Archive for December, 2014
- Who’s makin’ a list? on December 24, 2014
From nature's asymmetry to the ethics of liberal democracy, by Paul Cornell du Houx
The body of the economy is described as a living organism within an environment of “asymmetric polarities of change” that require balanced action inspired by a deep democracy revealed in Nature herself.
“Yoganomics, an afterword explains, is derived from a similar work first privately circulated in 1979 and now updated from a book titled Unicycle: The Book of Fictitious Symmetry and Non-Random Truth (Nature’s Democratic Pi)… Cornell du Houx, with a background in economics, mathematics and literature, ‘developed a math that lets us read the ethics of natural law within the environment.’ This is a not inaccurate, but incomplete summary of Yoganomics‘s subject matter, which skates an enormous range of philosophical material…
“The text consists of numbered sentences (370 of them) … aphorisms, some of which have a vatic quality, others plainly conversational. They cover quantum physics, mathematics and pi; politics; various real and figurative modes of addiction; gender; the perils of climate change; the Tao; communist China; Plato; ranked-choice voting; and many more subjects, with recurring focal points involving socioeconomics, nature, environmental degradation, and the dangers of ‘absolutes’ in everyday thinking.
“For examples: ‘340. We need an economics based on the value of nature’s moral compass.’ ‘328. Markets do not depend on competition – they do depend on cooperation.’ …
“[The sutras] act like firecrackers in your intellectual reading consciousness, some loud enough to reverberate and make you wonder what else is out there.”
—Dana Wilde, MaineToday, Morning Sentinel / Kennebec Journal
(In color inside and out, with art.)
The observation that nature is asymmetric allows us to introduce reasoning that is as organized as the logic of symmetries currently in use, by using symmetry as a foil in a proof by contradiction.
One result is the discovery that nature, the universe, does indeed have a non-random sense of direction with fortunate ethical consequences and implications for political science and other fields of inquiry.
“Very scrupulously set out. It is extremely well written and beautifully literate.” —Dr. Diané Collinson, author of Plain English, Fifty Major Philosophers, Fifty Eastern Thinkers, coauthor of works including the Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers
“This book contains some serious mathematics — smart, thought-provoking, and engrossing.” —William H. Barker, PhD, Isaac Henry Wing Professor of Mathematics, Bowdoin College, coauthor of the textbook Continuous Symmetry: From Euclid to Klein
In “this rich, dense, playful novel of philosophical, historical, and metaphysical inquiry … lovers, actors, and Pagan gods face the consequences of a new invention that reveals the polarity of sex uniting all the universe’s particles and upends all post-Pagan theology. The material is fascinating, but the novel offers a series of erotic setpieces, extended monologues, comic colloquies, and even extended comic erotic colloquies…
“The novel’s chief attraction is Cornell du Houx’s witty, daring, allusive prose. The accounts of action, chiefly sex, are lyric and inventive … as characters explain the Slipstream or the metaphysics of sexual connection, or discuss the figure of ‘the Running Christ.’ Imaginative vigor pulses through descriptive scenes in which characters encounter gods and Shakespeare’s fairies…
“There are few philosophical erotic novels about reborn Christs, Shakespearean fairies, crop circles, Sir Lancelot, and the history of religious sacrifice — this book certainly brings fresh and unique material to the table … daring ideas and memorable prose.”
—The BookLife Prize by Publishers Weekly
River of Asymmetry