Via positiva / Via negativa





Via positiva         -     Via negativa
Is                         -      Is not
Ideal                     -     Real
Future                  -     Past
Closed                 -      Open




[...] reasoning has not evolved in the ways that we think it has – as a process of ratiocination that is intended independently to figure out the world. Instead, it has evolved as a social capacity – as a means to justify ourselves to others.

We want something to be so, and we use our reasoning capacity to figure out plausible seeming reasons to convince others that it should be so. However, together with our capacity to generate plausible sounding rationales, we have a decent capacity to detect when others are bullshitting us.

In combination, these mean that we are more likely to be closer to the truth when we are trying to figure out why others may be wrong, than when we are trying to figure out why we ourselves are right.

This superficially looks to resemble the ‘overcoming bias’/’not wrong’ approaches to self-improvement that are popular on the Internet. But it ends up going in a very different direction: collective processes of improvement rather than individual efforts to remedy the irremediable.

The ideal of the individual seeking to eliminate all sources of bias so that he (it is, usually, a he) can calmly consider everything from a neutral and dispassionate perspective is replaced by a Humean recognition that reason cannot readily be separated from the desires of the reasoner.

We need negative criticisms from others, since they lead us to understand weaknesses in our arguments that we are incapable of coming at ourselves, without them being pointed out to us.

we likely radically underestimate the importance of the invisible and non-individually lucrative contributions that people make to the collective benefit by improving others’ ideas.

[Henry Farrell]
'In praise of negativity'




There are many things without words, matters that we know and can act on but cannot describe directly, cannot capture in human language or within the narrow human concepts that are available to us. Almost anything around us of significance is hard to grasp linguistically - and in fact that more powerful, the more incomplete our linguistic grasp.

But if we cannot express what something is exactly, we can say something about what it is not - the indirect rather than the direct expression. The “apophatic” focuses on what cannot be said directly in words, from the Greek apophasis (saying no, or mentioning without mentioning).

The method began as an avoidance of direct description, leading to a focus on negative description, what is called in Latin via negativa, the negative way […] Via negativa does not try to express what God is - leave that to the primitive brand of contemporary thinkers and philophasters with scientistic tendencies. It just lists what God is not and proceeds by the process of elimination.

The greatest - and most robust - contribution to knowledge consists in removing what we think is wrong - subtractive epistemology […] we know a lot more what is wrong than what is right, or, phrased according to the fragile/robust classification, negative knowledge (what is wrong, what does not work) is more robust to error than positive knowledge (what is right, what works).

So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition - given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily.

[…] since one small observation can disprove a statement, while millions can hardly confirm it, disconfirmation is more rigorous than conformation.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p.301, 303




The Via Negativa (also called the Apophatic Way) focuses on explaining the nature of God by focusing on what God is not (‘apophatic’ comes from the Greek term ‘to deny’).

The via negativa is based on the fundamental belief that ‘God’ is beyond human understanding and description – ‘He’ is completely ineffable. This belief in the ineffability of God is derived from the Neoplatonists (later interpreters of Plato), such as Plotinus and Augustine. The Via Negativa itself is found particularly in the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius and Moses Maimonides.

Any attempt to use human language to describe God is anthropomorphic. He saw it as necessary for the less intelligent, but it was still a ‘second-best’ approach as “the sun is hidden to eyes that are too weak to comprehend it.”

[Amy Trumpeter]
‘What is the Via Negativa?’



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Criticality




Order                  -          Chaos
Closed                -          Open
Efficiency           -          Evolvability




Metastable: poised, ready to react.

Myths and stories are good for criticality because they allow a degree of wiggle-room. Theories have a tendency to coagulate into paradigms, or strong attractors, which can only be escaped when their proponents die off.

Criticality is akin to dialectical tension - a point of dynamic equilibrium between opposing forces.




In physics, metastability is a stable state of a dynamical system other than the system's state of least energy.

A ball resting in a hollow on a slope is a simple example of metastability. If the ball is only slightly pushed, it will settle back into its hollow, but a stronger push may start the ball rolling down the slope.

'Metastability'




You can have something that’s very fragile but stays for a very long time.

In phase transitions - between gaseous, liquid, and solid forms - there is a thing called a metastable state. The material is already at the right temperature for, say, water to start boiling, but because there is no disturbance to it, it stays in the previous transition. If you then drop a little speck into this kettle of metastable water, it will instantly start boiling.

I think societies when they become stabilised or inactive in this way, they’re in a metastable state. And they can last there for centuries. It’s very similar to a dry forest.

[Samo Burja]
‘Live Players w/ Samo Burja (June 18, 2020)’




[…] many composite systems naturally evolve to a critical state in which a minor event starts a chain reaction that can affect any number of elements in the system.

Although composite systems produce more minor events than catastrophes, chain reactions of all sizes are an integral part of the dynamics. According to the theory, the mechanism that leads to minor events is the same one that leads to major events.

Furthermore, composite systems never reach equilibrium but instead evolve from one meta-stable state to the next.

When a number of trajectories lead towards a point (or area) in state-space, that point (or area) is an 'attractor', and represents a stable state of the system. When trajectories all lead away from a point, that point is unstable - a 'repellor'. A point that has trajectories leading towards it as well as away from it is known as 'meta-stable'.

[…] In a very stable system there will be one, or only a few strong attractors. The system will quickly come to rest in one of these, and will not move to another one easily. The resulting behaviour of the system is not very interesting. On the other hand, in a very unstable system, there will be no strong attractors, and the system will just jump around chaotically.

The theory of self-organised criticality tells us the following. A self-organising system will try to balance itself at a critical point between rigid order and chaos. It will try to optimise the number of attractors without becoming unstable.

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.96-7




[…] empirical evidence has proliferated that living systems might operate at criticality - i.e. at the border-line between order and disorder - with examples ranging from spontaneous brain behavior to gene expression patterns, cell growth, morphogenesis, bacterial clustering, and flock dynamics.

[…] why is a living system fitter when it is critical? Living systems need to perceive and respond to environmental cues and to interact with other similar entities. Indeed, biological systems constantly try to encapsulate the essential features of the huge variety of detailed information from their surrounding complex and changing environment into manageable internal representations, and they use these as a basis for their actions and responses.

The successful construction of these representations, which extract, summarize, and integrate relevant information, provides a crucial competitive advantage, which can eventually make the difference between survival and extinction.

[…] criticality is an optimal strategy to effectively represent the intrinsically complex and variable external world in a parsimonious manner.

This is in line with the hypothesis that living systems benefit from having attributes akin to criticality - either statistical or dynamical - such as a large repertoire of dynamical responses, optimal transmission and storage of information, and exquisite sensitivity to environmental changes.

As conjectured long ago, the capability to perform complex computations, which turns out to be the fingerprint of living systems, is enhanced in “machines” operating near a critical point, i.e., at the border between two distinct phases: a disordered phase, in which perturbations and noise propagate unboundedly - thereby corrupting information transmission and storage - and an ordered phase where changes are rapidly erased, hindering flexibility and plasticity.

The marginal, critical situation provides a delicate compromise between these two impractical tendencies, an excellent tradeoff between reproducibility and flexibility and, on larger time scales, between robustness and evolvability.

Any given genetic regulatory network, formed by the genes (nodes) and their interactions (edges), can be tightly controlled to robustly converge to a fixed almost-deterministic attractor - i.e. a fixed “phenotype” - or it can be configured to be highly sensitive to tiny fluctuations in input signals, leading to many different attractors, i.e., to large phenotypic variability.

These two situations correspond to the ordered and disordered phases, respectively. The optimal way for genetic regulatory networks to reconcile controllability and sensitivity to environmental cues is to operate somewhere in between the two limiting and impractical limits alluded to above.

Under the mild assumption that living systems need to construct good although approximate internal representations of the outer complex world and that such representations are encoded in terms of probability distributions, we have shown - by using concepts from statistical mechanics and information theory - that the encoding probability distributions do necessarily lie where the generalized susceptibility or Fisher information exhibits a peak, i.e., in the vicinity of a critical point, providing the best possible compromise to accommodate both regular and noisy signals.

[Hidalgo, Grilli, Zuweist, Muñoz, Banavar, & Maritan]
‘Information-based fitness and the emergence of criticality in living systems’




[…] this is what basically is going on in relevance realization. You can see it in your attention: 'default mode' and 'task centre'. ‘Default’ is making your mind wander and introduce variation, and then task focus selects. You kill off most of the variations, but some of them come in because your mind wandered enough.

You give people a problem and they're impassing - they can't solve it - and you just introduce a little bit of entropy into the system - you put some static on the computer screen or you shake it - then they'll have the insight because it puts in enough criticality.

They stop this unidimensional task focused attention and it allows the spread of activation. Then they reselect and they evolve a new way of framing the problem.

[John Vervaeke]
‘A Conversation So Intense It Might Transcend Time and Space | John Vervaeke | EP 321, YouTube




Vervaeke: […] you get a system simultaneously differentiating and integrating […] a system that is complexifying. If it's done right, because of adaptive fittedness its complexification is increasingly conforming to the complexity of the world.

Peterson: That's the scientific enterprise in some sense, right? Calibration against real world patterns.

Vervaeke: If it has good synoptic integration, it has self organising criticality. When it fires in self-organizing criticality, it tends to create a small world network wiring. It’s mostly organized, but when it breaks apart it opens up the possibility of one of these long distance connections. If a system starts to wire as a small world network, it has mostly regular connections keeping you in the norm, but with a few long distance connections that can suddenly snap you out.

Peterson: That's like the balance between conservatism and liberalism.

Vervaeke: If it fires at self-organizing criticality, it tends to wire as a small world network. And if it wires as a small world network, it tends to fire as self-organizing criticality. So these two things can mutually inform each other.

The self-organizing criticality theory of insight - you have to break out of an inappropriate frame, that's the criticality, and it reorganizes into the better frame. You do that evolution.

Peterson: And ‘better’ would be something like, both efficient and capable of performing a broader range of action. That was like a Piagetian description of what constituted a better theory. A better theory allows you to do everything the previous theory allowed you to do, plus something more, hopefully with a gain of efficiency.

Vervaeke: A good theory is efficient in that sense, but a good theory is also generative. You're always trying to optimize between efficiency and evolvability. You don't just do compression - that's epilepsy. You've just locked the system down and it has no capacity to adaptively refit itself to the world.

I think of this as mapping on to Piaget’s notion of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is compression, making everything integrated; accommodation is how you introduce [variety]; and then the calibration is this dynamical, constantly trading between them.

You don't come to any kind of stable thing. You're constantly evolving. You don't find the final theory - you're constantly moving to a theory that grabs more differences and yet brings them into an integration.

[Jordan B. Peterson & John Vervaeke]
‘A Conversation So Intense It Might Transcend Time and Space | John Vervaeke | EP 321, Jordan B. Peterson, YouTube




[...] philosophy itself does not throw off its ascetic mask as it grows up: in a way it must believe in this mask, it can only conquer its mask by giving it a new sense which finally expresses its true anti-religious force.

The people are certainly not always wrong: they have a foreboding of the essence of the philosopher, his anti-wisdom, his immoralism, his conception of friendship. Humility, poverty, chastity - we can guess the sense that these wise and ascetic values take on when they are revived by philosophy, by a new force.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.5-6



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The Adjacent Possible





The concept of the adjacent possible originates from Stuart Kauffman and his work on biological evolution.

Kauffman was particularly interested in the origins of order and the mechanisms that drive self-organization. His findings are broadly applicable to any complex adaptive system, be it natural like the biosphere, or human-made like cities, the economy, or technology.

Kaufman investigates how the actual expands into the adjacent possible. The actual describes the system under investigation in its current state, with all its components and interconnections. The adjacent possible contains all the elements outside but near that system; those represent the opportunities for the current system to expand by building new connections and turning those elements into system components.

[...] expanding any realm always requires leaving its current boundaries in order to explore ‘the possibilities out there‘. But rather than chasing the most extreme or distant possibilities, successful exploration focuses on the immediate vicinity of the current boundaries: Expansion can then occur by naturally ingesting nearby possibilities, by a short stretch of the realm’s new boundaries.

Therefore, the adjacent possible is the target of successful exploration and expansion.

Innovation is no exception from that general observation. To expand the realm of what we can do, innovation explores the wellspring of novelty in the adjacent possible. This concept of the adjacent possible could therefore help us frame our evolving understanding of innovation and gain new insights.

[Ulf Ehlert]
'Exploring the adjacent possible – The origin of good ideas'




So how do you change a system which is entrained around perverse behaviour?

And this applies to culture change in organisations as much as it does to wider society change [...] From my anthro-complex perspective the following stages are necessary:

1. Map the current dispositional state of the system.  What are the attractors in play, how stable are they?

2. Within those maps identify what Kauffmann [termed] the adjacent possible, patterns of behaviour adjacent to the present but in a more desirable position.  Radical change is hard and may have unintended consequences, smaller shifts are easier to achieve.

3. If there are no adjacent possibles, or the nature of system is such that the energy cost of escape is too great, then you need to take actions that disrupt or perturb the existing attractor mechanisms to allow the adjacent possible to emerge.  Until that happens change is very difficult.

[Dave Snowden]
'The adjacent possible'




The zone of proximal development, often abbreviated as ZPD [...], is best understood as the zone of the closest, most immediate psychological development of the children that includes a wide range of their emotional, cognitive, and volitional psychological processes. 

In contemporary educational research and practice, though, it is often interpreted as the distance between what a learner can do without help, and what they can do with support from someone with more knowledge or expertise ("more knowledgeable other").

The concept was introduced, but not fully developed, by psychologist Lev Vygotsky during the last three years of his life. Vygotsky argued that a child gets involved in a dialogue with the "more knowledgeable other" such as a peer or an adult and gradually, through social interaction and sense-making, develops the ability to solve problems independently and do certain tasks without help.

Following Vygotsky, some educators believe that the role of education is to give children experiences that are within their zones of proximal development, thereby encouraging and advancing their individual learning such as skills and strategies.

'Zone of proximal development'




"I spent years trying to get my early things published,” Rosch recalls. “Journals would send them back, finding fussy little things wrong with them, and saying, ‘Everyone knows this isn’t true.’”

Why did they balk?

“If something is going to be new, it has to be exactly in the right degree of difference from what’s going on for people to say, ‘That’s interesting,’” she says. “If it’s too new, it isn’t understood.”

[Daniel McNeill & Paul Freiberger]
Fuzzy Logic, p.88




[...] a new force can only appear and appropriate an object by first of all putting on the mask of the forces which are already in possession of the object. The mask or the trick are laws of nature and therefore something more than mere mask or trick.

To begin with life must imitate matter merely in order to survive. A force would not survive if it did not first of all borrow the feature of the forces with which it struggles.

We see that the art of interpreting must also be an art of piercing masks, of discovering the one that masks himself, why he does it and the point of keeping up the mask while it is being reshaped.

Only when philosophy has grown up can we grasp its essence or its genealogy and distinguish it from everything that it originally had too great a stake in being mistaken for.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.5


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On-record / Off-record





On-record                           -                      Off-record
Formal                                -                      Informal
Official                               -                      Unofficial
Narrow                               -                      Wide
Expert                                -                      Amateur
Limited                               -                      Unlimited
Solid                                   -                      Liquid
Safe                                    -                      Dangerous
Sterile                                 -                      Fertile
Centre                                 -                      Periphery




We need to understand what’s going on, and you can only understand a complex system by understanding the small particular parts of day-to-day interaction.

For humans those are the anecdotal data of the school gate, the street stories, the beer after work; not the grand narratives of workshops but the day-to-day anecdotes of people’s existence.

[Dave Snowden]
‘Complexity, citizen engagement in a Post-Social Media time | David Snowden | TEDxUniversityofNicosia’




I know that I would not like to be held scientifically responsible for many loose spoken sentences that I have uttered in conversation with scientific colleagues.

But I also know that if another person had the task of studying my ways of thought, he would do well to study my loosely spoken words rather than my writing.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry'), p.230




 On-record is the official line; it is certified. Certification gains its significance, in part at least, from reputations. And when the reputation of the speaker, or institution, is at stake, risks are less likely to be taken. Thus, certified knowledge - and on-record talk - has a certain stiffness to it. It is a museum of sorts, a place where formerly loose and lively things go to die - i.e. categorised (fit in to a wider system), viewed, and referenced.

The zone of off-record, on the other hand, is a sort of playground - a creative space where ideas and concepts are treated loosely, roughly - are tinkered with and explored. We can loosen up in off-record, and needn't act as responsibly (needn't 'act' at all). Accordingly, it can also be a dangerous space, and is not for the fainthearted.

On-record is found in books and respectable publications, in the output of venerable institutions. Off-record is found in comments sections, forums, subreddits, and informal conversations ‘around the water-cooler’ (do these still happen?). When you put a suit on you become on-record; when you discard your tie and undo your top-button you go off-record.

Identity is important in the zone of on-record; passports are thoroughly checked by border security, and you best hope you have the right credentials. Having a friend from inside write a letter of recommendation can also help with admission. Off-record is often pseudonymous or anonymous - here it is what is said that is important, not who is saying it.

The more strict are the border protocols of on-record, the more information is likely to be rebuffed. This information falls through the cracks and becomes ‘lost’ or liminal knowledge. It takes the form of bodges, hacks, and folk remedies.

The more restrictive, or ossified the zone of officialdom becomes, the more relevant off-record becomes. When on-record is corrupted (or gamed) then off-record may become a more reliable source of truth. Instead of looking to the centre, we begin to search the periphery. But there are dangers at the edges; we expose ourselves to uncertified material, outlandish theories.

On-record information comes ready-packaged - we don't need to check facts and references because we can safely assume this has been done for us. This is the whole point of on-record, after all. When handling off-record material we need to be more cautious - discernment is crucial in this zone.

Most information aspires to be on-record, but some makes a virtue of being off-record ('underground', 'edgy', 'esoteric').



Related posts:
Centre / Periphery
Taking the Rough with the Smooth
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Efficient / Redundant





Efficient               -          Redundant
Engineer              -          Artist
Specialist             -          Generalist
Work                   -           Play
Truth                   -           Myth
Narrow base        -          Wide base
Closed                 -          Open
Unconscious        -          Self-aware
Order                   -          Chaos




Complex situations/interactions cannot be standardised. Standardisation implies known territory. In complex circumstances, an abstracted/wide view is more advantageous than a concrete/narrow view.

Modern football bought efficiency at the price of character. When pundits say that the modern game is "better" what they really mean is that it is more efficient. 




A strong mechanical metaphor characterizes [process engineering] approaches. The focus is on efficiency, stripping away all superfluous functions in order to ensure repeatability and consistency.

The engineering process takes place in a specific context and once achieved, shifts in that context require the engineering design process to be repeated to some degree before efficiency can be achieved again. Radical shifts in context may make the entire approach redundant or lead to catastrophic failure.

Manufacturing plant, payment systems in a bank and the like are all closed systems that can be structured and standardized without any major issue. We can in effect define best practice. However when we apply the same techniques to systems with higher levels of ambiguity, for example customer interactions, sales processes and the like we encounter more difficulties.

[Some of these] arise from the impossibility of anticipating all possible situations and shifting context. In these cases we need a different focus, one of effectiveness in which we leave in place a degree of inefficiency to ensure that the system has adaptive capacity and can therefore rapidly evolve to meet the new circumstances. 

Examples would include apprentice schemes of knowledge transfer, maintaining mavericks or misfits, allowing people to take training in subjects with no apparent relevance to their current jobs and providing more delegated authority.

There is nothing wrong with an engineering approach; there are many things that need high degrees of order and control. However taken to excess, and it has nearly always been so taken, it sacrifices human effectiveness, innovation and curiosity on the altar of mechanical efficiency .

[Dave Snowden]
'Multi-ontology sense making: a new simplicity in decision making'




The exact opposite of redundancy is naive optimisation.

I tell everyone to avoid attending (orthodox) economics classes and say that economics will fail us and blow us up […] The reason is the following: It is largely based on notions of naive optimisation, mathematised (poorly) […] and this mathematics contributed massively to the construction of an error-prone society.

An economist would find it inefficient to maintain two lungs and two kidneys: consider the costs involved in transporting these heavy items across the savannah. Such optimisation would, eventually, kill you, after the first accident, the first “outlier.”

Also consider that if we gave Mother Nature to economists, it would dispense with individual kidneys: since we do not need them all the time, it would be more “efficient” if we sold ours and used a central kidney on a time-share basis.

Almost every major idea in conventional economics […] fails under the modification of some assumption, or what is called ‘perturbation,” when you change one parameter, or take a parameter heretofore assumed by the theory to be fixed and stable, and make it random.

For instance, if a model used for risk assumes that the type of randomness under consideration is from Mediocristan, it will ignore large deviations and encourage the building of a lot of risk that ignores large deviations; accordingly, risk management will be faulty.

For another example of egregious model error, take the notion of comparative advantage […] behind the wheels of globalisation. The idea is that countries should focus, as a consultant would say, on “what they do best” (more exactly, on where they are missing the smallest number of opportunities); so one country should specialise in wine and the other in clothes, although one of them might be better at both. But do some perturbations and alternative scenarios: consider what would happen to the country specialising in wine if the price of wine fluctuated

Mother Nature does not like overspecialisation, as it limits evolution and weakens the animals.

Globalisation might give the appearance e of efficiency, but the operating leverage and the degrees of interaction between parts will cause small cracks in one spot to percolate through the entire system. The result would be like a brain experiencing an epileptic seizure from too many cells firing at the same time. Consider that our brain, a well-functioning complex system, is not “globalised,” or, at least, not naively “globalised.”

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 312-3




A typical strategy of companies and corporations is to eliminate redundancies and degeneracies in the name of minimizing costs.

This is the major reason why almost all companies have great difficulty adapting to change, and eventually disappear. Just as biological systems pay a cost for robustness and evolvability foregoing efficiency for long-term persistence, so too should we demand this of our institutions.

[David Krakauer & Geoffrey West]
'The Damage We’re Not Attending To'




This is hint to a central problem of the world today, that of the misunderstanding of nonlinear response by those involved in creating “efficiencies” and “optimisation” of systems.

For instance, European airports and railroads are stretched, seeming overly efficient. They operate at close to maximal capacity, with minimal redundancies and idle capacity, hence acceptable costs; but a small increase in congestion, say 5 percent more planes in the sky owing to a tiny backlog, can give rise to chaos […]

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 274




[Economics] appeals to a very rigid mind. If you build everything around homoeconomicus, which is this model that clearly doesn’t represent how human beings actually are in the world, you tend to select for very rigid thinkers who have a particular penchant for finding […] lies that people tell themselves and each other. 

So famously a professor of economics suggested that no-one should give gifts because its much more efficient to give cash. 

And that’s what economists have historically liked to do […] relentlessly and unflinchingly they apply tools of utility-maximisation […] and try to turn humans into robots and make the robots maximally efficient. 

[Eric Weinstein]
‘Eric Weinstein: WTF Happened in 1971: An INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Birthday Extravaganza 🎉 !’




The most typical example is that of Protestantism, in which simplification takes the form both of an almost complete suppression of rites, together with an attribution of predominance to morality over doctrine; and the doctrine itself becomes more and more simplified and diminished so that it is reduced to almost nothing, or at most to a few rudimentary formulas that anyone can interpret in any way that suits him. 

Moreover, Protestantism in its many forms is the only religious production of the modern spirit, and it arose at a time when that spirit had not yet come to the point of rejecting all religion, but was on the way toward doing so by virtue of the anti-traditional tendencies which are inherent in it and which really make it what it is. 

At the endpoint of this 'evolution' (as it would be called today), religion is replaced by 'religiosity', that is to say by a vague sentimentality having no real significance; it is this that is acclaimed as 'progress', and it shows clearly how all normal relations are reversed in the modern mentality, for people try to see in it a 'spiritualization' of religion, as if the ‘spirit' were a mere empty frame or an 'ideal' as nebulous as it is insignificant. 

This is what some of our contemporaries call a ‘purified religion', but it is so only insofar as it is emptied of all positive content and has no longer any connection with any reality whatsoever.

[René Guénon]
The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, p. 77-8



“I knew a man who used to lecture frequently, on subjects requiring much thought […] He told me that he would become aware of himself perhaps once or twice during the lecture, and at the end of it, as he sat down, he would find himself surprised that it was he who had given the lecture. Yet he fully remembered everything.”

This is a very good description of a man acting like a programmed machine, implementing a programme devised some time ago.

He, the programmer, is no longer needed; he can mentally absent himself. If the machine is implementing a good programme it gives a good lecture; if the programme is bad, the lecture is bad. We are all very familiar with the possibility of implementing ‘programmes', e.g. when driving a car and engaging in an interesting conversation at the same time.

[E. F. Schumacher]
A Guide for the Perplexed, p.81




Unlike Bellamy, for whom military discipline implied an intricate division of labor and the efficiency provided by complete regimentation, Sorel believed that war nourished a "passionate individualism."

In the wars of the French revolution - his favorite example, next to Homeric Greece, of military life at its best - "each soldier considered himself as an individual having something of importance to do in the battle, instead of looking upon himself as simply one part of the military mechanism committed to the supreme direction of the leader."

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.310




Today, thanks to the spectroscope and other tools of the analytical laboratory, they can analyze these medicinal herbs and isolate their active medical ingredient. In so doing, scientists believe that they have accounted, in a scientific way, for folk remedies - they are biologically active chemicals adulterated by a variety of other substances.

How much better, therefore, to administer a 100 percent pure drug that has been synthesized in the laboratory than an unpleasant concoction of herbs and roots. Scientific knowledge has advanced beyond the superstition of folk medicine.

Again, what is really happening is not the perfection of knowledge or the replacement of myths by objective knowledge, but really an encounter of two worldviews.

To approach medicine herbs only in terms of biologically active molecules is to see them in only one dimension. Within the dimensions of chemical analysis this may be correct, but it leaves out the other dimensions of spirit, energy, and relationship.

The nature of Native medicine lies both in the plant and the ceremony, in the way that plant was picked, the exchanges and relationships that were entered into that would lead to its use, and in the relationship between that plant and other people in the circle and the relationship to the sick person.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.120, 132-3




The sacred seriousness of play has entirely given way to the profane seriousness of work and production […]

Without Eros, the steps of thinking degenerate into the steps of a calculation, that is, the steps of work to be performed. Calculation is naked, pornographic. Thinking dresses itself in figures. It is often squiggly. Calculations, by contrast, follow a linear path.

Thinking has the character of play. Under the compulsion of work and production, it becomes alienated from its essence […] Along the way from myth to dataism, thinking loses the element of play altogether. It comes close to calculation.

But the steps in thinking are not the steps of a calculation which simply repeat the same operation over and over again. Rather, they are moves in a game, or dancing steps, which create something totally different, introduce an altogether different order among things […]

Life subordinated to the dictates of health, optimization and performance comes to resemble mere survival. It lacks splendour, sovereignty, intensity.

The Roman satirist Juvenal expressed this well when he spoke of 'losing the reasons to live for the sake of staying alive' (propter vitam vivendi perdere causas).

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.55, 83




The sophists are seen as mere travelling showmen who are occupied solely with the playful. But play has now to give way to the work of uncovering the truth.

Huizinga is probably to be credited with having taught us about the playful character of human action in archaic cultures. But he turns play into something absolute, and he therefore misses the decisive paradigm shift within knowledge transfer in the history of the Occident, namely the transition from myth to truth, which coincides with the transition from play to work.

Along the path towards work, thinking gradually distances itself from its origin in play.

Limits must be set to the imagination's urge to play so that play can serve the purposes of the understanding, namely the production of knowledge. Play is subordinated to work and production.

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.79-80





Networks are the way in which things are connected, like sequences - the way an airline is connected, or the way the internet is connected, or the way neurons are connected; functional connectivity. There's three basic kinds of networks.

There's a regular network, where all the connections are just one step away, node to node. And then there's a random network, where you can have long distance connections - very long distance connections. I don't have to fly from Savannah to Atlanta to Toronto - I can just fly directly from Savannah to Toronto.

The regular network is highly inefficient. The way you measure efficiency is called mean path distance. You take all the distance from all possible combinations - how many steps do I have to go from this point to that point? - and you average them together and get the mean path distance - the average path distance between any two points.

In a regular network, it's very, very high because you have to go through a lot of steps. They're all local connections. When you look at it, it looks beautiful. It’s highly ordered because all the lines are the same length, but it's highly inefficient. The random network is highly efficient because you have a lot of these long distance connections that collapse your path.

But the brain doesn't go for either one of those, because there's a trade-off relationship. As I make the network more random to make it more efficient - which sounds like a contradiction in terms - I lose robustness in the system.

When you have a lot of little connections there's lots of redundancy, and so I can lose a lot of stuff - I get graceful degradation - but I only get a small reduction in functionality. In a random network, I can take out one link and entire nodes can become isolated from each other.

That's the danger of efficiency versus redundancy. The brain does what's called a small world network, which is mostly regular and then one or two long distance connections.

If you give somebody a Propofol and take them into unconsciousness, the brain will go from being a global, small world network and it'll break up into small, local regular networks. And then as you bring them back into consciousness, it will go from local regular networks back into a comprehensive small-world networks.

[John Vervaeke]
‘A Conversation So Intense It Might Transcend Time and Space | John Vervaeke | EP 321, Jordan B. Peterson, YouTube




We only see one side of it. We see that we’re being smart and saving effort, but we don’t see that […] there’s a corresponding loss of capability.

Because I don’t programme an assembly any more, I no longer am able to programme an assembly. If I use languages that are too high level […] I don’t know how my variables live in memory or how big they are and I certainly don’t know what the CPU is doing in response to the code I’ve written.

The rhetoric that we have is, “I’m being smart, I shouldn’t have to do the low-level stuff”, but part of the reality is the loss of capability that corresponds to those choices.

[Jonathan Blow]
‘Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization (English only)’, YouTube




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Old / New




New                   -         Old
Future                -         Past
Rationalism       -         Tradition
Top Down         -         Bottom Up
Nurture              -         Nature
Constructivist    -         Essentialist




Tradition is anchored in the past, via a foundational myth that remains accessible in the present. Rationalism is anchored in the future, via the quest for ‘Truth’, a progress towards the One True Path.

Reason allows a way out of tradition because it subverts the originary will of the founder. It births critique.

Revolution attempts a clean break with the past, but must always subsequently work to prevent the past from re-emerging - via doctoring, censorship, and various other forms of denial.    




The left is characterized by a preference for change and reform, a commitment to liberty and equality, an orientation toward progress and the future, while the right is the party of order and tradition, hierarchy, and a disposition to valorize the past.

Whether described as left vs. right, blue vs. red, or liberal vs. conservative, this basic division seems to capture a permanent divide between two fundamental human dispositions, as well as two worldviews that are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive of political options.

[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.43

 

The modern political divide of the past three centuries has essentially boiled down to these two camps: whether the past is a source of wisdom or an era of horrors; whether culture and tradition were fortifications against decline or barriers to progress; whether politics was the means to preservation of imperfect decencies and virtues, or a tool of human perfectibility.

[Patrick J. Deneen]




Things that have worked for a long time are preferable - they are more likely to have reached their ergodic states. At the worst we don't know how long they'll last.

Remember that the burden of proof lies on someone disturbing a complex system, not on the person protecting the status quo.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 371




We have polluted for years, causing much damage to the environment, while the scientists currently making these complicated forecasting models were not sticking their necks out and trying to stop us from building these risks […] - these are the scientists trying to impose the solutions on us.

But the skepticism about models that I propose does not lead to the conclusions endorsed by anti-environmentalists and pro-market fundamentalists. Quite the contrary: we need to be hyper-conservationists ecologically, since we do not know what we are harming with now.

 That’s the sound policy under conditions of ignorance and epistemic opacity. 

To those who say “We have no proof that we are harming nature,”  a sound response is “We have no proof that we are not harming nature, either”; the burden of proof is not on the ecological conservationist, but on someone disrupting an old system.

Furthermore we should not “try to correct” the harm done, as we may be creating another problem we do not know much about currently.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 316




So the reader can see how the ancients saw naive rationalism: by impoverishing - rather than enhancing - thought, it introduces fragility. They knew that incompleteness - half knowledge - is always dangerous.

Many other people than the ancients have been involved in defending - and inviting us to respect - this different type of knowledge. First Edmund Burke, the Irish statesman and political philosopher, who also countered the French Revolution for disrupting the “collected reasons of the ages.” He believed that large social variations can expose us to unseen effects and thus advocated the notion of small trial-and-error experiments (in effect, context tinkering) in social systems, coupled with respect for the complex heuristics of tradition.

Also Michael Oakeshot, the twentieth-century conservative political philosopher and philosopher of history who believed that traditions provide an aggregate of filtered collective knowledge. 

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 257-8




In Greek legend, there were two Titan brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus. Prometheus means “fore-thinker” while Epimetheus means “after-thinker,” equivalent to someone who falls for the retrospective distortion of fitting theories to past events in an ex post narrative manner.

Optionality is Promethean, narratives are Epimethean - one has reversible and benign mistakes, the other symbolises the gravity and irreversibility of the consequences of opening Pandora’s box.

You make forays into the future by opportunism and optionality […] It is a way - the only way - to domesticate uncertainty, to work rationally without understanding the future, while reliance on narratives is the exact opposite: one is domesticated by uncertainty, and ironically set back. You cannot look at the future by naive projection of the past.

All this does not mean that tinkering and trial and error are devoid of narrative: they are just not overly dependent on the narrative being true - the narrative is not epistemological but instrumental. For instance, religious stories might have no value as narratives, but they may get you to do something convex and antifragile you otherwise would not do, like mitigate risks.

English parents controlled children with the false narrative that if they didn’t behave or eat their dinner, Boney (Napoleon Bonaparte) or some wild animal might come and take them away. Religions often use the equivalent method to help adults get out of trouble, or avoid debt. But intellectuals tend to believe their own b***t and take their ideas too literally, and that is vastly dangerous.

Consider the role of the heuristic (rule-of-thumb) knowledge embedded in traditions. Simply, just as evolution operates on individuals, so does it act on these tacit, unexplainable rules of thumb transmitted through generations - what Karl Popper has called evolutionary epistemology.

Accordingly, wisdom you learn from your grandmother should be vastly superior (empirically, hence scientifically) to what you get from a class in business school (and, of course, considerably cheaper). My sadness is that we have been moving farther and farther away from grandmothers.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 211-13, 215




It isn't always the future that people want; they are often, as it were rather ambivalent about the Promised Land. Indeed, it isn't the future they most want, it is the past.

Psychoanalysis, like education [...] is an attempt to lure people into the future, to tempt them to grow up.

What the analyst and the teacher and the political revolutionary come up against is people's refusal to sacrifice an apparently known pleasure for an apparently unknown one. Better the devil you know, because if you know him he can't be the devil.

[Adam Phillips]
Side Effects ('Learning to Live'), p.152, 154




Societies, like animals, evolve.

The ones that survive spawn memetic descendants – for example, the success of Britan allowed it to spin off Canada, Australia, the US, et cetera. Thus, we expect societies that exist to be somewhat optimized for stability and prosperity. I think this is one of the strongest conservative arguments.

Just as a random change to a letter in the human genome will probably be deleterious rather than beneficial since humans are a complicated fine-tuned system whose genome has been pre-optimized for survival – so most changes to our cultural DNA will disrupt some institution that evolved to help Anglo-American (or whatever) society outcompete its real and hypothetical rivals.

[Scott Alexander]
'Meditations on Moloch'




Changes in the formula, if they are not to destroy the society, must be gradual, not abrupt. The formula is indispensable for holding the social structure together. A widespread skepticism about the formula will in time corrode and disintegrate the social order. 

It is perhaps for this reason, half-consciously understood, that all strong and long-lived societies have cherished their “traditions,” even when, as is usually the case, these traditions have little relation to fact, and even after they can hardly be believed literally by educated men. 

Rome, Japan, Venice, all such long-enduring states, have been very slow to change the old formulas, the time-honored ways and stories and rituals; and they have been harsh against rationalists who debunk them. 

This, after all, was the crime for which Athens put Socrates to death. From the point of view of survival, she was probably right in doing so.

[James Burnham]
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, p. 90




In all these writings, what interests us is not the routine polemics, the case against the abomination of mob rule and Jacobin slogans, but rather the counterrevolutionary argument in principle. This is invariably the rejection of the idea that law and the state could result from the methodical activity of individual human beings.

All important state institutions, and especially the constitutions that were altered so frequently during the French Revolution, are said to result automatically and in the course of time from prevailing circumstances and the nature of things. These institutions are the rational expression of such circumstances, and not their creator. Therefore, it would be absurd to propose to force things to conform to an abstract scheme.

The nation and society are not overnight products of doctrinaire "fabrication.” On the contrary, they are formed over long periods of time, in such a way that the individual persons involved could not survey them or even make an estimate of them.

On this point, Burke – in general phrases that are often powerfully rhetorical and emotional – stresses the growth of the national community that spans generations. De Maistre still sees the individual entirely from the perspective of the theological ideas of the classical age: in his insignificance in the presence of the transcendent providential power that governs us and in whose hands the active heroes of the Revolution appear to de Maistre as automatons.

Finally, as early as 1797, Bonald, a great systematic thinker, explains what is at stake with splendid precision: the opposition between liberal individualism and social solidarity. According to Bonald, the bearer of historical activity is not the individual person or the mass of individuals. It is instead society, which lives in history and constitutes itself according to definite laws, and which really constitutes the individual person as such.

All three - in a vehement rejection of the metaphysicians and the philosophers, Rousseau in particular - agree that the activity of the individual, based on rationalistic maxims, can create nothing. It can only delay, destroy, and abrogate the natural course of things; but it cannot produce anything of permanence.

[Carl Schmitt]
Political Romanticism, p. 110
 



The historical situations in which romanticism and romantics can arise are epochs in which an antiquated culture confronts a new one […] At such watersheds of world history, persons in whom feeling and imagination outweigh clear thinking, spirits of more warmth than light, always turn backward, to what is old.

From the unbelief and prose that they see gaining ground around them, they will long for the world of the old faith and ancestral customs, a world that is agreeable and rich in forms; and they will attempt to restore this world for its own sake and, wherever possible, beyond itself as well.

But as children of their time, they too are dominated more than they know by the new principle that is repugnant to them. 

That is why the old ways as they are reproduced in and through them are no longer the pure and primordial old ways. On the contrary, they are blended in many respects with what is new, and in this way they reveal the new in advance.

[David Friedrich Strauss]
Julian the Apostate: The Romantic on the Throne of the Caesars




Social facts, then, are entirely continuous with biological facts. They are part of life. This shows how misleading the metaphor of 'social construction' is if it is taken in its strong sense as meaning that we are omnipotent in inventing social practices.

Customs are not just an arbitrary product of our whim. Searle's central target is indeed the sense of artificiality and exaggerated power that this excessive constructivism suggests - the impression that it gives of human decisions taking place in a vacuum and dictating terms at will to the rest of the cosmos. He points out that human beings are not a separate entity detached from the natural world.

Different academic disciplines, therefore, should not behave as if they each owned their own private universe. Physics, literary criticism, political theory, geology and ethics should all notice that they share a world.

‘The traditional opposition that we tend to make between biology and culture is as misguided as the traditional opposition between body and mind … Culture is the form that biology takes.’

[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.192-3
 



Echoing Giambattista Vico, an early critic of the deracinated rationalism of Descartes and Hobbes, [Wendell] Berry defends what Vico named the sensus communis.

Such “common knowledge” is the result of the practice and experience, the accumulated store of wisdom born of trials and corrections of people who have lived, suffered, and flourished in local settings. Rules and practices based on a preconceived notion of right cannot be imposed absent prudential consideration and respect toward common sense.

This is not to suggest that traditions cannot be changed or altered, but, as Burke argued, they must be given the presumptive allowance to change internally, with the understanding and assent of people who have developed lives and communities based upon those practices.

[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.81




For that reason a real knowledge of the past, in Brandt's words, “requires something more than knowing how people used to make candles or what kind of bed they slept in. It requires a sense of the persistence of the past: the manifold ways in which it penetrates our lives.”

This persistence, of course, is what the nostalgic attitude denies.

Nostalgia evokes the past only to bury it alive. It shares with the belief in progress, to which it is only superficially opposed, an eagerness to proclaim the death of the past and to deny history's hold over the present. Those who mourn the death of the past and those who acclaim it both take for granted that our age has outgrown its childhood. Both find it difficult to believe that history still haunts our enlightened, disillusioned maturity.

Both are governed, in their attitude toward the past, by the prevailing disbelief in ghosts.

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.118




In this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we (English) are generally men of untaught feelings: that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree; and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them.

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.

Instead of “exploding general prejudices,” philosophers would "better employ their sagacity,” Burke thought, “to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them.” Prejudices guided conduct more reliably than reason, by making a "man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts.”

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.129




In the conservative sociological tradition, the tenacity of custom was seen as a useful check against innovation.

For Lynd, "folkways" meant "cultural lag." Habits and "values" failed to keep pace with economic and technological change. Americans retained the mental habits of pioneers even though their habits were now governed by elaborate organisations and complicated technologies.

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.427




For this reason, Brownson opposed any theory of progress that implied a rejection of past. 

Having sided in his early writings with "efforts for progress," he proceeded to take his readers "aback by telling them they must not run away from the past." The future could no more be dissociated from the past than the spirit could be dissociated from the body.

"It is idle to war against the past. No man can be a reformer who has no tradition. Divest us of all tradition, of all that we have derived from the past... and we were mere naked savages." Brownson's unwillingness to choose between reform and conservatism or to equate political radicalism with a repudiation of the past was typical of the populist tradition.

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.194




History has to have a happy ending.

“Are there no calamities in history?" Brownson asked in 1843. "Nothing tragic? May we never weep over the defeated? ... Must we always desert the cause as soon as fortune forsakes it, and bind ourselves to the cause which is in the ascendant, and hurrah in the crowd that throw up their caps in honor of the conqueror?"

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.221




The relationship of a plant or animal to the general ecology of its region is incredibly complicated.

It may be possible to make a computer model of, say, the introduction of a new bean hybrid upon a particular environment. But, as mathematicians would say, models are highly nonlinear, containing many feedback loops. Predictable behavior can suddenly change in abrupt ways, from gradual trends to wild oscillations or even chaos. It is beyond Western science to fully understand the impact that various aspects of genetic engineering could have upon the environment and our future.

Indigenous science, if we are to believe its metaphysics and its claims, moves in a slower way. 

It is based upon generations of painstaking observations and upon a perception that looks into the heart of things, upon knowledge that is given by the plants and animals to the two-legged. Thus, when changes take place they do so from within an acknowledged web of relationship.

Moreover, the power of the trickster is always acknowledged, for the People know that all human plans are subject to the forces of chance and transformation.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.183




Others are destined to find their own way; to rebel against the traditions which have been transmitted to them; to suffer anxiety and the fear which attends separation from the parents; and, finally, to win their way to a new individual point of view.

Such men are those whose genetic endowment makes it impossible for them to preserve the integrity of their own personalities and, at the same time, preserve the parental attitudes which they have introjected. They are compelled to fight their way to freedom; to find their own individual way of life; and to discard the traditions in which they have been reared.

For such people self-realization consists partly in becoming conscious of, and subsequently discarding, introjected parental attitudes: and the earlier some degree of emotional security is attained, the sooner will this discarding take place.

Emotional security is more likely to be attained in a household in which the parents are secure enough to be able to tolerate difference from themselves, and mature enough to make relationships with children who are not just little models of themselves, but individuals in their own right.

Part of the process of self-realization consists, therefore, in discarding introjected beliefs and attitudes which prove to be foreign to the developing personality: and this may be attended by considerable anxiety and depression.

Becoming free of identification with others is never completed; and most of us remain to some extent prisoners of our family background, of our social class, or of our nationality. The club, the old boys' reunion, the perpetuation of hierarchical social structure, are mechanisms of reassurance […] The sense of mutual support which men gain from such gatherings is matched by the loss of their individual characteristics, and the subtleties of personality disappear in the simplicities of the crowd.

[Anthony Storr]
The Integrity of the Personality, p.84-6




The neoliberal regime deploys emotions as resources in order to bring about heightened productivity and achievement.

Starting at a certain level of production, rationality - which is the medium of disciplinary society - hits a limit. Henceforth, it is experienced as a constraint, an inhibition. Suddenly, it seems rigid and inflexible. At this point, emotionality takes its place, which is attended by the feeling of liberty - the free unfolding of personality. After all, being free means giving free rein to emotions.

Rationality is defined by objectivity, generality and steadiness. As such, it stands opposed to emotionality, which is subjective, situative and volatile.

Emotions arise, above all, when circumstances change - and perception shifts. Rationality entails duration, consistency and regularity. It prefers stable conditions.

The neoliberal economy, increasingly dismantling continuity and progressively integrating instability in order to in order to enhance productivity, is pushing the emotionalization of the productive process forward. Accelerated communication also promotes its emotionalization.

Rationality is slower than emotionality; it has no speed, as it were. Thus, the pressure of acceleration now is leading to a dictatorship of emotion.

[Byung-Chul Han]
Psychopolitics, p.46




Since we are in the midst of this process of change, a clear description of what is happening is not easy, but the heart of the matter is that our technologies have become more powerful than our theories.

We are capable of doing things that we do not understand. We can perform gene-splicing without fully understanding how genes interact.

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.1




The social fabric is not 'designed' by means of some transcendental principle, but develops as a result of the way in which it responds to contingent information in a dynamic fashion.

The process is a complex one involving many individuals with complex, non-linear relationships between them, including feedback relations. Individuals co-operate to form clusters, but also compete for resources in the network. The system is therefore not, and can never be, symmetrical.

The history of the system is vitally important for the way in which meaning is generated in any part of it. The evolution of structures in the social fabric, causing continuous alterations, is an integral part of its dynamics.

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.117




Traditional interpretations of the temporal nature of a system […] privilege the present.

The immense gain of the notion of différence is that it reminds us that not only the past has to be considered when we try to establish the meaning of (say) an event, but that since we cannot fully predict the effects of this event, the future has to be considered as well, despite the fact that we have no idea what this future might be.

Now, instead of throwing up his hands, and declaring that in such a case it is impossible to talk about meaning, and that therefore anything goes, Derrida insists that we should take responsibility for this unknowable future. In the case of ethical decisions, this leads to an aporia: we have to take responsibility for the future effects of our decisions, but we cannot know those effects, nor can we wait to see what they are. We have to make the decision now. How do we deal with this aporia?

To fall back on universal principles is to deny the complexity of the social system we live in, and can therefore never be just. To allow everything is to evade our responsibility. The first approach to the system is too rigid, the second too fluid.

Cornell’s suggestion (following Derrida, and reformulated in my terminology) is to take present ethical (and legal) principles seriously—to resist change—but to be keenly aware of when they should not be applied, or have to be discarded. We therefore do follow principles as if they were universal rules (Cornell and Derrida use the term ‘quasi-transcendental’), but we have to remotivate the legitimacy of the rule each time we use it.

To behave ethically means not to follow rules blindly—to merely calculate—but to follow them responsibly, which may imply that the rules must be broken.

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.139




Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity.

What is the origin of the intensity that characterizes repetition and protects it against becoming routine? For Kierkegaard, repetition and recollection represent the same movement but in opposite directions, 'because what is recollected has already been and is thus repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards'.

Repetition, as a form of recognition, is therefore a form of completion. Past and present are brought together into a living present. As a form of completion, repetition founds duration and intensity. It ensures that time lingers.

Kierkegaard takes repetition to be opposed to hope as well as to recollection:

Hope is new attire, stiff and starched and splendid. Still, since it has not yet been tried on, one does not know whether it will suit one, or whether it will fit. Recollection is discarded clothing which, however lovely it might be, no longer suits one because one has outgrown it. Repetition is clothing that never becomes worn, that fits snugly and comfortably, that neither pulls nor hangs too loosely.


It is, Kierkegaard writes, 'only the new of which one tires. One never tires of the old.' The old is 'the daily bread that satisfies through blessing'. It brings happiness: 'and only a person who does not delude himself that repetition ought to be something new, for then he tires of it, is genuinely happy'.

Chasing new stimuli, excitement and experience, we lose the capacity for repetition.

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.9




The Bolshevik project which the Soviet system embodied throughout its history was that of imposing a western modernity on Russia, but without capitalism.

Like the Utopia envisaged by Lenin, the global free market aims to bring into being a state of affairs that has never hitherto existed in human society - and which goes far beyond the mid-Victorian English free market and the liberal international economic order that existed until 1914.

Global laissez-faire and the communist project that animated the former Soviet Union have many of the same enemies. They are hostile to national and cultural differences in economic life and to the inheritances of tradition and history. They resent the backwardness of peasants and village life. They are intolerant of the unruly individualism of the bourgeoisie and the refractoriness of working people.

The chief victims of the global free market, as of War Communism and the Soviet system, are peasants and - to a lesser but still notable extent - urban industrial workers and the professional middle classes.

[...] Peasant traditional beliefs had been under siege since the communist victory in 1949, but it was in the Great Leap forward, and then the Cultural Revolution, that they were finally almost destroyed: ‘Everything connected with traditional beliefs was smashed up in the Great Leap Forward.’

The attack on traditional China was resumed in the Great Proleterian Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. The ‘four olds’ - old customs, old habits, old culture and old thinking, as embodied in books, money, documents and antique art treasures - were assaulted in one of history’s greatest convulsions.

[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.140-1, 180




The global economy deskills people and organisations. It does so by making the environments in which they live and work unrecognisable to them. It thereby renders their stock of local and tacit knowledge less and less serviceable to them.

A major problem that has not been solved by business organisations - except partially Japanese companies - is that of combining the institutional continuity needed, if the local knowledge of employees is to be harnessed, with the capacity for organisational innovation required to make the most of new technologies.

[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.76




In his Reflections on the French Revolution (1790) Burke supplemented the authority of precedent by that of wisdom and experience, and reverence for the Constitution by reverence for tradition - that "partnership … between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born".

Radical reformers "are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgotten his nature”. “By their violent haste and their defiance of the process of nature, they are delivered over blindly to every projector and adventurer, to every alchymist and empiric."

[…]

"I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controuled, and contracted for, by the manuscript-assumed authority of the dead."

Burke wished to "consign over the rights of posterity for ever, on the authority of a mouldy parchment", while Paine asserted that each successive generation was competent to define its rights and form of government anew.

[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.97, 99



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