No. 14: Stifling norms, CBDCs, and Uncle Tom

Alcott/Aristotle/Baldwin/Beecher Stowe/Bergson/Cicero/Khaldun/Lenin/Newton/Orwell/Paine/Tolstoy

Here's some things people have been writing:

Baldwin’ wrote in 1962 that “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” That holds true for what feels like AI’s relentless march into our lives. ycombinator

Alcott’s free time in nature shaped her protagonist, Jo March, in Little Women, embodying the rebellion against stifling female norms that Alcott and other 19th-century women longed to embrace. Years later, this spirit echoed in the Fort Shaw Indian School Girls Basketball Team defied prevailing stereotypes of female and Indigenous “fitness”. nytimes

Newton’s laws are wrongly thought to apply to things with no forces acting on them. This blunder comes from a mistranslation from the original Latin to English. Old theories like Aristotle’s held that some bodies had a intrinsic motion didn’t help. scientificamerican

Bergson thought it unthinkable to reconstruct a poem based on the letters used without some understanding of the poem’s meaning. In a similar vein, AI can’t take the place of human intuition. hedgehogreview

Orwell’s dystopian worlds would be a good fit for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). A new book criticizes the shift from the gold standard and further warns of the possibility of governments wielding CBDCs as a form of dictatorial power, matching Orwell’s forebodings. thefederalist

Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, got blasted by James Baldwin in Everybody’s Protest Novel. He and many others loathed its reductive depictions of Black characters. And yet, it played an instrumental role in the abolitionist movement and societal awareness about slavery in the 19th century—a fact worth looking through the perspectives of folks like Frederick Douglass and the Josiah Henson. Josiah was the real-life inspiration for the ‘Uncle Tom’ character. theatlantic

Cicero’s thinking on balancing power shaped America’s mixed constitution. Later Paine believed that virtue and talent, key to good governance, are not hereditary. This was a big break with old prevailing aristocratic notions. joelonsdale

Ibn Khaldun, Lenin, and Tolstoy all thought much about society at large—in particular how they fail. Khaldun noted how polygamous societies last only a few generations. Lenin isn’t known for being a lawyer, but he was and its the most common profession for revolutionaries. In thinking on the topic, its useful to take Tolstoy’s approach of looking at the big picture and ignoring the individual. josephnoelwalker