Value and the good are synonyms in Aristotle's thought. You can see it play in 'beauty.' Beauty possesses a motive force and can be transferred to do the work of being, which is why art 'moves us.' Thus beauty is good. But this meaning has been lost to history.
Culture is organic.
It grows and withers and, once lost, must be grown again. However, that which remains is not broken. The energy is still there. We just have forgotten or lost the way to release it. So it's trapped in a form and awaiting the rediscovery of the great engines of change that will transform it in non material forms of growth–and other kinds of capital.
A good argument in favor of reading history and literature: you may happen upon a rich vein. And that is why reading the classics and timeless books is so valuable. But also stirring the conversation to the topics and ideas that have the objective capacity to affect meaningful change in our lives.
What could be more important than water?
Perhaps air. But it's the same feedback loop. Giulio Boccaletti has written and intriguing book about its taming in unstable, dynamic environment. He says if one had to design the perfect molecule to transfer on Earth, water would be it.
Water: a Biography details the early story of water and society. Which matters because it has left deep cultural traces guiding and inspiring human adaptation since. All major cities of the ancient world flourished either on the river banks or closer to the sea.
“If the energy used in the global economy—all transport, power plants, homes, heating systems were one unit of energy, then the water cycle of an average hurricane releases roughly one unit, the Asian monsoon about ten units, and global annual precipitation several thousand units. Water overwhelms humanity.”
Boccaletti, a physicist and climate scientist, divides the conversation on water into four symmetrical parts: (i) Origins (ii) A thousand years of convergence (iii) The Hydraulic Century (iv) finale. The valuable part of the book is awareness of what is because of what happened:
During the 20th century, inspired by the success of the model republic of the modern age, most rich societies replumbed the planet to insulate their citizens from the impact of the planet's climate and give their economies a comparative advantage. To do so, they harness the power of water while allowing everyone to live their lives at the sole beat of industrialization. For all intents and purposes, in wealthy countries at least, the climate system had mostly disappeared from people's lives.
Never before had water always been available, when and where needed, and always of a quality fit for its purpose. Never before had people been able to move around the landscape unimpeded, going about their technology-laden day, streams paved over, rivers contained, and all floods avoided. But while technology has changed people's relationship to climate, the thousands of years of layered institutions, which have defined the relationship between society and water over time, continue to play the dominant role in shaping the outcomes.
The relative water security he describes makes us complacent.
One short week ego, in the middle of the hottest summer we've experienced so far in many part of the world, contractors hired by the local township to repave a road were washing the luck off their truck with a hose connected to the fire hydrant. People are not watering plants, and these guys are hosing down their truck with emergency water.
When rivers and canals that used to support commerce, agriculture, and travel run dry, that's not good. Writing a book as comprehensive as this one is hard. Still, I wished there was more about the connection of sustainable life and water in the current predicament. However, you will find a connection between water and policy.
We take water for granted. It all began with a threesome; an oxygen atom hooked up with two hydrogen atoms. The rest, as they say, is history.
What is language good for?
Our greatest accomplishment, and yet our biggest source of grief. Nick Enfield confirms that language is not objective. Rather, it's doubly subjective: it conveys the personal perspective of the author; words and structures strip away an enormous amount of detail from our experience.
Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists is an accessible and fascinating journey into this double-edged sword. On one hand, language is rhetorical. The lawyer is us uses it to defend a proposition to convince others that something is true. On the other, it could be not vested in which proposition is real, like a scientist.
I'm with Rebecca Solnit, in that our words are not helping us describe the complexity and subtlety of what is happening.
The tyranny of the quantifiable is partly the failure of language and discourse to describe more complex, subtle, and fluid phenomena, as well as the failure of those who shape opinions and make decisions to understand and value these slipperier things.
It is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to value what cannot be named or described, and so the task of naming and describing is an essential one in any revolt against the status quo of capitalism and consumerism.
Ultimately the destruction of the earth is due in part, perhaps in large part, to a failure of the imagination or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can’t count what matters.
The revolt against this destruction is a revolt of the imagination, in favor of subtleties, of pleasures money can’t buy and corporations can’t command, of being producers rather than consumers of meaning, of the slow, the meandering, the digressive, the exploratory, the numinous, the uncertain.
The propensity for reducing everything to a dichotomy is a cry for certainty. But, “Certainty is a thought-terminating state of mind,” says Enfield. He's professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney who won the Nobel Prize for discovering that “huh?” is a universal word.
If language is not the best tool for conveying and representing reality, it's good for social coordination that relies on the transfer of information. But handle with care, because coordinating with others can be both for cooperation and/or exploitation.
What do we owe the future?
The argument in fairly simple: “Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives better.” But as always, the devil's in the details. William MacAskill is an optimist. He's positive that humanity can take advantage of moments of 'plasticity' to be here in the distant future.
What We Owe The Future views these 'what ifs' with a zoom lens. MacAskill is a philosopher and ethicist at Oxford and the co-founder of 80,000 Hours and Giving What we Can. The two non profits help people make a difference through their career, and by committing to give at least 10 percent of their income to the most effective charities.
Priority to improving the long-term future is an important concept in effective altruism. It's also a difficult concept to leap into. Human beings are used to thinking in terms of 'my generation' and possibly the next one: children and grandchildren. There's little focus on humanity in general.
That's the scope of MacAskill's book.
Culture is organic and is not lost forever. If humans go extinct, they can't come back. And that's true for other forms of extinction. So framing the questions of what happens with artificial intelligence (AI), and what happens with water (and air) because of climate is really important.
Yet, these important futures rely on language–a most imperfect tool–and the role of human capital as the engine to make sense of past and present.
[Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20 from Pixabay]