Subtitled “Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”
With second subtitle “Why the Meaningful Life is Closer than You Think”
(Basic Books, 2006, xiii + 297pp, including 54pp acknowledgements, notes, references, and index. Hardcover with no dust jacket.)
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Ch7, The Uses of Adversity
There has been much consternation over a piece published by Bill Gates last week, about climate change.
NY Times, David Gelles, 28 Oct 2025: Bill Gates Says Climate Change ‘Will Not Lead to Humanity’s Demise’, subtitled “In a memo, the Microsoft co-founder warned against climate alarmism and appears to have shifted some of his views about climate change.”
Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder who has spent billions of his own money to raise the alarm about the dangers of climate change, is now pushing back against what he calls a “doomsday outlook” and appears to have shifted his stance on the risks posed by a warming planet.
In a lengthy memo released Tuesday, Mr. Gates sought to tamp down the alarmism he said many people use to describe the effects of rising temperatures. Instead, he called for redirecting efforts toward improving lives in the developing world.
Subtitled “Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”
With second subtitle “Why the Meaningful Life is Closer than You Think”
(Basic Books, 2006, xiii + 297pp, including 54pp acknowledgements, notes, references, and index. Hardcover with no dust jacket.)
(Post 1)
Once again, there are lots of familiar ideas here, from books about psychology and human nature, from Stephen Pinker and Jonathan Haidt. That’s the point of the book: to assess modern understanding of topics about happiness and meaning, and contrast them with the ‘traditional wisdom’ about these matter. Three more chapters today. I’ll save my takes and summaries until the last post, but here I occasionally insert [[ personal comments ]].
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Ch4, The Faults of Others
Quotes by Matthew, and Buddha.
This piece isn’t news, but it is something core to my own understanding and themes, and something which I suspect is not widely understood.
IAI.tv (Institute of Art and Ideas), Samuel McKee, 4 Nov 2025: Our brains evolved to survive, not to find truth, subtitled “We are social animals, not truth-seeking ones”
Intro:
We like to believe that reason is our pathway to truth. Yet from Popper’s demand for falsifiability to Darwin’s doubt about the mind’s origins, a more unsettling picture is emerging. Our brains were shaped not to perceive reality, but to survive within it. Evolution has optimized us for social cohesion rather than accuracy, leaving false beliefs not as evolutionary errors but as features of our survival. In an age that prizes truth, philosopher of science Samuel McKee argues that our greatest obstacle may be the very mind that seeks it.
Subtitled “Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”
With second subtitle “Why the Meaningful Life is Closer than You Think”
(Basic Books, 2006, xiii + 297pp, including 54pp acknowledgements, notes, references, and index. Hardcover with no dust jacket.)
Here is a fascinating book that I didn’t get around to reading until the writer published later books, especially THE RIGHTEOUS MIND (review begins here), that I read first. This one seemed intriguing when I bought it in 2007, despite the whiff of self-helpiness about it, for presuming to compare “ancient wisdom” with modern-day scientific findings. This is exactly one of my core themes, even if in the guise of the discussion of base human nature with more modern enlightenment thinking. In fact, it’s almost exactly analogous to the theme of my book, which compares the assumptions by science fiction writers of how the world might be with the discoveries by actual science of how the world actually is.
So this book focuses on 10 great ideas, as discovered by the world’s civilizations, and then considers them in light of current scientific research. But they’re not just any 10 great ideas; they’re ideas, as the second subtitle says, about how to live, and how to be happy.
Paul Krugman, 3 Nov 2025: We’re Number Two!, subtitled “How Trump ceded the future to China”
Does Donald Trump realize that he has ceded world leadership to China? Probably not: During his recent Asian trip, foreign leaders flattered him and showered him with personal gifts, so he came home with his ego even more inflated than usual. Nobody close to him would dare tell him that if you look at the substance of what he agreed to, it amounted to an ignominious retreat. When Chuck Schumer pointed out the reality of what Trump didn’t accomplish, his reaction was hysterical:
Everything we think we know about the world, the universe, about reality, is necessarily filtered through the perceptual limitations of the human body and the biases of human nature. As fish with water, there are some things we simply can’t see. And the things we do see are interpreted through protocols that evolved to promote human survival, not for accurate perception of reality.
All the political stories I mention here are of interest because they reveal, implicitly, these filters. All interactions among humans, politics broadly, come not so much from different takes on reality (though they’re a good part of it), let alone good vs evil (a simpleton’s take on reality), but from different goals, which ultimately boil down to my tribe vs your tribe. And the rules we establish, or ignore, about how to deal with each other. Those rules amount to different types of governments.
NY Times, opinion column by David French, 2 Nov 2025: Why Trump Can Do No Wrong
We watched the new film about a potential nuclear war, A House of Dynamite, last Sunday on Netflix, and then I watched it again on Netflix Monday evening (while Y was on the phone with work). It’s a taut, well-made film about a contemporary missile crisis, roughly analogous to the situation in Fail Safe (book and film reviewed here), in which a foreign missile is detected heading for the US, origin unknown, intent unknown — is it real? An accident? More to the point — as in Fail Safe — if it really is a nuclear bomb and it detonates over its target, Chicago, what does the president do? All sorts of potential response strategies are alluded to, just as they were discussed in Fail Safe.
Two days ago I noted an essay that described five ways you can tell when America has become a dictatorship.
Today comes an analogous, much more elaborate piece at NYT, designed to be scrolled through, listing 12 “markers of democratic erosion,” with scales showing how far along we are along each one, moving away from democracy.
NY Times, Editorial Board, 31 Oct 2025: Are We Losing Our Democracy?
Countries that slide from democracy toward autocracy tend to follow similar patterns. To measure what is happening in the United States, the Times editorial board has compiled a list of 12 markers of democratic erosion, with help from scholars who have studied this phenomenon. The sobering reality is that the United States has regressed, to different degrees, on all 12.
Our country is still not close to being a true autocracy, in the mold of Russia or China. But once countries begin taking steps away from democracy, the march often continues. We offer these 12 markers as a warning of how much Americans have already lost and how much more we still could lose.
I’ll screen-capture the first.
Let’s give Hemant Mehta his due when he says his post today is an important one. (Why? Because he’s trying to be positive, instead of relentlessly negative in reporting about the religious shenanigans going on every day in the world.)
Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 30 Oct 2025: How the American Humanist Association is empowering a new wave of atheist content creators, subtitled “A quiet experiment could redefine how secular voices reach millions online and revive a movement that’s lost momentum”
A few months ago, I was given the Humanist Media Award from the American Humanist Association. Rather than speak directly about my own work, I used my time to highlight a growing concern I’ve had about the broader atheism movement.
