Here’s the first post in a new column that sounds interesting.
Washington Post, Daniel Pink, 29 Jan 2024: Opinion | American imagination needs an adrenaline shot. Here’s how I’ll deliver it.
Here’s an item to keep things in perspective.
BBC, 2 Feb 2024: Misinformation spreads in China on ‘civil war’ in Texas
Amid the escalating border standoff between Texas and the White House over illegal immigration, misinformation has spread in China that the Lone Star state has officially declared war to secede from the US.
[ … ]
While foreign media is largely blocked in China, content from foreign media is often cherry-picked to stoke suggestions of US internal divisions.
Sounds just like Fox News!
I’ve read three short books about philosophy recently; this is the second. Each is quite different from the others. If the first book (review here) was an overview focusing on the big questions that philosophy asks – What should we do? What is there? and How do we know? – this second one is a philosophy fan-boy’s collection of top ten lists. So if the interest is, who are the top 10 philosophers of all time, this is the place to come.
Simon & Schuster, 2002. Compiled and edited by John Little. 127pp including index.
Durant was in fact a well known historian and public intellectual, for decades throughout the 20th century. He was the author, along with his wife, of an 11-volume work called THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION, published over many years, from 1935 to 1975, with a final volume unfinished at the time of his death in 1981, at the age of 96. (As I recall the Durants lived in Santa Monica, or adjacent Brentwood, and Will’s passing was a big deal in local news at that time. In part because there was discussion of what would happen to his enormous collection of books. If I recall correctly, the honors went to Dutton’s, a once-famous, by now long-closed, bookstore on San Vincente Blvd.)
Plus:
This one is even better than the one I posted on 16 Jan 2024, since this shows the constellation in perspective of a ground view. Again, those wisps of red nebulae almost obscure the familiar outline of the constellation. Also in the pic, upper middle: the Pleiades.
Astronomy Picture of the Day, 31 Jan 2024: Camera Orion Rising. Go to this link and hover over the photo for identifications of the various sky objects.
\\\
This wackadoodle conspiracy theory involving Taylor Swift and the Super Bowl has reached the front page of the New York Times today.
I suppose everyone believes things that are not true, if only because of the intuitive biases inherent in human nature that evolved to help the species survive, intuitions that help us live in the world we experience (especially the ancestral world on the Savannah), one of particular scales and durations, yet which are *not* true when applied to other scales and durations. (These latter are where the best of science fiction chimes in.)
But some people believe more things that are not true than others. As in all things, there is a range, a spectrum, of attitudes; not a black and white divide. Humans are driven by narrative bias and tribalism, and so rely on flattering stories about their own tribes/communities/nations for group cohesion and survival, and can dismiss objective facts up to the point (or perhaps beyond [vaccines]) where such denial actually does harm. Many people live their entire lives inside such narratives, of religion or nationalism, and as long as they manage to reproduce and create the next generation, blissfully unaware of the vast universe around them, dismissal of those facts does little harm.
The scientist and philosopher tries to think around those biases of human nature, to rely on evidence and reasoning instead, in order to perceive the truth of the greater reality of the entire natural world, the cosmos. They try to escape the provincialism of self-enclosed narratives. They’re at the far end of the spectrum, and a tiny minority of the human race. But it’s that minority that has driven the advancement of the human race, in terms of knowledge and health and technology, and which has thus built the modern world.
\\
So perhaps the key question is, at what point does living inside a narrative, and believing things that are not true, do actual harm? If not to those inside that narrative, but to society in general, or even to the species?
Paul Krugman, NY Times, 29 Jan 2024 (though in today’s paper): MAGA Is Based on Fear, Not Grounded in Reality
As I mentioned in Thursday’s post, I keep finding books in my library that could be considered straight-out philosophy (e.g. on ethics and morality) or at least philosophy-adjacent (some of the more abstruse physics and evolutionary texts, in the way they inform our apprehension of the nature of reality) than I’d thought to find. There is not a sharp division among these fields of thought. By the same token, it’s not that difficult to find correspondences, if not quite metaphorical alliances, between current news stories, and between them and the great philosophical concepts.
In modern parlance, these examples are about people in silos.
David French, NY Times Opinion, 28 Jan 2024: When the Right Ignores Its Sex Scandals
Salon, Gary M. Kramer, 25 Jan 2024: “There will always be Holocaust deniers”: How “Zone of Interest” reveals unsettling truths about us, subtitled “The Oscar-nominated Johnnie Burn spoke to Salon about producing the sounds from the death camp next door”
This concerns a 2023 film I haven’t seen yet, though since it’s up for a bunch of Oscars, I might yet see it.
I’m mentioning it to make a broader point.
More links collected the past week or so, today non-political ones.
Washington Post, Perry Bacon Jr., 27 Jan 2024: Opinion | Journalism may never again make money. So it should focus on mission.
After two posts on intellectual topics, books, let’s check back in with the fringe, perhaps in a more condensed manner than I usually do.
I’ve said several times that Republicans are interested only in solving imaginary problems (wokeness, CRT), not real ones (climate change). This latest example (about the border crisis), already noted, has reached the front page of the New York Times. That and other links: the story is told in the headlines and subtitles.
NY Times, 25 Jan 2024: Trump Strengthens Grip on Capitol Hill as He Presses Toward Nomination, subtitled “The former president’s opposition has all but killed the prospects for a bipartisan border deal, reflecting how his influence in Congress has grown as he gains ground in the Republican primary.”
Proceeding with my foray into philosophy a bit discursively — not yet one of the big histories — I begin with the ‘very short introduction’ I displayed in my initial philosophy post back on 12 January. This is a volume in Oxford University Press’s huge library of “very short introductions” — they have a Wikipedia entry — that number over 700 now. Small paperbacks of 150 pages or less. Here’s the full list.
I have half a dozen of these, and have noticed that they vary in approach. Some are 10,000 foot overviews; some focus on specifics; some on general theory. E.g. you won’t brush up on your Greek mythology in the series’ mythology volume, which is more about the general idea of mythology and where myths come from.
I would call this philosophy volume more of a sampler, than a broad overview. The author is a professor at Cambridge. The volume I have is the second edition, published 2020; the first edition was published in 2002.
Herewith a summary, with [[ comments ]].
