Upton Sinclair, an appreciation

My ever-helpful brother Paul sent me an article that appeared in The New York Times nearly two years ago. I disagree with her assessment of Lanny’s character as a man of action rather than of introspection, but difference of opinion is what makes horse races. Not only an interesting article on its own, but particularly in context of the two Upton Sinclair communications posted here.

Revisit to Old Hero Finds He’s Still Lively

By JULIE SALAMON
Published: July 22, 2005

When I was about to turn 12, my mother came across a set of familiar books in a sale bin at a secondhand bookstore in Cincinnati, about 60 miles from our home in rural Ohio. She remembered being mesmerized when she read them years before, and bought the entire set for me, for my birthday.

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Upton Sinclair, shown in 1933, wrote 11 Lanny Budd books, including a Pulitzer Prize winner.

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Culture wars

We all know how hard it is for fundamentalists, the mainline religious, and what are called New Agers to live together. Although the three groups all believe in the reality of spirit, in a very real sense they live in radically different worlds, because they perceive different realities.

But those three at least believe that we are a blend of body, mind and spirit. Materialists eliminate spirit as “unscientific,” whatever that means. Behaviorist psychologists, if I understand their arguments, eliminate even mind, regarding thought and all internal human existence (presumably including their own) as an accidental by-product of chemical processes of the brain.

How can people holding such different viewpoints live comfortably together?

Well, we can’t. Not very comfortably. Strained tolerance is about as well as the various sides usually do. Each sees its own values under assault; each feels that its values are not respected by others or by society as a whole; each (to cite yet a third case of the same thing seen differently) sees others living in a fantasyland and forcing others to live there as well.

Continue reading Culture wars