Stray Thoughts

“Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

“If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.

“This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.”

Thursday, June 8, 1978

I was reading Mumford back in 1974 while ostensibly engaged in running in the Democratic congressional primary. What a misfit between my inner and outer lives! Yet what I was reading did apply, it’s just that I couldn’t figure out how to apply it. I knew more than I could express, and I could express more than I could yet embody. My instincts for truth were good, but as yet I had no way to live what I was beginning to know.

From Lewis Mumford, Interpretations and Forecasts, p 444:

Continue reading Mumford on ourselves and the world

Thomas Merton was an extraordinary man, a Protestant who became a Catholic, a secular hedonist who became a monk, an ambitious writer who cloistered himself away from the world. His autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain, though heavily censored by the religious authorities he had subordinated himself to, remains a fascinating window into another man’s soul.

I have thought about the following quotation a lot: it might be said (though Merton wouldn’t have thought of it that way) to deal with the question of which takes precedence, the part of ourselves that lives within time-space or that part that lives beyond.

Continue reading Merton on ambition

Want to know why the coming age will be different from the one that is dying around us? It is because no person and no civilization is large enough to encompass everything; for every truth we accept there is an equally important truth that we reject, and so some things that are true must seem mere superstition to us, and some things that are self-evidently true to us are not, in a larger sense, or seen from another viewpoint, nearly so self-evident, and perhaps not nearly so true.

Lewis Mumford in Interpretations and Forecasts quotes T.E. Hulme as saying, The difference between historical periods is the difference between the categories of their thought.

When are 50 million fleas more valuable than one elephant? When the fleas are volunteers and the their efforts are coordinated. As this article demonstrates. People doing something for the love of it, directed by those who know how to coordinate their efforts, are accomplishing more than the professionals alone could do, just out of sheer volume. You’d almost think there was a lesson in there somewhere….

From http://news.aol.com/article/sky-watcher-spies-gassy-cosmic-ghost/119539?icid=200100125x1207156595x1200357017

Sky Watcher Spies Gassy ‘Cosmic Ghost’

CHICAGO (Aug. 5) – A Dutch primary school teacher and amateur astronomer has discovered what some are calling a “cosmic ghost,” a strange, gaseous object with a hole in the middle that may represent a new class of astronomical object.
The teacher, Hanny van Arkel, discovered the object while volunteering in the Galaxy Zoo project, which enlists the help of members of the public to classify galaxies online.

Continue reading The power of co-operation

Does this begin to sound familiar? This, from The Age of Arthur: a History of the British Isles from 350 to 650, by John Morris.

[As the Roman occupation of Briton ended]
“Old men mourned; but younger men were capable of looking to the future with confidence, even welcoming escape from a dead past. One young Briton wrote home from Sicily:
“You tell me that everyone is saying that the world is coming to an end. So what? It happened before. Remember Noah’s time…. but after the flood men were holier.”
The continuous history of a thousand years of Greek and Roman civilization had suddenly snapped, leaving men nakedly aware, at the time, that the end had come. Those who could look beyond the deluge with assurance had already written off the headless corpse of the Roman Empire. They were the conscious architects of Christendom, impatient to clear away the debris of the past that they might build upon its ruins a new society, that which in retrospect we call the “middle ages.”