–Remember when it was a Good Thing that a growing middle class led to strong states. Now, the rise of a global middle class is massive extractivism destroying the planet.
–“Indeed, as the authors themselves recognize, the setting of carbon prices is highly uncertain. Evaluations can range from $45 to $14,300 per ton, depending on the time horizon and the reduction targeted. With such variability, there is no point in trying to optimize the cost of carbon reduction intertemporally.” (https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/energy-dilemma)
–Who would have guessed their answer to 21st century modernity is Slav revanchism and Han imperialism?
–With advances in neuroscience coming so fast, the Bayesian brain—we’re hardwired to predict the future by updating estimates of current probabilities—is beginning to look like Descartes’ understanding of the pineal gland as the soul linking mind and body.
–Janet Flanner, the journalist, reported in 1945 from war-struck Paris: “Everything here is a substitute for everything else.” Think: Cigarettes could be traded for food, food could be traded for clothes, clothes could be traded for furniture, and so on. It is in disaster where everything is connected to everything else; that’s why the only thing complete is “complete disaster.”
–It’s an odd kind of a-historicism to deny utopian possibilities because we live in an ceaseless present that forecloses on anything like a future.
–E.M. Forster in Howards End: “The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful life is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.” Under what conditions is this progress?
–“It is an interesting fact about the world we actually live in that no anthropologist, to my knowledge, has come back from a field trip with the following report: their concepts are so alien that it is impossible to describe their land tenure, their kinship system, their ritual… As far as I know there is no record of such a total admission of failure… It is success in explaining culture A in the language of culture B which is… really puzzling.” (Ernest Gellner, social anthropologist)
–The language of risk is now so naturalized that it seems the obvious starting point of analysis, as in: “Ok, the first thing we have to do is assess the risks of flooding here…”
No. The first thing you do is to identify the boundaries of the flood system you are talking about as it is actually managed and then the standards of reliability to which it is being managed (namely, events must be precluded or avoided by way of management) and from which follow the specific risks to be managed to meet that standard. (Note a standard doesn’t eliminate risks but rather identifies the risks that have to be managed in order to meet the standard.)
–“Encounters: Emerson feeling very transcendental in front of the Pyramids, fell into with a little American chap, with insect net, who gave his name as Theodore Roosevelt.” (Guy Davenport, essayist)
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 