My first book dealing with sustainability and flourishing begins with a chapter on systems dynamics and the use of its archetypes as means to diagnose the big problems of our times. Even back then, I wrote and spoke about “unsustainability” as a failure to deal with the systemic nature of the big threats and social failures. Now that I have discovered McGilchrist’s bi-hemispheric brain model, I can put more grounds under what I wrote back then. The connection is the way the two hemispheres attend to the world. The importance of connecting the divided brain and systems dynamics is that… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Election Nobody Won
I was sitting at my computer the morning after the election, not unexpectedly, awaiting the vote counting to end. It looked like Biden would be the next President. Now we know he will be, but it will be short of a victory. It will return truth to the White House, but little else. And even that will not matter much so long as the body politic has lost the basic civility on which democracy depends. Civility is at heart an acknowledgment that the burdens of governance are shared by all the people, and that requires an even more basic condition.… Read More
Continue ReadingOriginalism and Textualism Are Hoaxes
Amy Coney Barrett said in her Senate testimony that the Constitution has “the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it.” No. The Constitution Document and the words it contains have no meaning at all. A piece of text has as many possible meanings as there are people reading it. Only humans can create meaning from texts or spoken words. That is true of individual words and the sentences made from them. Much mischief has been done by conflating the written or spoken word with some inherent or essential meaning. The founding document “doesn’t change over time,” Barrett… Read More
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