Years and years ago, I was entranced by James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. (It was to continue that story that I wrote my own novel Messenger.) It has seemed to me that much of the essence of that book can be deduced from these two quotations:
First, the high lama saying to Conway, “Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue.”
Second, the narrator saying of Conway, “… he was doomed, like millions, to flee from wisdom and be a hero.”
The history of humanity … evokes the picture of a creeping vine. If its prop is pulled up or broken, the plant creeps along the ground, unknowingly seeking a new support, another occasion to raise itself above the weeds, and as soon as it has found one it clings to it in an unconscious but untiring effort toward the light. It is sometimes mistaken; its choice may be bad; the branch it has adopted may be rotten; that is not its fault. The human flock obeys an obscure order: it must rise, and it cannot do so without a leader. Thank God, if there have been evil influences, they have been counteracted, on an average, by that of certain rare privileged men, comparable to the transitional animals who were in advance of their time. These men attained a higher stage of evolution, and had a great part to play, a high duty to fulfill, namely, to orient the march of humanity in the path which leads away from the animal. Strange to say, in spite of their handicaps, of the fact that the doctrine they taught was less pleasant and demanded sacrifice, it is they who gained the higher prestige in history, and their teachings outlasted and outshone all the others.
Lecompte de Nuoy, Human Destiny, p. 110-111
Mark Morford is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle’s website SFGate. He’s often a little over-the-top but often entertaining and usually pretty right. This is from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/04/23/notes042308.DTL&type=printable
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
This is the kind of thing that, given all our distractions, our celeb obsessions and happy drugs and bothersome trifles like family and bills and war and health care and sex and love and porn and breathing and death, tends to fly under the radar of your overspanked consciousness, only to be later rediscovered and brought forth and placed directly in front of your eyeballs, at least for a moment, so you can look, really look, and go, oh my God, I had no idea.
This is the kind of thing we forget.
In human terms, how are we to describe… our own Western civilization, or any other of the 10 or 20 civilizations which we can count up on our fingers? In human terms, I should say that each of these civilizations is, while in action, a distinctive attempt at a single great common human experience, or, when it is seen in retrospect, after the action is over, it is a distinctive instance of a single great common human experience. The enterprise or experience is an effort to perform an act of creation. In each of these civilizations, mankind, I think, is trying to rise above mere humanity — above primitive humanity, that is, — toward some higher kind of spiritual life. One cannot depict the goal because it has never been reached, — or, rather, I should say that it has never been reached by any human society. It has, perhaps, been reached by individual men and women. At least, I can think of certain saints and sages…. But if there have been a few transfigured men and women, there has never been such a thing as a civilized society. Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor. No known civilization has ever reached the goal of civilization yet. There has never been a communion of saints on earth. In the least uncivilized society at its least uncivilized moment, the vast majority of its members have remained very near indeed to the primitive human level. And no society has ever been secure of holding such ground as it has managed to gain in its spiritual advance.
Arnold Toynbee, Civilization on Trial
I saved this quotation in my journal many, many years ago. Every year that passes only proves the more how true it is.
Fear guiding what passes for policy in our national political circles leads us to put ever more reliance on the military, ever more resources into wars and the means of making wars, until we have become the danger, rather than the guardian against danger.
It is as if we have deliberately set out to reverse Confucius’ priorities. Continue reading Confucius on the foundations of the state
Thomas Merton was a Protestant before he became a Catholic, a very worldly writer and critic before he became a monk, an intellectual before he began to try to become something more profound than an intellectual.
His language does not speak to us, perhaps, couched as it is in words like God and sin. This is too bad, because he has profoundly important things to say to us in these final days of an old civilization and (one hopes!) the dawning days of a new one. The old civilization was rooted in individual ambition and competition; the new one will perhaps become rooted in a larger, higher kind of ambition of which, in this still benighted time, it is nearly useless to speak.
Do you think politicians are the important people who shape your world? Think again. Our world is shaped more by thinkers like this, it’s just that the effect takes longer to spread through the culture — and the effect, when it does arrive, is less likely to be chaos of the economic and political type. Notice, BTW, that his theory came from his “accidentally” leaving out some numbers, and then his thinking about what had happened as a result of his doing so. I put the quotes around the word “accidentally” not because I think he did it on purpose, but because it has become clear to me over the years that when the non-physical side of things wants to cause something to happen, such synchronistic events often precipitate them. This obit from http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_Chaos_Theory_Scientist_Edward_Lorenz_Dies_At_90_16477.html
Chaos Theory Scientist Edward Lorenz Dies At 90
On April 16, the world lost yet another remarkable scientific figure that marked the 20th century with his ideas of the chaos theory and the butterfly effect. Edward Norton Lorenz, who revolutionized meteorology by studying the effects of small variations in the initial condition of a dynamical system, which can lead to large and unpredictable variations in later stages of the system, died of cancer at the age of 90 on Wednesday, at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Continue reading Chaos Theory Scientist Edward Lorenz Dies At 90