Keeping markets in their proper place... Moray reinvigorating public discourse
Economics should be seen as a sub-field, as a branch of moral and political philosophy.
What's missing is engaging with big ethical questions. Questions about the right way of valuing goods and social practices. So... Why do we shrink from this?
Morally invigorate the terms of public discourse. To overcome the bad habit of outsourcing our moral judgements to markets what we need is a politics of mutual respect that engages with competing views, including competing moral and even spiritual conceptions.
The end of neoliberalism - Reflecting the empirical reality of the economy
"New economics does not accept the orthodox theory that has dominated economics for the past several decades that humans are perfectly rational, markets are perfectly efficient, institutions are optimally designed and economies are self-correcting equilibrium systems that invariably find a state that maximises social welfare. [...] Rather new economics is best characterised as a research programme that encompasses a broad range of theories, empirical work, and methods. It is also highly interdisciplinary, involving not only economists, but psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, physicists, biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and others across the social and physical sciences."
How the Profound Changes in Economics Make Left Versus Right Debates Irrelevant: here
Wittgenstein: A Wonderful Life
Wittgenstein: A Wonderful Life (1989)
"I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking but, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own."
– What Wittgenstein was saying was, "forget all this nonsense about knowledge and uncertainty and all that stuff. What we all believe, to start with, is fine, and that is all there is to it."
Attention seeking
"Curiosity never comes with a guarantee."
"Attention seeking is one of the best things we do, even when we have the worst ways of doing it."
"One of the child's fundamental questions is: what is he allowed to be interested in outside the family? The history of our attention, in other words, is one of the stories of our lives."
"I was educated in the culture that is being defended here --a culture of close reading and slow looking, in which the arts were taken to be formative -- which tended to pride itself, as certain kinds of liberalism do, on the ability and freedom to question and cast doubt upon itself; and to concentrate in a way that made recognition of something other than one's self and its abiding preoccupations possible. As though this, in and of itself, guaranteed something; something that could be called the impossibility of fanaticism, or fascism, or certain kinds of egotism; or the imagining of lives not devoted to profiteering; or the possibility of including as many people as possible, in as many ways as possible, with as little demeaning hierarchy as possible (all in the service of personal development, assumed to be the ultimate value). Which at its best it can do and at its worst is a coercive and sure of itself as the people it claims to oppose."
"What would our lives be like without focus? Or without our attention always being prescribed, or described as a means to a known end?."
"psychoanalysis, at its best, contrary to popular prejudice, is the therapy that frees people to lose interest in themselves."
"Dreams are the counter-culture of culture."
"Psychoanalysis is one way of describing what happens to us despite what we want to happen to us; and a way of describing what we are doing despite what we think we are doing."
"Shame, then, is also a sign of self-deception [...] If you want to know what you want to be, pay attention to what makes you feel ashamed of yourself. It is a revelation, so to speak, of your ego-ideal (who you, in the fullest sense, wish to be: how you would like to look). But it is also, by the same token, a revelation of an assumed self-knowledge (someone who had no idea who they were or wanted to be could not feel shame."
"Behaviour that is in conflict with the super-ego, the psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft writes, 'evokes guilt, while that which conflicts with the ego-ideal evokes shame.' [...] In the Freudian story, broadly speaking, the super-ego represents the internalised rules of the parents, the ego-ideal the internalised, preferred version of oneself: 'a model to which the subject attempts to conform'. [...] The ego-ideal, that is to say, creates an essential perplexity. Is it safeguarding and sustaining what is best about us -- what we value above all about ourselves, about life -- or is it humiliating us with unattainable ideals? And are we able to talk about the values it promotes, or have we been, as it were, brainwashed or enchanted by our ideals? Are we suffering from our obedience -- our indebtedness -- or for our values? If, for example, we started from the principle that no one owes anyone anything, we could begin to think about what we want to give each other. Are we setting ourselves up to fail, or bringing out the best in ourselves?"
"What Freud is describing is the difference between the kind of attention paid when we know what we want, what we are looking for; and the kind of attention paid when we are finding out what we want, when we don't know beforehand what we want or what we are looking for, only that we are in a state of wanting and seeking."
Adam Phillips, in Attention Seeking
Burnt Norton - T. S. Eliot
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden
:T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, read by Jeremy Irons: I. Burnt Norton (extracts of)
"... Eliot's question in Burnt Norton is: what kind of attention – intelligent or otherwise – can we give to distraction." Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking [pg 116]
A change of attention is a change of experience
Protect me from what I want / motivated exclusion
"Freud [suggests] that attention is primarily, if not essentially, already thoroughly censored (or selective, as we more blandly say). That looking is a way of stopping us seeing; that talking is a way of stopping us speaking; that listening is a way of stopping ourselves hearing. That what we call attending is a process of motivated exclusion; that we concentrate and focus in order to occlude and temper what we might see.
[...]
"Psychoanalysis tracks what attention wants and doesn't want to omit."
Adam Phillips, in Attention Seeking [pg 96]
Zerkalo (The Mirror) 1975 - Second scene
on 'hobby horses' and 'tantrums'
"I would give my entire output of words, past, present, and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state 'I hurt' or 'I hate' or 'I want'. Or, indeed, 'Look at me'. And I do not go back on this for once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory."
Anita Brookner, in Look At Me [pg 84]
"For if one is serious, one is rarely a welcome guest. Everything must be converted, somehow, into entertainment."
Anita Brookner, in Look At Me [pg 165]
"What are we doing when we pay attention to the attention we pay to their hobby horses?."
Adam Phillips, in Attention Seeking [pg 88]
"Attention becomes the form and the medium of our desire, prompted by a felt lack of something. We attend to our felt absences."
Adam Phillips, in Attention Seeking [pg 88]
R.E.M. - Everybody Hurts (Official Music Video)
Satisfaction sabotaging desire...
"... the terrors of some versions of social engineering, in which we are entombed within our supposed preferences and ideals. What is absent in what is called notably Happy Valley is the tension of desiring; the freedom to think about what is missing and what might be missed (the inventiveness born of frustration). [...] 'I have already enjoyed too much; give me something to desire'"
Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking [pg 82]
... on flow[ting] and diving
"... to what should we give our attention, and to what do we give our attention (and who decides)?
[...] What are we doing when we pay attention to the attention people pay to their hobby horses? Hobby horses [meaning] absorption with a view to the stopping of time; a form of arrested development or arrested attention; a refuge from the future.
[...] Attention becomes the form and the medium of our desire, prompted by the felt lack of something. We attend to our felt absences.
[...] All morality depends upon knowing where and how to pay attention. And to pay attention to morality is also always to pay attention to attention.
[...] Attention nourishes us; distraction depletes us. Attention redeems the time. It makes it feel worth living, and living out. Good attention makes a good life."
Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking [pgs 91, 92, 93]
Creation comes out of vulnerability
Björk to Timothy Morton:
"Hi Timothy,
I wanted to write this letter for a long time.
I have been reading your books for a while and I like them a lot.
Next year there will be a MoMA exhibition on my work including a book.
I was wondering if you’d be interested in taking part in it?
Warmth, Björk.”
Timothy Morton to Björk:
“Dear Björk,
It was very kind of you to write to me, and I’m very touched by your kind words.
I am always quite surprised anyone reads my stuff!
I would be thrilled to be part of the MoMA catalogue.
Your work has been a very deep influence on my way of thinking and life in general.
I like to be given homework in terms of what to write (perpetual student!), so do tell me more about what specifications you might like.
It truly seems to me that there is some kind of shift happening towards ecological awareness – not just in terms of PR for the science.
I have heard this in your work since I started to listen to it.
Yours, Tim”
The rest is here.
Pecuária e Alterações Climáticas
Dois dos relatórios mais frequentemente citados sobre o contributo da pecuária para a crise ambiental – ‘A Longa Sombra da Pecuária’, da Organização das Nações Unidas para a Alimentação e a Agricultura (FAO), em 2006, e “Pecuária e Alterações Climáticas”, do Worldwatch Institute, em 2009 – propõem dois conjuntos de números distintos sobre o que constitui um dos dados mais importantes de toda a ciência ambiental: a percentagem de emissões de gases com efeito de estufa originadas pelo sector pecuário. Este número é uma espécie de superestatística que incorpora e simplifica uma vasta complexidade, e constitui a razão mais directa por que é tão crucial mudarmos a nossa relação com os alimentos de origem animal.
A ‘Longa Sombra da Pecuária’ foi o primeiro relatório do género a granjear a atenção generalizada e, ao afirmar que a pecuária é a causa de 18% das emissões globais de gases com efeito de estufa, atraiu aplausos e críticas. No entanto, desencadeou sobretudo o alarme: 18% era mais do que todo o sector combinado dos transportes. Foi, portanto, uma surpresa quando, em 2009, o Worldwatch Institute publicou o seu relatório em resposta a ‘A Longa Sombra da Pecuária’, defendendo que a pecuária não era responsável por 18% das emissões mundiais anuais de gases com efeito de estufa mas, na verdade, e no mínimo, de 51%. “Se esta asserção estiver correcta”, declaram os autores na sua introdução, “a conclusão é que a substituição da pecuária por alternativas melhores seria a estratégia preferencial para reverter as alterações climáticas.” Recomendam uma redução em 25% no número de cabeças de gado em todo o mundo que, clarificam, “pode acontecer em locais escolhidos, de modo a que as populações de gado nas comunidades rurais pobres permaneçam totalmente intactas.”
Jonathan Safran Foer, Salvar o Planeta Começa ao Pequeno-Almoço [pg 259]
The Human Crisis
Where economics meet psychology
"Danny [Daniel Kahneman] always used to say that the way to become a general in the Israeli army was to be over confident and lucky. So, you do two foolish things and luck out, and then you become a general. And that's a good way, also, to become a CEO. It also helps if you're quite tall. [...] I know, and my colleagues should know, that interviews are useless at forecasting virtually anything."
Question is big art
James Lee Byars - World Question Center from Michael Werner Gallery on Vimeo
"In 1969, the American artist James Lee Byars developed a performance piece entitled The World Question Center. The original idea, which was not brought to fruition, entailed gathering one hundred brilliant minds including thinkers, scientists and artists together in a room, locking them behind closed doors and inviting them to ask each other questions they had been asking themselves. The final version of this project, produced for Belgian Radio and Television, is a performance piece in which Byars contacts all of them by telephone."
– Do you have an affection for questions?
– Did Plato forget questions?
– What's the speed of an idea?
– Which questions have disappeared?
– Is all speech interrogative?
– Do questions require more energy than other sentences?
– Is a single question the synthesis of you?
– What questions are you asking yourself?
The Overview Effect - taking Earth into perspective
"O sentimento de reverência é inspirado por duas coisas: a beleza e a vastidão. É difícil imaginar algo mais transformadoramente belo e vasto do que o planeta visto do espaço, sobretudo sendo enquadrado por uma vacuidade negra aparentemente infinita."
"O Efeito Visão Geral muda as pessoas. Um astronauta da Apolo tornou-se sacerdote depois de regressar à Terra. Outro iniciou-se em meditação transcendental e dedicou-se ao voluntariado. Um, Edgar Mitchell, fundou o Instituto de Ciências Noéticas, que investiga a consciência humana."
Jonathan Safran Foer, in Salvar o Planeta Começa ao Pequeno-Almoço [pag 144]
Quem escreve assim não é gago!
"There, old vicary, congratulate my refuge, the saneside outside sheltering the insane inside: to present the static sane side outside to another outside saneside, to be esteemed for that outsane side while all the while the insaneside attacks your outsane side as though we weren't both playing the same game, and gone dowm Summer Street (singing unchristian songs) the inane sinside, pocketing a cool million wearing the shoutside outside and the doubtside inside, the vileside inside and the violinside outside skipping dancing and foretelling things too come all ye faithful, of thine own give we back to thee."
William Gaddis, The Recognitions [pg 399]
da perspectiva
“O nascimento dá início ao processo de aprendizagem da separação. A separação é difícil de acreditar ou aceitar. Contudo, à medida que a aceitamos, a nossa imaginação desenvolve-se – a imaginação que é a capacidade de religar, de reunir o que está separado. A metáfora encontra vestígios que indicam que tudo é uno. Actos de solidariedade, de compaixão, de auto-sacrifício e generosidade são tentativas de restabelecer – ou ao menos uma recusa em esquecer – uma unidade que já foi conhecida. A morte é a provação mais difícil em que a vida incorre na aceitação da separação.”
John Berger, Porquê Olhar os Animais?
