Saturday, July 8, 2023
On dogma.......................
Understand the value of truth for its own sake. That is the vaccine to prevent you from falling so deeply in love with our own opinions. That is the recipe for avoiding dogmatism. Be engaged, but don’t be dogmatic.
the distant trail.........................
The trouble with him was that he was not able to imagine. He was quick and ready in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in their meanings.
-Jack London, from his short story, To Build a Fire
results....................
You'll get 10 times better results by elevating good behavior rather than punishing bad behavior, especially in children and animals.
-Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier
grounded...................
Regardless of what the marketers, click-bait headlines, and pseudoscience evangelists say, there are no magic lotions, potions, or pills when it comes to deep happiness, lasting well-being, and enduring performance.
. . . happiness, fulfillment, well-being, and sustainable performance arise when you concentrate on being present in the process of living instead of obsessing over outcomes, and above all when you're firmly grounded wherever you are.
-Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness
hearing.....................
Only today
I heard
the river
within the river.
-Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry
Walk....................
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.
-Soren Kierkegaard, as quoted here
a precious inheritance...............
In all those ways modern conservatism arose as a defence of the individual against potential oppressors, and an endorsement of popular sovereignty. However, it opposed the view that political order is founded on a contract, as well as the parallel suggestion that the individual enjoys freedom, sovereignty and rights in a state of nature, and can throw off the burden of social and political membership, and start again from a condition of absolute freedom. For the conservative, human beings come into this world burdened by obligations, and subject to institutions and traditions that contain within them a precious inheritance of wisdom, without which the exercise of freedom is likely to destroy human rights and entitlements as to enhance them.
-Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition
Thursday, July 6, 2023
Yep......................
There’s nothing wrong with being risk averse at times but if you’re always risk averse you’re going to miss out on life.
-Ben Carlson, as lifted from here
Magic pills don't exist....................
The shortcut turnpike is dark and filled with terrors.
-Tony Isola, from this post
Us pesky humans...............
Man alone, of all created beings, displays a natural contempt for existence, and yet a boundless desire to exist; he scorns life, but he dreads annihilation.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 1, Chapter XVII
Can I get an Amen............................
Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Checking in with...............................
................................Albert Camus:
One does not decide the truth of a thought according to whether it is right-wing or left-wing.
Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.
Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one's head against a wall.
It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.
Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.
Tuesday, July 4, 2023
Light and Glory......................
“I am apt
to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great
anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by
solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty.
“It ought
to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells,
Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from
this Time forward forever more.
“You will
think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil
and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and
support and defend these States.
“Yet
through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can
see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will
triumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in
God We shall not.”
-John Adams, as cut-and-pasted from here
On the inertia of busyness................
Productive activity has nothing to do with being swept away by the inertia of busyness. It is not about quantity either. Rather, it is a deliberate choice of where and how to direct one's attention.
The significance of this choice cannot be overstated.
-Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness
Ah............................
If you can't tell what you desperately need, it's probably sleep.
-Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living
Hope........................
Time, and the work of changing days, has made
Many a bad thing good; fortune has played
With many men, and set them firm again.
-Virgil, as channeled by Montaigne, Book 2, Chapter 3
For a take on geopolitics..............
.............that you likely won't find elsewhere, one should check in periodically with Fred Reed:
Here it is, step by step, following Fred’s First Law, an American war begins with overestimating American power, underestimating the enemy, and misunderstanding the kind of war it is getting into.
Checking in with Wendell Berry.........
'Chance' is a poor word among
the mazes of causes and effects, the last
stand of these all-explainers who,
backed up to the first and final Why,
reply, “By chance, of course!” As if
that tied up ignorance with a ribbon.
In the beginning something by chance
existed that would bang and by chance
it banged, obedient to the by-chance
previously existing laws of existence
and banging, from which the rest proceeds
by logic of cause and effect also
previously existing by chance? Well,
when all that happened who was there?
Did the chance that made the bang then make
the Bomb, and there was no choice, no help?
Prove to me that chance did ever
make a sycamore tree, a yellow-
throated warbler nesting and singing
high up among the white limbs
and the golden leaf-light, and a man
to love the tree, the bird, the song
his life long, and by his love to save
them, so far, from all the machines.
By chance? Prove it, then, and I
by chance will kiss your ass.
the mazes of causes and effects, the last
stand of these all-explainers who,
backed up to the first and final Why,
reply, “By chance, of course!” As if
that tied up ignorance with a ribbon.
In the beginning something by chance
existed that would bang and by chance
it banged, obedient to the by-chance
previously existing laws of existence
and banging, from which the rest proceeds
by logic of cause and effect also
previously existing by chance? Well,
when all that happened who was there?
Did the chance that made the bang then make
the Bomb, and there was no choice, no help?
Prove to me that chance did ever
make a sycamore tree, a yellow-
throated warbler nesting and singing
high up among the white limbs
and the golden leaf-light, and a man
to love the tree, the bird, the song
his life long, and by his love to save
them, so far, from all the machines.
By chance? Prove it, then, and I
by chance will kiss your ass.
Look..........................
Look beneath the surface: never let a thing's intrinsic quality or worth escape you.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Six
the intention heuristic.............
I am not a fan of the desire to do good. I call it the intention heuristic. I think that, on average, profit-seeking businesses do good, and non-profits do harm. But if you insist on doing non-profit work, I think that working for a hands-on charity is less likely to cause harm than working for a cause.
------------------------------------------
What I call the intention heuristic takes two forms:
Good intentions necessarily lead to good consequences.
Bad consequences necessarily indicate that someone had bad intentions.
True wisdom requires discarding the intention heuristic. It requires accepting that the world is complex and that each individual is complex.
-Arnold Kling, from this substack
Monday, July 3, 2023
The fog of war.......................
An interesting exercise.................
...........would be to study the net worth of members of Congress prior to their election and after they have served multiple terms. Just curious.
A distinction must be made when aristocracies and democracies accuse each other of facilitating corruption. In aristocratic governments, those who are placed at the head of affairs are rich men, who are desirous only of power. In democracies, statesman are poor and have their fortunes to make. The consequence is that in aristocratic states the rulers are rarely accessible to corruption and have little craving for money, while the reverse is the case in democratic nations.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 1, Chapter VIII, 1835
need......................Part 1
We human beings live naturally in communities, bound together by mutual trust. We have need for a shared home, a place of safety where our claim to occupancy is undisputed and where we can call on others to assist us in times of threat. We need peace with our neighbors and the procedures for securing it. And we need the love and protection afforded by family life. To revise the human condition in any of those respects is to violate imperatives rooted in biology and in the needs of social reproduction.
-Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition
need.......................Part 2
. . . But to conduct political argument as though these factors are too far from the realm of ideas to deserve a mention is to ignore all the limits that must be borne in mind, if our political philosophy is to be remotely believable. It is precisely the character of modern utopias to ignore these limits - to imagine societies without law (Marx and Engels), without families (Laing), without borders or defenses (Sartre). And much conservative ink has been wasted (by me among others) in rebutting such views, which can be believed only by people who are unable to perceive realities, and who therefore will never be persuaded by argument.
-Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Grand Tradition
seeks.........................
Philosophy, as Spinoza understands it, does not peddle in temporary cheer, modest improvements in well-being, or chicken soup for the soul; it seeks and claims to find a basis for happiness that is absolutely certain, permanent, and divine. The principal—indeed, the sole—purpose of his mature philosophy, as expressed in his masterwork, the Ethics, is to achieve this kind of blessedness or salvation. . . . Like Socrates, Spinoza avers that blessedness comes only from a certain kind of knowledge—specifically, the "knowledge of the union the that mind has with the whole of Nature."
-Matthew Stewart, Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World
consistency.....................
The consistency of your endeavors (exercise, companionship, work) is more important than the quantity. Nothing beats small things done every day, which is way more important than what you do occasionally.
-Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living
Sunday, July 2, 2023
supremely........................
There is a way of losing that is finding. When soul overmasters sense. When the noble and divine self overcomes the lower self. When duty and honor and love immortal things bid the mortal perish. It is only when a man supremely gives that he supremely finds.
The left flank............................
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