This above title of this post was the headline in today’s online edition of the Guardian. What a terrible idea! This proposal is a perfect example of what economists and others call a moral hazard. Moral hazards are basically situations in which one party takes on risks that another would bear the cost should the outcome require it. The term can also be used to describe an action that purports to solve some problem, but actually fails to deal with the real causes and diverts attention from an effective course. While the term is relatively new, the concept can be… Read More
Continue ReadingArticle Finally Published
After an excruciatingly long wait, my article in the Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion has been published. I submitted it about two years ago. It is part of a special issue, titled: “The Rise of the Well-Being, Happiness, and Fulfillment Driven Organization.” The article is free to download. Just click this link. Here is the abstract: ABSTRACT Modern humans are failing to attain their existential potential, expressed as flourishing. Simultaneously, mega- problems like climate change have arisen as unintended consequences of normal societal behaviors. Both failings lie at the deepest root of modern culture, the way we think we… Read More
Continue ReadingAn Important Limitation of AI
The Harvard Gazette has a story today about the deleterious effect AI has on human empathy. Here’s the first few paragraphs: Artificial intelligence holds the promise of optimizing many aspects of life, from education and medical research to business and the arts. But some applications may have a deeply worrisome effect on human relationships. During a talk March 20 at Harvard Law School, MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, whose books include “Reclaiming Conversation” and “The Empathy Diaries,” outlined her concerns over the fact that individuals are starting to turn to generative AI chatbots to ease loneliness, a rising public health dilemma… Read More
Continue ReadingA Plea for the Arts & Humanities
David Brooks wrote a very interesting oped piece the other day (Jan 28), commenting on the “sad, lonely, angry, and mean” state of the US society. It’s basically a plea for more humanities, especially art, in our lives. I don’t always agree with Brooks, but this piece is spot on. Additionally, he is following, very closely, the work of McGilchrist, although I doubt if he knows that. The article, in very different words and from a different platform, is pointing to the left-brain domination of our society, just as McGilchrist does. The problems he points to are the result of… Read More
Continue ReadingLetting the Rear-view Mirror Be Our Guide
Again, I apologize to my faithful followers for the silence on this blog for quite a while. No excuses really. I just haven’t felt I have much to say for a while. Some things have changed for me. My wife and I have moved into a senior living community after many decades in a big house. We have yet to finish unpacking, but are feeling very positive about the change. I hope to continue the blog on a more regular schedule once we are more settled. In any case, here are some thoughts i have been having lately. This post… Read More
Continue ReadingTime to Get Moving
I have been lately quoting Marx’s last “Thesis on Feuerbach” which reads: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Much as I admire Iain McGilchrist for his breakthrough work on the brain, I wish he would pay more attention (right-brain) to this timely aphorism. His first book, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, established the bi-hemispheric brain as the paradigm for the way we attend to the world and consequently act in it. It also pointed out, in excruciated detail, how… Read More
Continue ReadingMoving Homes (Not Blogs)
To my faithful and other visitors to my blog, thank you for continuing to come even though I have been very irregular lately. At least two reasons are involved. The first is that I have been reading McGilchrist’s recent book, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, and the second is that my wife and I are moving to a CCRC, that is a retirement or senior community. The move will take place in mid-July, but has been very unsettling for a while as the process of moving is horrendous after being in… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Schizophrenic Modern World
In McGilchrist’s new book, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, he spends a considerable number of pages discussing the relation of mental illness and other pathologies of the brain to the hemispheric balance. Schizophrenia and autism share a chapter. He provides lots of evidence that the loss of reality and related symptoms in schizophrenic subjects is due to an imbalance of the hemispheres with th left strongly dominating the right. That makes sense as the affected person is operating largely out of the disconnected hemisphere, and had limited connection to the actual… Read More
Continue ReadingApologies
Again, I apologize for the erratic posting schedule, but this time I do have a reason. As I was composing my to-be-my-next post, I realized that I was almost certainly misinterpreting McGilchrist’s work. I had been reading his new book, but only casually because I found it so daunting. But as I started to read it more closely, I realized it offered more clarity for some of the issues I was concerned about. Nothing much new about the general differences in the way the two hemispheres attend to the world and produce subsequent actions, but lots more about how they… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Myth of the Self (4): Caring Connects to the World
For those who haven’t been following closely, I will repost the table containing the several behaviors associated with the right-hemisphere. I have rearranged the rows in the order in which I discuss them in this series of blog posts. * Russell Ackoff’s ways to deal with messes. Right-hemisphere-dominant behavior types Caring is an especially important category because it has existential implications and is also partly constitutive of flourishing. Caring acts incorporate inputs from the contextual world presented to the right hemisphere. Empathy, sensing what is going on with another person and acting in accordance, guides much caring. But not all… Read More
Continue Reading