite absolute. It cannot, however, be ignored. The crystals are not agencies requiring the destruction of elaborate societies derived from the environment; a living society is such an agency. The societies which it destroys are its food . This food is destroyed by dissolving it into somewhat simpler social elements. It has been robbed of something. Thus, all societies require interplay with their environment; and in the case of living societies this interplay takes the form of robbery. The living society may, or may not, be a higher type of organism than the food which it disintegrates. But whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification." — ibid

Real science ... follow it

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden
With the advent of quantum mechanics and the arrival of Schroedinger's cat [c.1900], it was apparent to the rational scientific historian that Enlightenment heuristics [including the subjective value theory], masquerading as science and even accepted as truth, were outdated and in desperate need of re-imagining. To this day, physics has largely returned from Newtonian dogma [at which Newton himself would have blushed] to a cosmological pursuit with philosophy alongside laboratory experiments and space launches. But economics remains 500 year behind the times ... and stuck in a failed paradigm ... until now.

Real science springing from philosophical speculation and imagination is beginning to posit that ... as the ancients assumed ... nature does, afterall, provide a universal metabolic scale in which the common life needs and the individual idiopathic desires of all living creatures can be quantitatively measured, compared and ethically judged ... in life units:
"What he [Geoffrey West] found was that despite the riotous diversity in mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other ... and that the same laws of scalability held true with an eerie precision ... to cities and businesses." Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies.
More knowledge about life units is certainly coming. A new era is dawning as the neo-liberal collapse unfolds. But established half-truths die hard. Much we now think we know about economics is going to be overturned ... and we are going to return to nature ... or to dust ... it's our choice.

The road behind

"I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but rescue consists in going back til you find the error and working from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' - or else not." ― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
And, of course, the choice for the capitalist culture built on subjective value theory and its logical techne [ie. its technology] of fiat money and credit is clear:
  • press ahead culturally ... into increasingly procrustean and totalitarian versions of commercial nominalism detached from nature and real life on the grounds that the practice has become Too-Big-To-Fail or
  • go back culturally ... unwinding bit by bit ... even repenting ... initially to something resembling our pre-1970's Bretton-Woods style gold-based system of global currency and commerce [as BRICS seems to be wisely doing] even if it is alongside CBDC's and/or blockchains which transparently enforce common [if not yet completely just], physical [not merely financial] rules for and disclosure of resource valuation and allocation across continents and classes.
Going back would set great changes into motion immediately ... but they appear to be coming in any case. Furthermore, the "road behind" may lead from global gold to local resource [including labor] based currencies, credit and commerce which have already become essential as we pass through nature's great simplification which scientists around the planet are seeing more and more clearly with each passing day as the inevitable ending to our intentionally unimaginative [ie. ignorant], financially perverted and unsustainably wasteful practices in energy, agriculture and transportation ... the once elegant edifices we intentionally built on foundations of sand.

The importance of money: is it natural or positive?

 It must certainly be allowed, that nature has kept us at a great distance from all her secrets, and has afforded us only the knowledge of a few superficial qualities of objects; while she conceals from us those powers and principles on which the influence of those objects entirely depends. — Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section IV. Part II - Sceptical Doubts
At this point, somebody with intellect should observe that even the wisest and most ardent organicist [like AN Whitehead] would admit [indeed insist] that taking the road behind can never bring us to a completely natural state of commercial realism in which we discover, define and utilize nature's common life unit [which, thanks to West and others, we can no longer deny exists] to accurately measure, morally evaluate and justly [whether considered as subjectively profitable or objectively zero-sum] transact all the opportunity costs for every proposed action any individual might take given that, assuming the organic nature of our universe, every such transaction would set in motion a new, continuous and infinite series of dynamic consequences resulting in a perpetually, non-neutral disequilibrium. So aren't we really going back to Hayek's pragmatic individualism with which we opened this blog post? Haven't we come full circle? Back to Ockham's nominal value and Menger's intentional [aka positive] money?
 
Or have we simply refused to accept the cosmological idea that reality is process not stasis ... and that equilibrium is a "ceteris paribus delusion" which supports the inorganic notion that intentional action [aka individualism, liberty, liberalism, neo-classical economics and libertarianism] is attainable and meaningful?

We must go back even further from Hayek's individualism ... to Adam Smith's moral sentiments ... to Aquinas ... and to Aristotle ... to a hierarchical scale combining subjective and objective value ... to particulars and universals ... to physics and metaphysics ... to intention and purpose ... to a brain with a left and a right hemisphere ... to practice and potential ... to culture and truth ... to Economy and Ecology ... to Creation and Creator. And we must put and keep them together in a cycle ... a 3e-system ... a process ... which, like the wheel on a bike, turns many times as the journey progresses ... but with feedback [Education] to correct and guide the oft-straying pilgrim.

And the scale's hierarchy must acknowledge and correctly identify and distinguish the Master from the Emissary.

And what is to be the medium which connects subjective to objective value ... the corpus callosum between Economy [left-hemispherical, positive-law nomos] and Ecology [right-hemispherical, natural-law logos]? Isn't it obvious from the very words themselves?
 
The only possible medium must be the "eco" ... the "oikos" ... the household of Creation itself.

We must tie nominal money to real resources ... locally and globally ... if we wish to bridge the divide between subjective and objective value ... then TRUST that Ecology will both enable and constrain Economy as needed over time.

Does this require us to adopt a beneficient view of nature if we wish to have hope for the future? And does the evidence justify taking a beneficient view?
 
Aristotle believed a beneficient view of the universe was not only justified but required:
“[T]here is something which moves while itself unmoved. ... Th[is] first mover, then, exists of necessity; and in so far as it exists by necessity, its mode of being is good, and it is in this sense a first principle. ... On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature. ... We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God. ... We must consider also in which of two ways the nature of the universe contains the good, and the highest good, whether as something separate and by itself, or as the order of the parts. Probably in both ways, as an army does; for its good is found both in its order and in its leader, and more in the latter; for he does not depend on the order but it depends on him. And all things are ordered together somehow, but not all alike,-both fishes and fowls and plants; and the world is not such that one thing has nothing to do with another, but they are connected. For all are ordered together to one end, but it is as in a house, where the freemen are least at liberty to act at random, but all things or most things are already ordained for them …” Metaphysics Book XII, Aristotle, 350 BC
For those who cannot accept this organic view of the universe, there is a more humane [and stoic] point of view also expressed by the ancients and described by Whitehead as reverent duty:
"We can be content with no less than the old summary of [culture] which inculcates duty and reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity."
And, for those who will not accept duty and reverence, there is no way back. What remains for them is the road ahead into irreverent intentionality ... which does not lead to life:
"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing." — Shakespeare, MacBeth

Tuesday, April 16, 2024

Chronic Disease

 

“The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.”  ― Joseph Conrad

“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” ― C.S. Lewis

"All experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while [d]evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms [of government] to which they are accustomed." — T. Jefferson


Time never heals

"Procrastination" comes from the suffixed Latin "pro+cras" = "for+tomorrow" ... and it remains the leading cause of death [both individual and societal] in the history of human civilizations. Why? Think of it as custom or moral inertia in which evil grows ... at first enjoyed ... then unadmitted ... then undiagnosed ... then too advanced to treat ... then fatal.

Appetite appeals as it repeals

Chronic disease begin with pleasure-seeking [or appetite] which appeals to us as an end in itself and, in so doing, appears to repeal the limits and consequences we, unconsciously at least, suspect nature [as our ever-presnt companion] might impose on our unilateral actions. This is the "liberty or labor" phase of life ... and can be quite intoxicating as it powerfully stamps our mind with an open invitation to return to its boundary-less domain where everything seems to be within and waiting for our grasp.

Custom conceals

As time progresses, we begin to "use and consume the fruit of our labor" ... known as usufruct. This is the "pursuit-of-happiness or property" phase of life in which we first encounter satisfaction of appetite and are faced with the choice of "craving more" or "sharing with the one in need" ... and we must decide which is "proper" [which word has the same etymological root as "property" and "robbery"].

This is the critical moment in any civilization, as Jefferson explained to Madison, in which "custom" is established as the basis for political authority ... and in which, as the Apostle Paul warned, "the [d]evil seeks a foothold". And it is the moment in which conscience usually fails to be heard ... not because it fails to speak ... but because it is sequestered in the right hemisphere of the brain as the left hemisphere wrests control. The critical question that must be answered at this point is

  • whether "what is true of every member of the society individually is true of them all collectively" or, in other words,
  • whether "the right of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals."
Everything that follows hinges on the answer to this question.

Pain reveals

One therapeutic purpose of pain is to raise the alarm that something is not "right" [to use Jefferson's word]. Unfortunately, treating the pain per se usually becomes the obsession that obscures and delays any diagnosis and allows the disease to progress until it is too advanced and multi-symptomed to cure without killing the hosting organism ... TOO BIG [NOT] TO FAIL.

Delay seals

It is in retrospect [ie. "backwards+looking"] that irreversible chronic disease becomes clear with lyrics which inevitably recount some story of an intelligent man being needlessly reduced to a dehumanized animal for slaughter ...
  • a tragedy [tragos+ōidē = "goat, buck + song" ] as opposed to
  • a comedy [kōmos+ōidē = "revel, carousal, merry-making, festival + song"].

The net-WORK of demons

In a letter to his son, storied economist Irving Fisher retrospectively identified his demons as "war, disease, degeneracy, and instability of money". We each have our own list of demons. And, if we are persistent and honest, we always find them linked in a net-work [ie. snare] of chronic diseases that can be traced back to the formulations of LIFE we chose to embrace by giving them our attention in custom which becomes more entrenched and entangled the longer we wait to examine and untangle it.


Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Absolutes are back

absolute - "not relative to something else"; ab + solvere = "off, away from" + "to loosen, untie, release, detach"

“Relativism reduces every element of absoluteness to relativity while making a completely illogical exception in favor of this reduction itself. Fundamentally it consists in propounding the claim that there is no truth as if this were truth or in declaring it to be absolutely true that there is nothing but the relatively true; one might just as well say that there is no language or write that there is no writing. ... The assertion nullifies itself if it is true and by nullifying itself logically proves thereby that it is false; its initial absurdity lies in the implicit claim to be unique in escaping, as if by enchantment, from a relativity that is declared to be the only possibility.” ― Frithjof Schuon, Logic & Transcendence

"There is no better means of reducing a fallacious variety of thought to absurdity than to let it live itself out completely." ― Carl Menger

The absurdity of Economy ...

Little did Carl Menger imagine that his notion of marginal utility would be allowed to "live itself out" to absurdity, and yet that is what has happened. But, perhaps, Menger [like many great scientists before him] is merely the scapegoat for subsequent, smaller minds that took his transitional notion of relative values and, in a slothful act of pagan idolatry, deified it as a destination ... as absolute truth.

"The study of philosophy is a voyage towards the larger generalities. For this reason in the infancy of science, when the main stress lay in the discovery of the most general ideas usefully applicable to the subject matter in question, philosophy was not sharply distinguished from science. To this day, a new science with any substantial novelty in its notions is considered to be in some way peculiarly philosophical. In their later stages, apart from occasional disturbances, most sciences accept without question the general notions in terms of which they develop. The main stress is laid on the adjustment and the direct verification of more special statements. In such periods scientists repudiate philosophy; Newton, justly satisfied with his physical principles, disclaimed metaphysics." Whitehead

While most "economists" are stuck regurgitating what they "learned" by watching and listening to others regurgitate, a few have been able to lift their eyes and minds above their "micro" and even "macro" scopes to REALITY in its dazzling, comprehensive and coherent beauty. And what do they encounter?

... without going to the next level of Ecology

If the fatal flaw of Economy is its obsession with abstract desires, the strength of Ecology is its recognition of relative needs

WHAT ???!!! Didn't we just say that relative values is a failed paradigm?  Not exactly. What we said was that relative values are not appropriate as a destination. Economy by definition limits its field of vision to individuals [micro] or groups of individuals [macro], but in both cases it relies on some form of subjective value determination as the basis for rational exchange to "maximize" value.

Ecology is willing to consider the proposition that Nature [the Cosmos] imposes absolute limits and consequences on Economy in the form of an objective and comprehensive hierarchy of values .. something Hayek claimed mankind could never know and which he therefore fatally dismissed as non-existent. These absolute, objective values are defined relative to one another ... but the idea that this relativity can be meaningful within a local "subset" of all the things in the cosmos is futile nonsense.

... which redefines LIBERTY

Of course, most self-styled classical "economists" claim that the theory of relative values and marginal utility is the basis for liberty. And yet when it comes to explaining this "liberty", they go to absurd lengths which nobody practices in real life or is able to articulate even in theory.

Ecology provides a new and simple definition of LIBERTY:

Local Includes Believing Everything's Related To You

which puts Economy [local] into comprehensive perspective [includes] with Religion [believing], Science [everything's related] and the individual [to you].

... and returns us to Philosophy

And yet Ecology, properly understood, merely returns Economy to what Whitehead identified as its starting point for our Enlightenment ancestors: "the study of philosophy as a voyage towards the larger generalities" ... even God ... the ultimate absolute.

"Assessing the roles  of  economics  and  ecology  for  biodiversity  conservation  ultimately  requires embedding  the  view of  Mainstream  Economics,  Ecological Economics  and ecology  on humankind  and  nature  into  an  encompassing  philosophical  understanding  of  the relationship between humans and nature."
TY  - JOUR
AU  - Faber, Malte
AU  - Frick, Marc
AU  - Zahrnt, Dominik
PY  - 2019/01/20
SP  -
T1  - Absolute and Relative Scarcity
VL  -
ER  -
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340336532_Absolute_and_Relative_Scarcity

 Sounds like Genesis 1. Are our religious, political and educational institutions up to that challenge?

Added Resources

Mario Giampietro: "Models with Meaning - Changing Social Practices” | The Great Simplification #107 ... Giampietro proposes the task of combining Economy and Ecology by viewing them as stages in a universal "metabolism"  ... an idea we also develop in our discussion of the 3e cycle:

"Society doesn't like complex things because we just like to parse things into dollars or euros and we make decisions on that and this is not easy to do with what you just said. It is something that should start in school, it should start in school. How would we do that? I think that they should change the way we teach things at school because all the energetics, metabolism, these are all... Let alone the discussion on multiple scales, this idea that we have only one scale is absurd. ... We have to even teach young people what energy is and why it's important to our lives. We're still not even doing that. No, but we are victim of the success of economics. This is the point, we are intoxicated [Rev 18:3]. Because if you imagine we have a discipline, I work with Kozo Mayumi which is a professor of economics. So I respect the category of what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is that economics assumes that absolute scarcity is impossible because it works with price. If you have price there is a modest scarcity, so you can use technology to trade the things. But if you have absolute scarcity, you no longer have price, you don't have a market, you have either war or solidarity but you don't have market. So we are using a science, they assume the absolute scarcity is impossible to study absolute scarcity, how to avoid it. Guys, no, economics is not capable of comparing the size of economic process to the size of ecological process. Would that ever change?"


Friday, January 19, 2024

Get with the plan?

I-80

After Christmas 2023, my wife and I took a road trip from Kansas to the Pacific NW. We crossed mountain ranges in snow storms [-22 in Laramie WY] ... and saw amazing sights [snow covering the Steamboat Rocks in the Utah mountains]. But nothing prepared me for the spectacular experiences surrounding the birth of another grandson. LIFE IS INVALUABLE ... except in terms of other lives.

As that new human being presented himself to his family, I marveled at how helpless and near-sighted he was. But also at how, from the first, he seemed to know what "the plan" was ... FOOD ... which his mother graciously [and quite happily it appeared] supplied on demand. If this boy makes it to my age of 70+, I wonder what he will think about "the plan" looking back. Was there really a plan? And was it all about just being together with the food?

JWST

The James Webb Space Telescope is, as its name says, bringing what is FAR DISTANT [telos] into VIEW [skopos]... and the vastness of the new perspective is SHATTERING long-standing [but now seemingly parochial] explanations of the universe. Did all this just happen ... without a plan?

What if we could observe [skopos] the history of human civilization with such a comprehensive perspective? What would it reveal to us about where humans have been and where they may be going ... about our notions of "economy" in the face of "ecology"?

This is precisely what noted astro-physicist Tom Murphy [who sees the universe thru the lens of JWST] has done in a recent piece titled The Simple Story of Civilization - Do the Math where he puts human "progress" into perspective by looking at human civilization as if it were a single life ... leading him to conclusions that will burst a few bubbles ... especially those of the enlightened elites & entrenched economists who are supposedly "leading" us into the future. ["Parochial" is too dignified a word to describe our current notions of policy and economy ... Tom uses "idiotic" ... and you will see why ... and agree!]

I have prepared a very short comment introducing Tom's piece [with generous quotes from several reliable sources in addition to Tom's work] which I have entitled Fill the earth ... OK ... NOW WHAT? I hope these thoughts, may ... along with Tom's piece ... give you pause to think even more deeply than you ever have before about ALL life on earth ... and whether you are doing your duty in reverence during your life here.

Bob

PS. For more on Tom's work, see his text book Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet

Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Truth & Power

 

"Whoever is partner with a thief hates his own life; He hears the curse [when swearing an oath to testify], but discloses nothing [and commits perjury by omission]. " Prov 29:24

"'My house will be called the House of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers." Matt 21:13

"Is not impotent truth just as despicable as power that gives no heed to truth?" Arendt, Truth & Politics

 
 

To be or not to be

In the most basic sense, truth simply "is" ... being ... existence ... "what is". Thus Pontius Pilate unknowingly answered his own question when he asked, "What is truth?" which is, perhaps, why Jesus [the great "I am"] did not respond. This truth is both unmoved and unmovable as described in Aristotle's metaphysics:
“[T]here is something which moves while itself unmoved. ... Th[is] first mover, then, exists of necessity; and in so far as it exists by necessity, its mode of being is good, and it is in this sense a first principle. ... On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature. ... We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God."

To do or not to do

But the ancient sentiment goes on to further describe existence as movement making it personal ... "handsome is that handsome does" ... extending being to becoming ... one to many ... static to dynamic ... potential to actual ... eternal to changeable ... timeless to temporal ... stasis to agency.
  • stasis - Latin stare = "to stand, make or be firm, condition, position, state, manner, attitude"
  • agency - Latin agere = "to set in motion, drive forward, to do, exert power, produce effect"
"We must consider also in which of two ways the nature of the universe contains the good, and the highest good, whether as something separate and by itself, or as the order of the parts. Probably in both ways, as an army does; for its good is found both in its order and in its leader, and more in the latter; for he does not depend on the order but it depends on him. And all things are ordered together somehow, but not all alike,-both fishes and fowls and plants; and the world is not such that one thing has nothing to do with another, but they are connected. For all are ordered together to one end, but it is as in a house, where the freemen are least at liberty to act at random, but all things or most things are already ordained for them …” 
And so the age old question arises, "What happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object?" ... when power diverges from the truth which quickens it?

Money is power ... but "What is money?"

Paraphrasing Pilot, does the question "What is money?" contain its own answer? Yes and No. "Yes" to the extent that money reflects "what is" ... existence. "No" when money is detached from "what is" ... in which case the power of money diverges from the truth of money ... setting the stage for a cosmic collision.
 
It is increasingly clear that the global, financial detachment of money from "what is" by a small group of unchallenged elites who have hijacked the people's power [demos-kratos] by using that delusion of fiat money and credit is now cascading the destruction of not only the atmosphere and environment but of humanity itself in what can reasonably be described as unjustifiable robbery of cosmic proportions:
“Another characteristic of a living society is that it requires food. In a museum the crystals are kept under glass cases; in zoological gardens the animals are fed. Having regard to the universality of reactions with environment, the distinction is not quite absolute. It cannot, however, be ignored. The crystals are not agencies requiring the destruction of elaborate societies derived from the environment; a living society is such an agency. The societies which it destroys are its food. This food is destroyed by dissolving it into somewhat simpler social elements. It has been robbed of something. Thus, all societies require interplay with their environment; and in the case of living societies this interplay takes the form of robbery. The living society may, or may not, be a higher type of organism than the food which it disintegrates. But whether or no it be for the general good, LIFE IS ROBBERY. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification.” - AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, Chap III - The Order of Nature, Section X - Life and Food, 1929

If YOU have doubts about the prospects for a cosmic reckoning ... or should we say wrecking ... I encourage you to listen to this exchange [pretty much one way] between a Swedish godling of finance [let's call him Molech] and an American shepherd and grower of figs [let's call him Amos]. Like Molech, you will be speechless ... which is what ALWAYS happens when power meets truth.

 Perjured by omission ?

"They hate the poor at the gate, and he who speaks correct things they despise. ... Because of this, he who understands in that time will be quiet for it, because that time is of evil." Amos

[Please read the whole book of Amos and remember ... either GOD is not a respecter of persons or nations ... or else HE is a liar ... and, either way, YOU should be frightened.]
We have only one account in the New Testament of Jesus using physical violence [arguably twice]: driving the money changers out of the temple with a whip. After all, he pardoned a dishonest tax collector over lunch and was crucified between thieves to whom he showed only mercy. Why was this offense so abhorent to him? Why such zeal for God among a group of socially accepted [even necessary] business persons?
 
Perhaps, it was because these offenders had unknowingly crossed the invisible line from their corrupt nomos into the timeless logos ... using money to rip power from truth ... defacing the image of God in His creation ... and then, TO ADD INSULT TO INJURY, claiming "IN GOD WE TRUST" as the justification for their robbery and thereby blaspheming his name with oaths and making it appear that God condoned and ordered their robbery of the people who came to the temple for His help.

It is dangerous to remain silent in the face of robbery ... because robbery must be justified. But it is damnable, when the robber falsely swears trust in God.
 
WE MUST SPEAK OUT ... WE MUST DO SOMETHING. WWJD?