Why US foreign policy keeps being bad

Sep 21 2019

Meditation as a meaning maker

I’m afraid I must take issue with my friend Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at Columbia University (whom I had the pleasure of talking with on meaningoflife.tv last year).

On his Scientific American blog, Scott recently posted an interesting piece about what kinds of things give people’s lives meaning.

It turns out people say they derive meaning from (among other things) extreme emotional experiences—not just positive ones, but negative ones as well. Which makes sense, when you think about it. The death of a close relative is an intensely negative emotional experience, one you wish you’d been able to avoid—but you certainly wouldn’t call it meaningless.

Newsworthy

How Trump and MBS helped get that giant Saudi oil plant blown up

Washington spent the first part of this week trying to figure out who blew up some Saudi oil facilities. Was it Houthi rebels in Yemen, who proudly claimed responsibility? Or was it Iran? Or was it both—an attack conceived and orchestrated by Iran but executed by Iran’s Houthi allies?

There’s an important and underappreciated sense in which the answer doesn’t matter. The moral of the story is the same regardless of how the blame is distributed between Iran and the Houthis. Namely: If you don’t want people to blow stuff up, don’t attack them in the first place!

Psychology Of Tribalism

Plant-based game theory

Sunflowers, believe it or not, play non-zero-sum games with one another—and do so with impressive skill! At least, that’s one reading of a study published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

A typical sunflower, not surprisingly, tends to send its roots more profusely into nutrient-rich patches of soil than into nutrient-poor patches. But two researchers—Megan Ljubotina and James Cahill—report that, when there is another sunflower in the neighborhood, this behavior gets recalibrated.

If much closer to the nutrient-rich patch than its neighbor, the sunflower sends its roots into the patch more profusely than when there’s no neighbor around—as if it were rushing to colonize land before a rival gets to it.

Progressive Realism

Samantha and the Power of Denial

Samantha Power—who wrote a Pulitzer prize–winning book about genocide that catapulted her onto President Obama’s foreign policy team, where she was a forceful advocate for humanitarian military intervention—has just published another book. It’s a memoir called The Education of an Idealist.

So far the commentary on the book illustrates a general principle of foreign policy commentary: the more your views depart from the establishment consensus, and the more willing you are to attack credentialed members of that establishment, the smaller the platform you’re allowed to express those views on.

Readings

In a post ominously titled “A Middle East One Step Closer to Its ‘1914 Moment’,” the International Crisis Group does a good job of sizing up the implications of the attack on Saudi oil facilities.

The New York Times Magazine interviews Ram Dass, author of the 1971 pop-eastern-philosophy classic Be Here Now, about the ego, the soul, and death—including his own eventual death, which he says is not a very big deal since “the soul is infinite.”

In Prospect Magazine, Ray Monk, a philosopher and Wittgenstein’s biographer, argues that the landscape of modern philosophy might be quite different had it not been for the premature death of the philosopher R.G. Collingwood in 1943—a death that left Gilbert Ryle, a fervent champion of analytic philosophy, with unrivaled power in the British philosophy establishment. (Monk doesn’t get into this, but Ryle became Daniel Dennett’s mentor. And, though Dennett’s writings on the mind-body problem don’t echo his mentor’s writings to the point of saying that consciousness doesn’t exist, I’ve always had trouble seeing the difference between what Dennett does say about consciousness and saying that it doesn’t exist. Some other observers have had the same reaction. Maybe that helps account for the old joke about Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained—that it should have been called Consciousness Explained Away. In any event, Ryle’s book The Concept of Mind was basically an overt attempt to explain consciousness away; he coined the term “ghost in the machine” as a dismissive label.)

If you’ve been waiting for an entertaining writer to spend a whole article playfully ridiculing Silicon Valley startups that are in the psychological therapy business, your ship has come in. Nellie Bowles does the honors in the New York Times.

What I did this summer: During the newsletter’s six-week summer break, as its name was slowly morphing from Mindful Resistance to Nonzero, I had conversations with some interesting people, including: Political scientist Francis Fukuyama on his book Identity; Israeli scholar and politician Yael Tamir on her book Why Nationalism; Ronald Purser on his book McMindfulness; and, last but certainly not least cosmic, political scientist Alexander Wendt on his book Quantum Mind and Social Science. All appeared on either bloggingheads.tv or meaningoflife.tv, and all can be heard on The Wright Show podcast feed, available at a podcast app near you.