Thomas Hobbes

been reading "Ethics the Essential Writings" by Gordon Marino and read the chapter on Thomas Hobbes so I thought I would do a quick write up of what I read.

Thomas Hobbes is known for his writings on notable ideas such as the social contract theory of government and his views on absolute sovereignty. Hobbes unfortunatly grew up in a time of political turmoil that in turn influenced his view on man and philosophy. On mankind Hobbes famously wrote:

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

as we can see Hobbes did not see mankind in the most positive light and came to the conclusion that "the object of man's desire is not to enjoy once only, and for one instant of time, but to assure forever the way of his future desire". Thomas Hobbes saw man in his natural as only working to secure his/her own safety at the expense of future gains, to counter this problem he proposed that mankind unite to avoid the ugly fate of the natural man and:

"confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will: ... This is more than consent, or concord; it is a real unity of them all in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man with every man, in such manner as if every man should say to every man: I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition; that thou give up, thy right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner."

 Thomas Hobbes had extreme views and I while I can see the benefit of having every individual submit their individual will to one person so as to avoid the discontent and quarrels of competing views, and while I may have misunderstood Thomas Hobbes I still think that there is a unique feature of the individual that needs to be preserved and protected. Call me crazy but I think that there still is a way to protect the individual and ones right to conflicting viewpoints while still preserving unity.

Final excerpt from Contact by Carl Sagan

They had been right to keep the truth from her. She was not sufficiently advanced to receive that signal, much less decrypt it. She had spent her career attempting to make contact with the most remote and alien of strangers, while in her own life she had made contact with hardly anyone at all. She had been fierce in debunking the creation myths of others, and oblivious to the lie at the core of her own. She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

 ***

Finished Contact by Carl Sagan last night and let me say that I was impressed by his writing, I never knew him as much as a writer. I found the book to be revealing of a deep philosophy of life that I didnt know Sagan possessed. I found this video expresses a similar philosophy to what he wrote in contact, here is a glimpse of his thoughts:

Oh how I would love to gain the perspective that Carl Sagan had as an astronomer. to even grasp a fraction of how he understood the vastness of the universe and utterly insignificant scale of our own existence. After reading this book I can see how people say that Astronomy is a science that stretches your perceptions of the world and causes you to reconsider once held beliefs.

Throughout the book he writes (through the experiences of the characters) of how contemplating the vastness of the universe evokes feelings not unlike those of a religious experience or a Numinous experience. 

Before I had read Contact I was under the impression that Carl Sagan was an Atheist, now after reading the book I think I would say that Carl Sagan was very much a religious man (officially he said he was an agnostic),
just not in the same way we would normally say someone is religious. On religion he said:

The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.

What this quote doesn't show is his deep, personal, view of the universe. How the complete insignificance of the Earth in comparison to the unimaginable size of the universe should cause us to reconsider deeply held beliefs of how we treat and view each other. To take a step back and ask the question "does this really matter? is this something that the only known intelligent beings in the universe should be doing?  Dont we deserve to be treated better and likewise treat others better?", were the questions that in my mind really mattered to Carl Sagan.

I think that the significance of a book is only truly apparent to a reader after a period of time has passed. Enough time to let the most important parts stew in your mind till you finally understand and know what the author was trying to say, and connect it with your previous thoughts and feelings. Only after a period of time has passed I think will you know how the book influenced you. Maybe a follow-up post will be in order

Excerpt from Contact by Carl Sagan

  "I want to know what you think of us," she said shortly, "what you really think."
He did not hesitate for a moment. "All right. I think it's amazing that you've done as well as you have.You've got hardly any theory of social organization, astonishingly backward economic systems, no grasp of the machinery of historical prediction, and very little knowledge about yourselves. Considering how fast your world is changing, it's amazing you haven't blown yourselves to bits by now. That's why we don't want to write you off just yet. You humans have a certain talent for adaptability--at least in the short term."
  "That's the issue, isn't it?"
  "That's one issue. You can see that, after a while, the civilizations with only short-tem perspectives just aren't around. They work out their destinies also."

On Reading

Rarely have young people been expected to have truly deep knowledge of particular texts. Instead, education, especially in its "liberal arts" embodiments, has been devoted to providing students with navigational tools—with enough knowledge to find their way through situations that they might confront later in life. (Even the old English public schools flogged their students through years of Latin and Greek not because Latin and Greek were intrinsically valuable, still less useful, but because the discipline of such study would have a salutary effect on young men's characters. And these are the terms in which survivors of that system typically praise it.) This is one of the ways in which the artes liberales are supposed to be "liberal," that is, "liberating": They free you to make your own way through the challenges of life without requiring external props.

this is the sort of education we need to be getting in our schools. these days there are so many different avenues for getting information it is easy to be overcome with information overload. As noted in the article information overload has been heralded as a problem since books were first printed on the Gutenberg press, and since then many techniques have been developed to try and overcome this problem. Techniques such as speed reading or skimming are advocated, and while these techniques work for some and are effective in trying to filter out the good from the bad they simply don't address another symptom of information overload: that is the fact that there is so much information that even if you are able to snag a piece of literature we don't have the mental determination to deep, focused attention needed for serious analysis and learning.

A Liberal Education is the sort of education I want, an education that doesn't just fill me up with knowledge and trivia but that build character and the attributes necessary to lean on my own, yet as the article discusses it is something that is difficult to teach. Rarely do people have the passion, focus, self determination or whatever you want to call it these days to not only search out a book but become engaged and actively thinking, interacting with what an author of a literary work is trying to express. I myself find that I am far to passive and merely sit back and absorb what I can from a book.

Those who proclaimed that 'knowledge is power' meant that the only true education is self-education

Excerpt from Contact by Carl Sagan

At a few hundred kilometers altitude, the Earth fills half your sky, and the band of blue that stretches from Mindanao to Bombay, which your eye encompasses in a single glance, can break your heart with its beauty. Home, you think. Home. This is my world. This is where I come from. Everyone I know, everyone I ever heard of, grew up down there, under that relentless and exquisite blue. You race eastward from horizon to horizon, from dawn to dawn, circling the planet in an hour and a half. After a while, you get to know it, you study its idiosyncrasies and anomalies. You can see so much with the naked eye. Florida will soon be in view again. Has that tropical storm system you saw last orbit, swirling and racing over the Caribbean, reached Fort Lauderdale? Are any of the mountains in the Hindu Kush snow-free this summer? You tend to admire the aquamarine reefs in the Coral Sea.

You look at the West Antarctic Ice Pack and wonder whether its collapse could really inundate all the coastal cities on the planet. In the daylight, though, it's hard to see any sign of human habitation. But at night, except for the polar aurora, everything you see is due to humans, humming and blinking all over the planet. That swath of light is eastern North America, continuous from Boston to Washington, a megalopolis in fact if not in name. Over there is the burn off of natural gas in Libya. The dazzling lights of the Japanese shrimp fishing fleet have moved toward the South China Sea. On every orbit, the Earth tells you new stories. You can see a volcanic eruption in Kamchatka, a Saharan sandstorm approaching Brazil, unseasonably frigid weather in New Zealand. You get to thinking of the Earth as an organism, a living thing. You get to worry about it, care for it, wish it well. National boundaries are as invisible as meridians of longitude, or the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. The boundaries are arbitrary.

The planet is real. Spaceflight, therefore, is subversive. If they are fortunate enough to find themselves in Earth orbit, most people, after a little meditation, have similar thoughts. The nations that had instituted spaceflight had done so largely for nationalistic reasons; it was a small irony that almost everyone who entered space received a startling glimpse of a transnational perspective, of the Earth as one world. It wasn't hard to imagine a time when the predominant loyalty would be to this blue world, or even to the cluster of worlds huddling around the nearby yellow dwarf star on which humans, once unaware that every star is a sun, had bestowed the definite article: the Sun. It was only now, when many people were entering space for long periods and had been afforded a little time for reflection, that the power of the planetary perspective began to be felt.

Excerpt from Contact by Carl Sagan

Like doctors and lawyers, the vendors of religion rarely criticize one another's wares,Joss observed. But one night he attended services at the new Church of God, Crusader, to hear the younger Billy Jo Rankin, triumphantly returned from Odessa, preach to the multitude. Billy Jo enunciated a stark doctrine of Reward, Retribution, and the Rapture. But tonight was a healing night. The curative instrument, the congregation was told, was the holiest of relics-holier than a splinter of the True Cross, holier even than the thigh bone of Saint Teresa of Avila that Generalissimo Francisco Franco had kept in his office to intimidate the pious. What Billy Jo Rankin Brandished was the actual amniotic fluid that surrounded and protected our Lord. The liquid had been carefully preserved in an ancient earthenware vessel that once belonged, so it was said, to Saint Ann. The tiniest drop of it would cure what ails you, he promised, through a special act of Divine Grace. This holiest of holy waters was with us tonight.

Joss was appalled, not so much that Rankin would attempt so transparent a scam but that any of the parishioners were so credulous as to accept it. In his previous life he had witnessed many attempts to bamboozle the public. But that was entertainment. This was different. This was religion. Religion was too important to gloss the truth, much less to manufacture miracles. He took to denouncing this imposture from the pulpit.

Joss argued that in ever religion there was a doctrinal line beyond which it insulted the intelligence of its practitioners. Reasonable people might disagree as to where that line should be drawn, but religions trespassed well beyond it at their peril. People were not fools, he said.

 ***

"The theologians seem to have recognized a special, nonrational--I wouldn't call it
irrational--aspect of the feeling of sacred or holy. They call it 'numinous.' The term was first
used by... let's see... somebody named Rudolph Otto in a 1923 book, The Idea of the Holy. He believed that humans were predisposed to detect and revere the numinous. He called it the misterium tremendum. Even my Latin is good enough for that.
"In the presence of the misterium tremendum, people feel utterly insignificant but, if I read this right, not personally alienated. He thought of the numinous as a thing 'wholly other,' and the human response to it as 'absolute astonishment.'

Now, if that's what religious people talk about when they use words like sacred or holy, I'm with them. I felt something like that just in listening for a signal, never mind in actually receiving it. I think all of science elicits that sense of awe."

"Now listen to this." She read from the text:
Throughout the past hundred years a number of philosophers and social scientists have
asserted the disappearance of the sacred, and predicted the demise of religion. A study of the history of religions shows that religious forms change and that there has never been unanimity on the nature and expression of religion Whether or not man..."Sexists write and edit religious articles, too, of course." She returned to the text.
Whether or not man is now in a new situation for developing structures of ultimate
values radically different from those provided in the traditionally affirmed awareness of the sacred is a vital question.
"So?"
"So, I think the bureaucratic religions try to institutionalize your perception of the numinous instead of providing the means so you can perceive the numinous directly--like looking through a six-inch telescope. If sensing the numinous is at the heart of religion, who's more religious would you say--the people who follow the bureaucratic religions or the people who teach themselves science?"

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selection from "Contact" by Carl Sagan

For all the tenure of humans on Earth, the night sky had been a companion and an inspiration.

The stars were comforting. They seemed to demonstrate that the heavens were created for the benefit and instruction of humans. This pathetic conceit became the conventional wisdom worldwide. No culture was free of it. Some people found in the skies an aperture to the religious sensibility. Many were awestruck and humbled by the glory and scale of the cosmos.
Others were stimulated to the most extravagant flights of fancy.
At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. I the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population had abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended only with the dawn of space exploration.

books have come a long way

Book covers

Why do they make crappy book covers. Yeah I know you are not supposed to judge a book by it's cover, but book covers should reflect at least the same attention to detail and depth of thought that the author placed in the work

Reading

So many books to read yet so little time! What a wonderful yet frustrating problem to have.
I need to find better ways of managing time and efforts so I don't squander what precious resources I have right now.

Looking forward to picking up some more books tomorrow. Possibly "The Dispossessed" by Ursula Le Guin (I think that is how you spell it) or "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein

Also am looking forward to possibly picking up a copy of "Ethics" by Gordon Marino which was recommended to me by a friend. Marino also has a book on existentialism which is something I would be interested in reading as well.