Barley Literate: Philosophy

Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Mindset: think about it

Book review: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

By Dr. Carol S. Dweck, New York: Ballantine Books, 2006

277 pages

This is one of those books that knocks a hole in your head and then fills it up with startling knowledge.

Dweck wrote this rather chatty book about a very serious subject: the mindset that influences much of your life, and can literally play a critical role in your success or failure at work, at school, among your friends and at home with your family.

Here’s a simplistic summary of her findings based on years of teaching and research:

There is a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. A mindset is a frame of mind that enables you to interpret what’s happening in the world around you, and to determine how you will feel about it, and how you will act and react.

I’ll take a stab at briefly defining the two mindsets in my own words.

Fixed mindset—you interpret most everything that happens to you in terms of whether it validates your static view of your own abilities and self-worth, in other words, you see the events and people in your life as confirming that you are talented and wonderful, or proving that you’re stupid and worthless. You can’t change, and you’ve got to grab what you deserve.

Growth mindset—you interpret most everything that happens to you in terms of feedback about your motivation and your performance, in other words, you see the events and people in your life as part of your continuous quest to learn and achieve your goals and enjoy your relationships with others. You can change, and you can learn to do better.

Of course, it’s possible to have different mindsets in different circumstances, and it’s possible to have some mix of the mindsets.

Dweck says you can learn to have a more effective growth mindset, and you can teach others, kids and adults, to embrace a more effective growth mindset.

We can always learn, we can always build up our talents, we can always get smarter, and we can help ourselves to have more enjoyable lives.

This all makes sense to me.

I don’t think I learned everything Dweck can teach me, so I’m going to read the book again.

Book review: The Sea Runners

Here's one for your reading list

Book review: Waterloo

Book review: Orphan Train

"...somewhere hot..."

Saturday, May 28, 2016

Consider another point of view….

Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, has an unconventional and incisive point of view. He offers startling, lucid guidance on matters spiritual, contemplative, intellectual and personal. See his comments here at The Center For Action and Contemplation.

Recently he discussed “Community as Alternative Consciousness.” I’m not competent to summarize it, read it for yourself here if you wish.

Here’s an excerpt:

“For instance, I've never once heard a sermon about the tenth commandment, "You shall not covet your neighbor's goods," because in our culture that's the only game in town. It is called capitalism. The individual is largely helpless and harmless standing against the system.”

Regarding capitalism, this is more a rhetorical statement than a conclusive definition. Nevertheless, he’s dealing with pith.

Here’s my own rhetorical whack at capitalism: not by its classic philosophical design, but in its inescapable effect, it’s a system that reinforces too many inequities and shields too many wrongdoers from accountability. Too many of us don’t fully understand this reality.

Who did it?

Soda consumption is still dropping

Anything sound familiar here?

A long wait for the perp walk....

Outsourcing: what's it all about?

Another take from Peter Drucker

Book review: American Crisis

The cod in "Cape Cod"

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

World domination, circa 1914

“World domination” is a concept we don’t mention too often in casual conversation these days, but 100 years ago it was an ordinary frame of reference.

In 1800, at the beginning of the 19^th century, European powers controlled about one-third of the world’s land mass. By 1914—before the start of World War I—those Western powers could claim domination of about 84 percent of the planet.

It wasn’t a stretch to acknowledge that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.”

Margaret Macmillan, in The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914, says

"Europe's countries dominated much of the earth's surface whether through their formal empires or by informal control of much of the rest through their economic, financial and technological strength. Railways, ports, telegraph cables, steamship lines, factories around the world were built using European know-how and money and were usually run by European companies.”

"The march of knowledge throughout the nineteenth century, in so many fields from geology to politics, had, it was widely assumed, brought much greater rationality in human affairs. The more humans knew, whether about themselves, society, or the natural world, the more they would make decisions based on the facts rather than on emotion.”

As we sadly know now, such self-serving and blithely ignorant claptrap was brutally exposed when the “guns of August” commenced firing in 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Book review: Shantung Compound

I did the Boston Marathon again!

Hateful people having fun

The drollery of William F. Buckley Jr.

Book review: The First Congress

"Mannish Boy"....hold that thought

Sunday, April 17, 2016

The drollery of William F. Buckley Jr.

“It’s very hard to stand up carrying the weight of what I know.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008)

If you’re at all familiar with Buckley’s potent command of language, you won’t have any trouble believing he said that.

Certainly, the man was literate and learned.

Too bad he wasted all that talent on being a champion of the rigidly righteous and repeatedly wrong Right Wing of just about everything in American culture and politics in the 1950s and the ‘60s and the ‘70s.

In my youth I was an ardent Buckley acolyte. I had dinner with him once in my college daze.

As I have learned more and more in my life since then, I have come to understand that it wasn’t his knowledge that was a burden to him—it was his blindness to many realities of the human condition.

Whining isn't a campaign strategy

It started out as a "bachelor's" degree....

Hatred is now legal in North Carolina

Book review: The First Congress

"Mannish Boy"....hold that thought

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Take the next step

A new life beckons, time after time….

I have learned to walk through the open door.

Movin’ on….

I dream a new life….

my living here is not done,

but I am going.

"Mannish Boy"....hold that thought

Word-proof

Soda consumption is still dropping

Book review: Dead Wake

Okay, it’s “O. K.”—OK?

Sunday, February 14, 2016

Understanding

Understanding the “o” word

“Old” is a highly charged word. A poem about the process of aging and being aged, without using the “o” word:

This post has been moved to my website:

http://richardsubber.com/understanding/

Monday, January 25, 2016

Another poet heard from….(part 9)

Naomi Shihab Nye offers some deft strokes in her poetry, and I’d like to tell you about one of them….

This post has been moved to my website:

http://richardsubber.com/another-poet-heard-from-part-9/

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

The wisdom of Ecclesiastes

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might…”

Ecclesiastes 9:10
King James VersionV

This is an elegant reminder for me that I am committed to doing what I want to do, committed to doing the right thing, committed to taking my best swing with all my heart….

Ecclesiastes is regarded as one of the Wisdom Books of the Old Testament. Likely it was written in the 3^rd century AD by an unknown author, who used as a pseudonym the Hebrew word Koheleth, usually translated as “teacher” or “preacher,” with the Latin transliteration Ecclesiastes.

“Do it with thy might” asserts a powerful admonition, with moral suasion and with raptured optimism.

Them’s words to live by.

Is it properly chilled?

A slow eruption of despair

Educators: what do they know and how long have they known it?

Book review: The Climate Casino

"See the [segregated] USA, in your Chevrolet..."

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Thursday, December 31, 2015

The year in pictures….

It’s time for the ever popular “Year In Review” in pictures.

Let’s try words, instead.

The Sunday New York Times offered “Year In Pictures” in its December 27 Sunday Review section.

All of 17 pages invested in 41 full-color photos of the stuff that happened around the globe in the momentous (every year is momentous) year that ends today.

Here’s the thing that bites: 34 of those pictures depicted people who were dead or dying or starving or in danger, people who were desperately fleeing their homelands to avoid danger, discrimination, starvation or death, children who were crying, afraid, lost, in pain, dead….

It’s hard to remember what the other seven pictures were….

2015 is going into the history books.

These words already are ashes on my lips.

Here’s hoping for a happier New Year.

We’ve got a lot of work to do.

"Simplify" the tax code?

Let's all sing "Purple Haze"

"...juice of toads."

Moby-Dick and stuff....

Gen. Grant kicked out the Jews....wha?

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Our Constitution: the people did not speak

The U. S. Constitution is the primary legal and political document in our history, our heritage, our political organization and our culture.

It was written largely by wealthy white men (about two-thirds of them were lawyers), and about 4% of the population voted for the delegates who ratified it.

Vox populi had nothing to do with it, just saying.

“We the People…” is a bit of an exaggeration.

How we got the Constitution is not a well-known story

I guess some folks may imagine that it was originally written on tablets by those mythical great men, The Founding Fathers.

To make a very long story short, the Constitution is a grotesquely politicized document that was conceived more or less on the sly by colonial delegates whose mandate merely was to fix up the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union (ratified 1781).

The Articles of Confederation permitted little centralized power in the brand new republic, and they proved close to useless in the initial efforts to effectively govern the independent colonies, defend their sovereignty and manage their internal trade and civil affairs.

On February 21, 1787, the Congress convened state delegates in Philadelphia for the “sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation" and to “render the federal constitution adequate to the exigencies of government and the preservation of the Union."

Generally, the delegates were the same elite group of men—wealthy and politically connected—who dominated the state legislatures after the Revolutionary War.

They went hog wild and cooked up the Constitution with centralized “federal” powers that were feared by many political and commercial interests. They did back room bargaining and political horse trading in Philadelphia and among the states to ultimately engineer ratification of the Constitution by state legislatures or specially convened assemblies in 11 states in late 1788. North Carolina and Rhode Island finally joined the crowd in 1790.

By the way, there was no popular vote on the Constitution. In fact, only about 150,000 white men voted for the delegates to state conventions that ratified the document. In 1787, the total white population of the 13 former colonies was about 3,671,000.

Worse than Fahrenheit 451

Raptor

Wave goodbye to the "middle class"

The art of Robert Louis Stevenson

"Music in my own house? Wow!"

Monday, December 7, 2015

The wisdom of Sam Levenson (part 3)

“One of the virtues of being very young is

that you don't let the facts

get in the way of your imagination.”

Sam Levenson 1911-1980

American humorist, writer, teacher, TV celeb and journalist

I am an insufferable fan of the facts.

Imagination also gets my vote, and sometimes the twain need not interfere with each other.

I have a grandfatherly perspective on this. I love to hear my kids spinning a tale or making up a song on the fly. It’s a wonderment to hear their freelance explanations of Santa Claus and rain and why flowers die and how the astronauts can survive in space.

Their cautionary tales about animal parents taking care of their young are sophisticated in their concern, and carefree in their attribution of human values and familial love….sometimes I feel like I’m on a mission to soak up enough free-range delight and fanciful understanding to keep my brain and my heart from getting older, at least for an hour or two….

I never tell the kids a lie.

Sometimes I collaborate in keeping the dried-up facts in the back pocket for a while.

...but I mean...

The yin and yang of productivity

"You can't dance in a long dress."

A Farewell to Arms

Evolution "deniers"

Friday, November 27, 2015

Evolution “deniers”

Charles Darwin went to his printer 156 years ago with the book that stood science, philosophy, religion and mankind on their collective heads.

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was a smash hit—in the bookshops, at least. The first press run of 1,250 copies sold out quickly, and the book went through six editions in 13 years.

A few years ago a first edition copy was sold by Christie’s for $194,500. Bibliophiles guess that perhaps 1,000 copies of the first edition are still tucked away in institutional and private libraries.

Several of them are sold every year.

You probably know that, although the book enjoyed some degree of popularity among both scientists and late 19^th century popular science readers, Darwin’s startling conclusion that human beings evolved from ape-like ancestors was wildly debated and disputed immediately after he published the book. The debate, dispute and denial continues today.

It seems to me that the “evolution deniers” got a 100-year head start on the today’s global climate change deniers.

For some folks, it is an apparently enduring capacity of human nature to ignore facts and scientifically rigorous thinking when some combination of ignorance, myth, belief, greed and fear makes it comfortable to do so.

Read here about the other evolution theorist, Alfred Russel Wallace

The Revolutionary War didn't end at Yorktown

At the juncture

Pulling the curtain away....

Book review: Shawshank Redemption

Keeping track of time

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Words, words, words

I was intrigued by a passage on early transliteration of key words in the New Testament, in a most fascinating book about the history of the English language. Ooops, you yawned. Give me a chance.

Owen Barfield, in History in English Words, explains that “passionate Hebrew meanings were gradually imported into the cold and clear-cut Greek words” during the centuries, before the life of Jesus, when Egyptian Jewish scholars translated Hebrew scriptures in the Greek (Koine Greek) language to create what is known as the Septuagint.

The meanings of words change continuously, with changes in knowledge and social interaction, evolving cultural milieu, travel and other environmental factors. This has been happening since humankind started talking.

Barfield relates what happened in plain talk: “Seeking for words to convey such notions as ‘sin,’ ‘righteousness,’ ‘defilement,’ ‘abomination,’ ‘ungodly,’ the Jewish translators had to do the best they could with noises which to Heraclitus and Plato had implied something more like ‘folly,’ ‘integrity,’ ‘dirt,’ ‘objectionable practice,’ ‘ignorant.’

The Greek version of the scriptures was known in the synagogues of Palestine. It’s possible that Jesus

read it.

I wonder what Jesus thought the words meant.

Source:

Owen Barfield, History in English Words (Hudson, NY: The Lindisfarne Press, 1953), 114-15.

The Six Grandfathers

Book review: A Literary Life: A Second Memoir

Not your daddy's bookshelf

"Daddy, I need another book!"

King George as a kid....

Saturday, August 15, 2015

To err is….

Well, let’s just talk about mistakes for a sec.

I’ve always tried to live with the conviction that a mistake is a temporary wrong thing….as long as you catch it and fix it. Nothing to get really worried about. Nothing to start a fight about. Often, it’s not really a performance issue in the workplace.

Confucius said much the same thing:

“If you make a mistake and do not correct it, this is a mistake.”

It may seem that this is rather circular and, perhaps, imperiously silly. Still, I think the old teacher was peeling away the layers of the mistake onion—a false step, if corrected, loses its meaning and its impact.

Anybody who never makes a mistake won’t have any idea what I’m talking about.

Here’s another thought, from The Little Corporal:

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

Mistakes may indeed be tactical or even strategic—if someone else is making them.

Science ruins everything....

"...the very best story of diablerie..."

Really?

The bad news about the good news

Better off in North Korea?

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Science ruins everything

The world and universe we live in is what it is, although some folks insist on their right to believe otherwise.

Let’s be straight here: for example, believing that the earth was made in six days doesn’t make it so.

The reference to 1543 calls to mind the work of Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish mathematician and astronomer of the Renaissance who startled the Western world by publishing his evidence (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium) of a heliocentric solar system—sun at the center, planets revolving around it. It took a while for that to sink in.

Full disclosure: Copernicus had nothing to say about Santa Claus.

Same old, same old

The Declaration was a re-write

Same old, same old....

Beguiled by speed....

Miep Gies saved Anne Frank's diary

Monday, August 10, 2015

Carpe diem, annotated….

Seize the dawn, your way....

ditto for "...every beast of the field..."

"...and every bird of the air..."

Miep Gies saved Anne Frank's diary

"...inter librorum copias."

The rain comes in...

Always

Yes, singing

Immensity is tapping....

Sunday, June 28, 2015

Think about what matters….

If you think you aren’t sure what “pathos” means, it’s your lucky day, take a look at this picture:

Paul Farmer isn’t an animal rights activist—he’s a doctor and an anthropologist and a humanitarian, he’s one of those people who doesn’t mind that he’s uncomfortable while he’s actually doing good.

His plaintive remark about lives that “matter less” was not directed at this bear or this scene. He was talking about our concern, or lack thereof, for the human lives that are degraded and could be made better by our more conscientious attention to doing the right thing.

The picture won’t let you look away easily. You know the bear isn’t happy. The boys are oblivious to that reality.

Think about some realities that you know you shouldn’t ignore.

The wisdom of Ivan Doig

Reliable political polling is dead

The staff of life....

Paying top dollar for....what?

"Voter fraud" is not the problem....

Thursday, May 3, 2012

The wisdom of Edgar Allan Poe

Everything I write now is posted on my website:

http://richardsubber.com/

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

"And so being young
and dipped in folly,
I fell in love
with melancholy."

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Poe offers much to like for so many people, I think his poetry is under-appreciated….and try reading The Tell-Tale Heart when you're home alone some evening, and it's unpleasant outside, and you would really prefer to feel pleasant inside, except you're reading the masterpiece…

I really only like the first half of Poe's snippet, melancholy ain't my thing….."dipped in folly" suggests the exotic and self-indulgent excess of youth, mostly not fatal because it's usually hauled along by optimism and rescued once in a while by love….

If you're not personally in the "youth" category any more, be prepared to supply the love, let's keep pushing melancholy into the next county somewhere…

Chautauqua, revisited....

....another 3rd grade tour

Before comic books there were....

"Blood-and-thunder" for only 10 cents

When the next step is a jump....

Pay your taxes to rebuild schools

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

The wisdom of Gustav Mahler

"Tradition is tending the flame, it's not worshipping the ashes."

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

I think it's not well known that this late-Romantic Austrian composer worked primarily in his life as a conductor, and only later did his music become as popular as it is today. Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten acknowledged influence from Mahler's musical legacy.

Mahler's forward-looking comment about tradition appeals to me…..I tend to think of myself more as a traditionalist than as an early adopter, but I take Mahler's point: the great benefits of tradition are not the reward for looking backward, they are the energy and revelation we can adapt as we work at living a good life…