Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

Although the literary theorist and anthropologist René Girard has many Silicon Valley disciples, surely the most notable of them is the German-born venture capitalist and founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel. A student of Girard’s while at Stanford in the late 1980s, Thiel would go on to report, in several interviews, and somewhat more sub-rosa in his 2014 book, From Zero to One, that Girard is his greatest intellectual inspiration. He is in the habit of recommending Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978) to others in the tech industry.

Girard has two big ideas, each intertwined with the other: the theory of mimesis, and the theory of the scapegoat. Michel Serres, another French theorist long resident at Stanford, and a strong advocate for Girard’s ideas, has described Girard as the “Darwin of the human sciences”, and has identified the mimetic theory as the relevant analog in the humanities of the Darwinian theory of natural selection.

For Girard, everything is imitation. Or rather, every human action that rises above “merely” biological appetite and that is experienced as desire for a given object, in fact is not a desire for that object itself, but a desire to have the object that somebody else already has.

More here.

Radek Vana in Inquiries:

We are never alone. And by this statement, I do not intend to argue for existence of some supernatural entities, aliens or God. We are never alone because we all share our bodies with trillions of symbiotic microorganisms that perform various physiological functions crucial for our health. In fact, they may be responsible for even more than that. Here, I present a view that the symbiotic microbiota is an important part of the complex system constituting our consciousness. By consciousness, I mean the type called phenomenal consciousness (Block 2002) which stands for the subjective experience of what is it like to be someone (see Nagel 1974).

If we look at the contemporary literature on consciousness (e.g. Dehaene 2014; Northoff 2014; Graziano 2015; Feinberg and Mallatt 2017), we can see that the current trend in philosophy of mind is to focus on the role of the brain. This seems quite reasonable since for so long we thought that it is just the brain that creates our mind. However, new biological discoveries in the last decade suggest that we were wrong and there are also other actors at play with a causal impact on our mental states1.

In this paper, I first introduce the concept of holobiont and explain what it signifies for the study of consciousness. Next, I focus on the role of the brain-gut-microbiome axis and its importance for the future research in philosophy of mind. Then, I discuss whether the brain is a necessary condition for the existence of consciousness at all, and finally I conclude that our consciousness is our emergent property caused by the brain-gut-microbiome axis.

More here.

Fran Quigley in Jacobin:

“As the World Turns” is not just the title of an old TV soap,
but a thing that happens year by year.” — Sean O’Saical

Letter from My Ancestors

We wouldn’t write this,
wouldn’t even think of it. We are working
people without time on our hands. In the old country,

we milk cows or deliver the mail or leave,
scattering to South Africa, Connecticut, Missouri,
and finally, California for the Gold Rush—

Aaron and Lena run the Yosemite campground, general
store, a section of the stagecoach line. Morris comes
later, after the earthquake, finds two irons

and a board in the rubble of San Francisco.
Plenty of prostitutes need their dresses pressed, enough
to earn him the cash to open a haberdashery and marry

Sadie—we all have stories, yes, but we’re not thinking
stories. We have work to do, and a dozen children. They’ll
go on to pound nails and write up deals, not musings.

We document transactions. Our diaries record
temperatures, landmarks, symptoms. We
do not write our dreams. We place another order,

make the next delivery, save the next
dollar, give another generation—you,
maybe—the luxury of time

to write about us.

by Krista Benjamin
from The Best American Poetry, 2006
Scribner, 2006

Joanna Blythman in The Guardian:

The investigative journalist Gary Taubes is known for his painstakingly researched and withering demolitions of the “eat less, move more” diet orthodoxy, but his latest book is personal. The Case for Keto is aimed at “those of us who fatten easily”. Taubes locates himself in this beleaguered group, “despite an addiction to exercise for the better part of a decade” and a diet of “low-fat, mostly plant ‘healthy’ eating”. “I avoided avocados and peanut butter because they were high in fat and I thought of red meat, particularly steak and bacon, as an agent of premature death. I ate only the whites of egg.” Yet still he remained overweight.

Taubes started to shed those pounds when he realised that one-size-fits-all diet advice fails, among other reasons, because people are metabolically different. Some of us can eat fattening carbohydrates and sugar and get away with it; others can’t. Those who claim to have “a sluggish metabolism” are too often seen as making lame excuses for their weakness and indulgence. This punitive view – that fat people could easily be thin people if only they would eat less and exercise more diligently – is wrong, says Taubes. It amounts to what the philosopher Francis Bacon called “wishful science”, based on “fancies, opinions and the exclusion of contrary evidence”.

More likely, people who are perpetually fighting to lose weight have “a metabolic disorder of excess fat accumulation”. They store fat when they ought to burn it for energy. They become “insulin-resistant”, meaning that their insulin levels stay higher for longer in a day than is ideal. These people are predisposed to hold on to fat, notably above the waist, rather than to mobilise it. The only solution for them, Taubes says, is keto.

More here.

Edward Sorel in The New York Times:

Priya Satia in Aeon:

After the Second World War, historians asked us to shift our focus from great men to the actions and experiences of ordinary people, to culture rather than institutions. This methodological shift to ‘history from below’ was political, supporting a democratic vision of political, social, intellectual and cultural agency as the Cold War stoked authoritarian impulses in the East and West. It sought to rectify historians’ paternalistic habit of writing about the people ‘as one of the problems Government has had to handle’, as E P Thompson put it, as objects rather than subjects of history. Influential as this trend was, great-man history retained a cultural hold too and, today, the would-be ‘great men’ dominating political stages around the world, however caricature in form, challenge democratic visions of how history has been and should be made. ‘History from below’ succeeded in throwing out the chimera of great men while preserving the chimera of the nation that was the most common excuse for their invocation. Revisiting its origins might reveal why.

Thompson is perhaps the figure most popularly associated with ‘history from below’, specifically his totemic work, The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Expansive as its cast is, its geographical scope is constricting. Though set in the era of British conquest of vast swathes of the world, it barely acknowledges that reality. This is doubly strange, given that Thompson wrote it while decolonisation was forcing Britons to contend with the ethics of empire, and was himself descended from a line of colonial missionaries deeply engaged with such matters. His classic text created an island template for the most progressive British history of the late-20th century, unwittingly legitimising the nostalgic view of ‘Little England’ that has culminated in Brexit. The book’s enormous impact also ironically endowed Thompson with fairly robust great-man status himself, as the iconic historian-activist of his time.

More here.