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
Now in print, available most everywhere
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). As explained, 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.
“An afterword characterizes the contents as having ‘the ancient and succinct style of the sutra,’ indicating the sort of gonglike presence of religious feeling that clearly underpins its ideas. For like a sutra, the text consists of numbered sentences (370 of them) most of which are fewer than 30 words, and none more than 50, I think. Speaking literally, however, they are less like religious scripture and more like 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.)
Unicycle, the new 6x9 edition
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
Now in print, available most everywhere
“Plot is hardly the concern of this rich, dense, playful novel of philosophical, historical, and metaphysical inquiry. In Paul Cornell du Houx’s book, scientists, 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, all set in existence itself’s jumbled slipstream of connections, rather than conventional narrative… The novel’s chief attraction is Cornell du Houx’s witty, daring, allusive prose… Imaginative vigor pulses through descriptive scenes…” —The BookLife Prize
