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 ReadingPartners or Dominators
Today I am reposting a message from a group I belong concerned with making a great transition to a world that works. The current topic is big history and the great transition. The post is from Riane Eisler for whose work I have great respect. She writes that modern cultures are largely systems of domination, which is hardly arguably, and that “partnership systems” should replace them. Well written and grounded. I see this as a call for caring, which is why I posted it here. Her case could be made much more timely and likely to happen if she was… Read More
Continue ReadingMorality Without Religion
I recently heard Harvard-based sociologist, Robert Putnam, discuss his recent co-authored book, The Upswing. He claims that US society has fallen to a level of separateness not seen since the 19th century Gilded Era. His research shows an I-we-I pattern with a “we” peak around 1960. Levels of economic inequality, political differences, frayed social capital, and rampant individualism are higher now than in the 1890’s. The social “we” has virtually disappeared. Putnam and Garrett argue that restoring “communitarian virtues” is critical in reversing this trajectory. In the 1890’s, the Gospel Revival supplied them. In today’s secular world, this source cannot… Read More
Continue ReadingMore Technology Will Not Bring Us Flourishing
I am generally a fan of David Brooks. That doesn’t mean that I always agree with him, but I think he has a pretty good handle on what needs to be said at the right time. But his column today in the New York Times bothers me a lot. In a nutshell, he paints the possibility of technological breakthroughs as the bright light against all of today’s dark shadows. I think he is wrong, but worse, very wrong. I am not a Luddite, given my doctorate in Chemical Engineering from MIT, standing athwart the road to the artificially intelligent, autonomous,… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Divided Brain in Action
I have just finished reading My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor in which she describes having and recovering from a serious stroke. I have been aware of the book and the main plot line of her remarkable story, but hadn’t realized its close tie to McGilchrist’s work. She is not mentioned in his tome, but should have been highlighted, as she is a living example of his brain model. This post is quite long, but is worth reading right to the end. Taylor has a serious stroke involving the left-brain hemisphere that impaired her ability to walk, talk,… Read More
Continue ReadingSufficiency, Caring, and the Right-brain
One of my colleagues, after a look at my new book, suggested that I had omitted an important concept, sufficiency. True, the word does not appear anywhere in the text, but the idea lingers in the background. Sufficient must take its meaning from some reference state or quality, as the amount of something just enough to achieve or attain that stage or quality. In particular, the concern raised is triggered by the impending collapse of the Earth’s life support system. The global consumption of energy and goods is destabilizing the Earth’s capacity to maintain human and other living creatures’ habitats.… Read More
Continue ReadingUpside-down Economics
We now have, thanks to Kate Raworth, donut economics. Herman Daly gave us steady-state economics. Regular professionals gave us micro- and macroeconomics. And so on. Today, I am announcing a completely new type of economics: upside-down economics. It is the science of too much. From Adam Smith onward, economics has been largely about how to manage scarcity. But today, while scarcity is still a real issue for much of the world’s population, here in the US and other rich countries, the issue has been turned on its head; we have too much of a lot of things. It is important… Read More
Continue ReadingFlourishing and The Endangered Species Act
“Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons; trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a few decades hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.” (Aldo Leopold, “On a Monument to the Pigeon,” 1947) Carl Safina has been a loud voice for the natural world, which, of course, needs to be heard through human channels. Not that nature does not speak to us, literally. Even in the densest human habitations, we can hear the small voices of our pets, birds, rodents, and, in… Read More
Continue ReadingSea Change or Just a Ripple
On August 19, 2019, the Business Roundtable made waves in the business press and the media in general with this press release. The key paragraph reads: Since 1978, Business Roundtable has periodically issued Principles of Corporate Governance. Each version of the document issued since 1997 has endorsed principles of shareholder primacy – that corporations exist principally to serve shareholders. With today’s announcement, the new Statement supersedes previous statements and outlines a modern standard for corporate responsibility. The full “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation” is quoted below. Americans deserve an economy that allows each person to succeed through hard… Read More
Continue ReadingPragmatism and Hope
I continue to read Rorty and have just discovered a critical link between pragmatism and hope that I missed when I ended my book, Flourishing, with a chapter on hope. At that point I was grappling with Andy Hoffman’s questions about the differences between optimism and hope. Hope can stand on its own feet, but becomes clearer when the connection to pragmatism is made. Let me start with a few lines from Rorty’s book, Philosophy and Social Hope: If there is anything distinctive about pragmatism it is that it substitutes the notion of a better human future for the notions… Read More
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