Bill > Books: nonficion‎ (11)

Not to be done:

The promulgation of ideas entertained without seriousness, that is, without any corresponding consideration of what would be entailed were they actually to be effected.

The use of ideas such as privilege, appropriation, ableism, and microagression to sow hostility, persecute other members of a community, and make meaningful conversations impossible.

The use of the classroom and the seminar to indoctrinate students and thus to send them off parroting views that they have not adequately thought through or mastered.

The creation of an “us versus them” orientation, underwritten by enemies lists and fueled by a
sense that on matters for which a consensus has been reached no dispute may be tolerated.

The weaponization of “virtue” for what Marilynne Robinson calls “class advantage,” with zealots adept mainly at trumpeting their own superior status and making “a fetish of indignation.”

The assaults will not be discrete—this is another climate delusion. Instead, they will produce a new kind of cascading violence, waterfalls and avalanches of devastation, the planet pummeled again and again, with increasing intensity and in ways that build on each other and undermine our ability to respond . . .”

Over the past fifteen years, the iconoclastic mathematician Irakli Loladze has isolated a dramatic effect of carbon dioxide on human nutrition unanticipated by plant physiologists: it can make plants bigger, but those bigger plants are less nutritious. . . Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third.

But consider the case of the saiga—the adorable, dwarflike antelope, native to Central Asia. In May 2015, nearly two-thirds of the global population died in the span of just days—every single said in an area the size of Florida . . . The culprit, it turned out, was a simple bacteria, Pasteurella multocide, which had lived inside the saiga’s tonsils without threatening its hosts in any way, for many, many generations . . . Suddenly it had proliferated . . . Why? “The places where the saiga died in 2015 were extremely warm and humid . . . When the temperature gets really hot, and the air gets really wet, saiga die. Climate is the trigger, Pasteurella is the bullet.”

[T]he Anthropic Principle . . . takes the human anomaly not as a puzzle to explain away but as the centerpiece of a grand narcissistic view of the cosmos. . . . [H]owever unlikely it may seem that intelligent civilization arose in an infinity of lifeless gas, and however lonely we appear to be in the universe, in fact something like the world we live on and the one we’ve built are a sort of logical inevitability, given that we are asking these questions at all—because only a universe compatible with our sort of conscious life would produce anything capable of contemplating it like this. . . .

There is one civilization we know of, and it is still alive and kicking—for now at least. Why should we be suspicious of our exceptionality, or choose to understand it only by assuming an imminent demise? Why not choose to feel empowered by it?

Sally Horner can’t be cast aside so easily. She must be remembered as more than a young girl forever changed by a middle-aged man’s crime of monstrous perversion. A girl who survived adversity, manipulation, and cross-country horror, only to be denied a chance to grow up. A girl immortalized, and forever trapped in the pages of a classic novel of satire and sadness, like a butterfly with wings damaged before ever having the chance to fly.

With the strikers destitute, the IWW thought to place worker’s children with sympathizers in different cities. This spread the Lawrence workers' cause. On February 10th, 119 children boarded a train to New York dressed in their rags, with their name, age, address, and nationality pinned to them . . . They all found families when they arrived, as five thousand socialists met them at the train station to celebrate their arrival.

A women's auxiliary formed to support the workers, bringing them food, clean clothing, newspapers and other items to help them spend the long nights inside the plant. Genora Johnson, a mother of two and the wife of one of the strike leaders, took the microphone and urged the women of Flint to stand up (or sit down!) to GM and fight for the men inside. She shouted, “We will form a line around the men, and if the police want to fire then, they’ll just have to fire into us.”

For two days, Oakland shut down. Despite the cold December rain, over 1000,000 workers participated . . . All businesses except for pharmacies and food markets, which the workers deemed essential for the city, closed. Bars could stay open but could only serve beer and had to put their jukeboxes outtside and allow for their free use. Couples literally danced in the streets . . . Workers allowed children to visit Santa in front of a department store to give their Christmas wishes. Recently returned war veterans created squadrons to prepare for battle against the police.

We came very far in the struggles of workers in the two centuries before today. In the past four decades, we have given back much of our freedom. Only through our combined struggle to demand the fruits of our labor can we regain our lost freedoms and expand those freedoms into a better life for all Americans.

Even as I savored these luxuries and connections, I found something amiss about the Aspen institute. Here were all these rich and powerful people coming together and speaking about giving back, and yet the people who seemed to reap most of the benefits of this coming together were the helpers, not the helped. I began to wonder what was actually going on when the most fortunate don’t merely seek to make a difference but also effectively claim ownership of “changing the world.” . . .

I began to feel like a casual participant in . . . a giant, sweet-lipped lie. . . . Why were we coming to Aspen? To change the system, or to be changed by it? To speak truth to power, . . . or to help make an unjust, unpalatable system go down a little more easily? Could the intractable problems we proposed to solve be solved in the way that we silently insisted—at minimal most to elites, with minimal distribution of power?

* * * * * The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, 'Western civilisation' or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.

* * * * * Cities are no more artificial than the hives of bees. The internet is as natural as a spider's web. As Margulis and Sagan have written, we are ourselves technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as means of genetic survival: 'We are a part of an intricate network that comes from the original bacterial takeover of the Earth. Our powers and intelligence do not belong specifically to us but to all life.'

* * * * * Among us, science serves two needs: for hope and censorship. Today, only science supports the myth of progress. If people cling to the hope of progress, it is not so much from genuine belief as from fear of what may come if they give it up.

* * * * * Over the past 200 years, philosophy has shaken off Christian faith. It has not given up Christianity's cardinal error — the belief that humans are radically different from all other animals.

* * * * * Postmodernists parade their relativism as a superior kind of humility — the modest acceptance that we cannot claim to have the truth. In fact, the postmodern denial of truth is the worst kind of arrogance. In denying that the natural world exists independently of our beliefs about it, postmodernists are implicitly rejecting any limit on human ambitions. By making human beliefs the final arbiter of reality, they are in effect claiming that nothing exists unless it appears in human consciousness.

* * * * * Even the deepest contemplation only recalls us to our unreality. Seeing that the self we take ourselves to be is illusory does not mean seeing through it to something else. It is more like surrendering to a dream. To see ourselves as figments is to awake, not to reality, but to a lucid dream, a false awakening that has no end.

* * * * * Action preserves a sense of self-identity that reflection dispels. When we are at work in the world we have a seeming solidity. Action gives us consolation for our inexistence. It is not the idle dreamer who escapes from reality. It is practical men and women, who turn to a life of action as a refuge from insignificance.

* * * * * Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?