Currently reading: An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942โ1943 by Rick Atkinson. A brilliantly pitiless account โ pitiless in that Atkinson makes no attempt to disguise how radically incompetent the Allies were at this early stage of the war. Strategic planners mentally deformed by arrogance, ignorance, or national chauvinism; tactical planners who couldnโt plan; logisticians who couldnโt organize; field commanders who were reckless when circumstances called for caution and timid when they called for boldness; navigators who couldnโt navigate; helmsmen who couldnโt steer; drivers who couldnโt drive; communications officers who couldnโt send or receive communications; artillerymen who couldnโt aim; infantrymen who ran brainlessly in any and all directions or went to sleep under hedges. If it werenโt so tragic it would be farcical. And if, as some wanted, the bosses had ignored North Africa and headed straight for France, Iโd be writing this in German. ๐
Though I have abandoned reading McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things, I’m still noting how many people who know nothing about the hemispheres of the brain nevertheless see our internal divides. For insistence, here’s Koลakowski from The Presence of Myth:
Metaphysical questions and beliefs reveal an aspect of human existence not revealed by scientific questions and beliefs, namely, that aspect that refers intentionally to nonempirical unconditioned reality. The presence of this intention does not guarantee the existence of the referents. It is only evidence of a need, alive in culture, that that to which the intention refers should be present. But this presence cannot in principle be the object of proof, because the proof-making ability is itself a power of the analytical mind, technologically oriented, which does not extend beyond its tasks. The idea of proof, introduced into metaphysics, arises from a confusion of two different sources of energy active in manโs conscious relation to the world: the technological and the mythical.
The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.
I’ve added a highly selective bibliography to Cosmos Malick.
The chatbot hopes for
Right-brain wisdom, but gets only
Hallucinations.
