p. xvi Robert Frost famously wrote that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. The word "tribe" might be the people you feel compelled to share the last of your food with.
p. 65 To some degree the sexes are interchangeable - meaning they can be easily substituted for one another - but gender roles aren't. Both are necessary for the healthy functioning of society, and those roles will always be filled regardless of whether both sexes are available to do it.
p. 109 There are many costs to modern society, starting with its toll on the global ecosystem and working one's way down to its toll on the human psyche, but the most dangerous loss may be to community. If the human race is under threat in some way that we don't yet understand, it will probably be at the community level that we either solve the problem or fail to. If the future of the planet depends on, say, rationing water, communities of neighbors will be able to enforce new rules far more effectively than even local government. It's howe we evolved to exist, and it obviously works.
p. 112 In this sense, littering is an exceedingly petty version of claiming a billion-dollar bank bailout or fraudulently claiming disability payments. When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don't see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you're walking around in. And when you fraudulently claim money from the government, you are ultimately stealing from your friends, family, and neighbors - or somebody else's friends, family, and neighbors. That diminishes you morally far more than it diminishes your country financially. My friend Ellis was once asked by a troubled young boy whether there was any compelling reason for him not to pull the legs off a spider. Ellis said that there was. "Well, spiders don't feel any pain," the boy retorted. "It's not the spider I'm worried about," Ellis said.
p. 127 The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs - and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative though - will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.
Showing posts with label community. Show all posts
Showing posts with label community. Show all posts
Sunday, June 11, 2017
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, r. Jun. 2016
p. 267 (Putnam and Campbell) "By many different measures, religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than secular Americans - they are more generous with their time and money, especially in helping the needy, and they are more active in community life."
p. 267 Putnam and Campbell reject the New Atheist emphasis on belief and reach a conclusion straight out of Durkheim: "It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing."
p. 292 For example, on a small island or in a small town, you typically don't need to lock your bicycle, but in a big city in the same country, if you only lock the frame, your wheels may get stolen. Being small, isolated, or morally homogeneous are examples of environmental conditions that increase the moral capital of a community. That doesn't mean that small islands and small towns are better places to live overall - the diversity and crowding of big cities makes them more creative and interesting places for many people - but that's the trade-off. (Whether you'd trade away some moral capital to gain some diversity and creativity will depend in part on your brain's settings on traits such as openness to experience and threat sensitivity, and this is part of the reason why cities are usually so much more liberal than the countryside.)
p. 294 Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you're asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism - which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity - is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.
p. 294 (Bertrand Russell) "It is clear that each party to this dispute - as to all that persist through long periods of time - is partly right and partly wrong. Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.
p. 305 I find it ironic that liberals generally embrace Darwin and reject "intelligent design" as the explanation for design and adaptation in the natural world, but they don't embrace Adam Smith as the explanation for design and adaptation in the economic world. They sometimes prefer the "intelligent design" of socialist economies, which often ends in disaster from a utilitarian point of view.
p. 317 If you bring one thing home from this last part of the trip, may I suggest that it be the image of a small bump on the back of our heads - the hive switch, just under the skin, waiting to be turned on. We've been told for fifty years now that human beings are fundamentally selfish. We're assaulted by reality TV programs showing people at their worst. Some people actually believe that a woman should shout "fire" if she's being raped, on the grounds that everyone is so selfish that they won't even come out to investigate unless they fear for their own lives. It's not true. We may spend most of our waking hours advancing our own interests, but we all have the capacity to transcend self-interest and become simply a part of a whole. It's not just a capacity; it's the portal to many of life's most cherished experiences.
p. 267 Putnam and Campbell reject the New Atheist emphasis on belief and reach a conclusion straight out of Durkheim: "It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing."
p. 292 For example, on a small island or in a small town, you typically don't need to lock your bicycle, but in a big city in the same country, if you only lock the frame, your wheels may get stolen. Being small, isolated, or morally homogeneous are examples of environmental conditions that increase the moral capital of a community. That doesn't mean that small islands and small towns are better places to live overall - the diversity and crowding of big cities makes them more creative and interesting places for many people - but that's the trade-off. (Whether you'd trade away some moral capital to gain some diversity and creativity will depend in part on your brain's settings on traits such as openness to experience and threat sensitivity, and this is part of the reason why cities are usually so much more liberal than the countryside.)
p. 294 Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you're asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism - which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity - is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.
p. 294 (Bertrand Russell) "It is clear that each party to this dispute - as to all that persist through long periods of time - is partly right and partly wrong. Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.
p. 305 I find it ironic that liberals generally embrace Darwin and reject "intelligent design" as the explanation for design and adaptation in the natural world, but they don't embrace Adam Smith as the explanation for design and adaptation in the economic world. They sometimes prefer the "intelligent design" of socialist economies, which often ends in disaster from a utilitarian point of view.
p. 317 If you bring one thing home from this last part of the trip, may I suggest that it be the image of a small bump on the back of our heads - the hive switch, just under the skin, waiting to be turned on. We've been told for fifty years now that human beings are fundamentally selfish. We're assaulted by reality TV programs showing people at their worst. Some people actually believe that a woman should shout "fire" if she's being raped, on the grounds that everyone is so selfish that they won't even come out to investigate unless they fear for their own lives. It's not true. We may spend most of our waking hours advancing our own interests, but we all have the capacity to transcend self-interest and become simply a part of a whole. It's not just a capacity; it's the portal to many of life's most cherished experiences.
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Is That A Fish In Your Ear? by David Bellos, r. Nov. 2015
p. 145 When you have to pay attention to more than one dimension of an utterance - when your mind is engaged in multilevel pattern-matching pursuits - you find resources in your language you never knew were there.
p. 166 To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.
p. 195 ...translation always takes the register and level of naturally written prose up a notch or two. Some degree of raising is and always has been characteristic of translated texts simply because translators are instinctively averse to the risk of being taken for less than fully cultivated writers of their target tongue. In important ways, translators are the guardians and, to a surprising degree, the creators of the standard form of the language they use.
p. 216 The solar structure of the global book world wasn't designed by anyone. With its all-powerful English sun, major planets called French and German, outer elliptical rings where Russian occasionally crosses the path of Spanish and Italian, and its myriad distant satellites no weightier than stardust, the system is all the mor remarkable for being in stark contradiction to the weblike network of cross-cultural relations that most people would like to see.
p. 239 As one lawyer working [at the EU] said to me when I visited, he never really thinks about which of his four languages he is speaking or writing at any given time - he switches without conscious effort, as if he were just shifting the weight of his shoulder bag from the left to the right side.
p. 253 Languages can always be squeezed and shaped to fit the needs that humans have...
p. 290 For Thirlwell, novelistic "style" is the name of a holistic entity that comes somewhere between "a writer's special way of looking at the world" and "a writer's own way of writing novels."
p. 293 There aren't many publishing executives in Britain and the United States who read foreign languages other than French.... the English translator is often the only person in the chain who really knows very much about the book or its author at all. It's a daunting position, with responsibilities going far beyond the already difficult business of producing an acceptable and effective translation.
p. 324 Like [the movie Avatar], the practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different - we speak different tongues and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same - that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of the suppositions, translation could not exist.... Translation is another name for the human condition.
p. 338 It's not poetry but community that is lost in translation. The community-building role of actual language use is simply not part of what translation does.
p. 166 To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.
p. 195 ...translation always takes the register and level of naturally written prose up a notch or two. Some degree of raising is and always has been characteristic of translated texts simply because translators are instinctively averse to the risk of being taken for less than fully cultivated writers of their target tongue. In important ways, translators are the guardians and, to a surprising degree, the creators of the standard form of the language they use.
p. 216 The solar structure of the global book world wasn't designed by anyone. With its all-powerful English sun, major planets called French and German, outer elliptical rings where Russian occasionally crosses the path of Spanish and Italian, and its myriad distant satellites no weightier than stardust, the system is all the mor remarkable for being in stark contradiction to the weblike network of cross-cultural relations that most people would like to see.
p. 239 As one lawyer working [at the EU] said to me when I visited, he never really thinks about which of his four languages he is speaking or writing at any given time - he switches without conscious effort, as if he were just shifting the weight of his shoulder bag from the left to the right side.
p. 253 Languages can always be squeezed and shaped to fit the needs that humans have...
p. 290 For Thirlwell, novelistic "style" is the name of a holistic entity that comes somewhere between "a writer's special way of looking at the world" and "a writer's own way of writing novels."
p. 293 There aren't many publishing executives in Britain and the United States who read foreign languages other than French.... the English translator is often the only person in the chain who really knows very much about the book or its author at all. It's a daunting position, with responsibilities going far beyond the already difficult business of producing an acceptable and effective translation.
p. 324 Like [the movie Avatar], the practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different - we speak different tongues and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same - that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of the suppositions, translation could not exist.... Translation is another name for the human condition.
p. 338 It's not poetry but community that is lost in translation. The community-building role of actual language use is simply not part of what translation does.
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