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@contexture.bsky.social

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How shall we live?

Text reads: The Luddites, Brian shows, weren’t anti-technology. In fact, they embraced new machines that helped them do their jobs better. They were against machines that destroyed workers’ livelihoods and rendered their skills useless. The Luddites rejected technology when it was used to enrich capitalists at the expense of laborers. Their dispute is best understood not as being over “technology” but about who gets the benefit of new technologies and who decides what kinds of technologies will be implemented. Today, Brian joins us to clear up misconceptions about the Luddites and show us what we can learn from them.
An image of three red roses — bathed in sunlight, nestled in green.
"Just to show that life ought to be lived, and that the ring-ring-ring of the tram is something wonderful even in the face of conceptual precision, which we are all meant to strive towards, and that the wealth of the senses is a wealth in its own right. Out of this urge one may list the hundred attributes of every single object." The text is from Robert Musil's Tagebücher, p. 119.
Bence Nany quoting from the Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. The quoted text reads: “whenever a man is momentarily raised above the tangle of his rational intentions, which involve him with innumerable objects, whenever he is raised into a state entirely free from purpose—for instance, whenever he is listening to music—he is almost in the same biological state as a flower on which the rain and the sunlight fall” (Volume II, Chapter 22, p. 942).
“Nor must any synechist say, “I am altogether myself, and not at all you.” If you embrace synechism, you must abjure this metaphysics of wickedness. In the first place, your neighbors are, in a measure, yourself, and in far greater measure than, without deep studies in psychology, you would believe. Really, the selfhood you like to attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity.” — C.S. Peirce, “Immortality in the Light of Synechism” (1893)
Thus everything belonging to the realm of the mind finds itself nowadays in profound disorder. Acting from tradition, and hardly aware of the reasons anymore, people attack the spirit of facts and numbers without offering anything but its negation to replace it. For if we proclaim—and who doesn't, to some degree?—that our age lacks synthesis, or culture, or a sense of religiosity, or community, this is hardly more than singing the praises of the “good old days,” since no one can say what cultures, religions, or communities would look like today if our laboratories and airplanes and the whole mammoth body of our society were to include them within their synthesis, and not simply dismiss them as outdated. This is merely to demand that the present surrender itself. Uncertainty, enervation, and a pessimistic cast are today the hallmarks of soul. Naturally this is all reflected in an unprecedented intellectual fragmentation. Our age accommodates side by side and in totally uncoordinated fashion such oppositions as individualism and social solidarity, aristocracy and socialism, pacifism and militarism, the lionizing of “culture” and the bustle of civilization, nationalism and internationalism, religion and natural science, intuition and rationalism, and so on ad infinitum. Excuse the analogy, but our age has an upset stomach, and it keeps regurgitating bits and pieces of the same food without digesting it. Even a casual glance reveals that this kind of antitypicality—this posing of problems as pairs of opposites, this agglomeration, or these “either-or” formulations—means that too little intellectual work is being done. There is in every either-or a certain naiveté, which may well befit the evaluator but ill-becomes the thinker, for whom opposites dissolve in series of transitions.
It's the cover of the album Conference of the Birds by the Dave Holland Quartet
Title of historian and political theorist E. P. Thompson's 1980 essay “Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization.”
What follows is, in my view, the most important and beautiful passage in Musil’s essays. It is nothing less than the appropriate antidote to the twentieth century’s often anti-intellectual “humanism”: After the Enlightenment the rest of us lost our courage. A minor failure was enough to turn us away from reason, and we allow every barren enthusiasm to inveigh against the intentions of a d’Alembert or a Diderot as mere rationalism. We screech in favor of feeling over intellect and forget that – apart from exceptional cases – feeling is by itself utterly incomprehensible. In this way we have ruined our imaginative literature to such an extent that, whenever one reads two German novels in a row, one must solve an integral equation to balance out one’s diet […] [The way of mathematicians] is a parable for the intellectual of the future. (p. 42; modified translation by RRD)
The report warns that, without action, global warming is now likely to reach 2°C before 2050, a level associated with catastrophic impacts on societies and economies worldwide – with major disruption to water and food systems, migration, and human health. This raises the risk of climate-driven inflation, financial shocks, and the withdrawal of insurance from high‑risk areas much sooner than many expect which, in turn, increases the chance of widespread financial instability and ‘Planetary Insolvency’ – the risk of societal and economic collapse from the loss of nature’s critical support systems.
George Oppen's poem, The source. THE SOURCE If the city has roots, they are in filth. It is a slum. Even the sidewalk Rasps under the feet. -In some black brick Tenement, a woman’s body Glows. The gleam; the unimaginable Thin feet taper down The instep naked to the wooden floor! Hidden and disguised -and shy? The city’s Secret warmth.
Image from WHO showing leading causes of mortality in 2021: "The world’s biggest killer is ischaemic heart disease, responsible for 13% of the world’s total deaths. Since 2000, the largest increase in deaths has been for this disease, rising by 2.7 million to 9.1 million deaths in 2021. As a newly emerged cause of deaths, COVID-19 was directly responsible for 8.8 million deaths in 2021, and consequently, largely pushed down other leading causes of death by one place. Instead of being the second and third leading causes of death as in 2019, stroke and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease became the third and fourth in 2021, responsible for approximately 10% and 5% of total deaths, respectively. Lower respiratory infections remained the world’s most deadly communicable disease other than COVID-19, ranked as the fifth leading cause of death. However, the number of deaths has gone down substantially: in 2021 it claimed 2.5 million lives, 370 000 fewer than in 2000. Deaths from other noncommunicable diseases were also on the rise. Trachea, bronchus and lung cancers deaths have risen from 1.2 million in 2000 to 1.9 million in 2021 and are now ranked sixth among leading causes of death. In 2021, Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia ranked as the seventh leading cause of death, killing 1.8 million lives. Women are disproportionately affected. Globally, 68% of deaths from Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia are women. Diabetes was also among the top 10 causes of death, following a significant percentage increase of 95% since 2000. Other diseases which were among the top 10 causes of death in 2000 are no longer on the list. HIV and AIDS are among them. Deaths from HIV and AIDS have fallen by 61%, moving from the world’s seventh leading cause of death in 2000 to the twenty-first in 2021. Similarly, deaths due to diarrhoeal diseases have dropped by 45%, from sixth leading cause of death in 2000 to thirteenth in 2021."
A comment by Frank Wilholt on Crooked Timber from 2022 that reads: "Newborns don’t care about money. They care about revenge for the birth trauma. The human race has an emotional age of three seconds. This is what post-materialism means. There was never such a thing as greed. The thing that looked like it was only a manifestation of sadism. There was never such a thing as capitalism. The thing that looked like it was a universal intellectual conspiracy to conceal the fact that, by definition, there can be no economic “growth”, only reallocation."
Suddenly this defeat. This rain. The blues gone gray and yellow a terrible amber. In the cold streets your warm body. In whatever room your warm body. Among all the people your absence. The people who are always not you. I have been easy with trees too long. Too familiar with mountains. Joy has been a habit. Now suddenly this rain.
Image of figure skater Toller Cranston, an absolute twink