MysteriumMagnum

Materialism and the Mysterium Magnum

"What has come to an end is the distinction between the sensual and the super-sensual, together with the notion, at least as old as Parmenides, that whatever is not given to the senses... is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears; that it is not just beyond sense perception but above the world of the senses... In increasingly strident voices, the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the danger of nihilism inherent in this development. The sensual... cannot survive the death of the super-sensual without nihilism setting in." Hannah Arendt

Not only is the universe stranger than we suspect; it is stranger than we can suspect. J. B. S. Haldane

The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about. Tom Stoppard

We are like flies crawling across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: we cannot see what angels and gods lie underneath the threshold of our perceptions. We do not live in reality; we live in our paradigms, our habituated perceptions, our illusions; the illusions we share through culture we call reality, but the true historical reality of our condition is invisible to us.

William Irwin Thompson

"The nothingness 'before' the creation of the universe is the most complete void that we can imagine - no space, time, or matter existed... Yet this unthinkable void converts itself into a plenum of existence - a necessary consequences of physical laws. Where are these laws written into that void? What "tells" the void that it is pregnant with a possible universe? It would seem that even the void is subject to a law, a logic that exists prior to space and time." Heinz Pagels

Just as we cannot bite our own teeth, the human mind cannot comprehend itself. Alan Watts paraphrase.

Something deeply hidden had to be behind things. Einstein

The task of the novelist is to deepen mystery, and mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind. Flannery O'Connor

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Shakespeare

"The whole is more than the sum of its parts"

Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory

The fact that we are totally unable to imagine a form of existence without space and time by no means proves that such an existence is itself impossible. Carl Jung

"The consciousness of the scientist, in his mechanized, dead and dumb universe, logically reaches the point where --- if he practices his science existentially and not merely intellectually -- the meaning of his own existence becomes an absurdity and he stands on the rim of the abyss of nihil face to face with his own nothingness. People are not aware of this dilemma. That it does not cause great concern is in itself a symptom of the sub-marine earthquake of which our most desperate world-problems are merely symptomatic... It is becoming ever clearer that the terrors of war, hunger and despoliation are neither economic, nor technological problems for which there are economic or technological solutions. They are primarily spiritual problems..." Frederick Franck

(Frederick Franck was born into a non-observant Jewish family in Holland. He was subsequently baptized a Protestant. After graduating as a dentist, Franck began the first dental clinic at Albert Schweitzer's hospital in West Africa. Later, having embarked a career as writer and artist, Mr. Franck heeded Pope John XXIII's call to build a society of peace on earth (Pacem in Terris.) Franck became the official artist of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and, as a tribute to Pope John, has created a temple of all faiths called Pacem in Terris on his property in Warwick, New York.)

"The future of a civilization depends on our overcoming the meaninglessness and hopelessness which characterizes the thought of men today." Albert Schweitzer

A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest. Martin Heiddeger

Not to dream boldly may turn out to be simply irresponsible. John Leonard

In this country we encourage "creativity" among the mediocre, but real bursting creativity appalls us. We put it down as undisciplined, as somehow "too much." Pauline Kael

We are not human beings trying to be spiritual. We are spiritual beings trying to be human. Jacquelyn Small

The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the wellbeing of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves. G. K. Chesterton Toronto, 1930

The problem is not bad politics, but a bad way of life. Wendell Berry

"The problems are our lives. In the 'developed countries', at least, the large problems occur because all of us are living either partly wrong or almost entirely wrong. It was not just the greed of corporate shareholders and the hubris of corporate executives that put the fate of Prince William Sound into one ship (the Exxon Valdez); it was also our demand that energy be cheap and plentiful.... To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers." "What Are People For," Wendell Berry http://www.alteich.com/links/berry.htm

"And so there is the Territory of self-righteousness. It is easy to assume that we do not participate in what we are not in the presence of. But if we are members of a society, we participate, willy-nilly, in its evils. Not to know this is obviously to be in error, but it is also to neglect some of the most necessary and the most interesting work. How do we reduce our dependency on what is wrong? .....

There is also the Territory of historical self-righteousness: if we had lived south of the Ohio in 1830, we would not have owned slaves; if we had lived on the frontier, we would have killed no Indians, violated no treaties, stolen no land.

The probability is overwhelming that we belong to a generation that will be found by its successors to have behaved deplorably. Not to know that is, again, to be in error and to neglect essential work, and some of this work, as before, is work of the imagination. How can we imagine our situation or our history if we think we are superior to it?" Wendell Berry

When asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi replied: "I think it would be a good idea."

The fullest life is impossible without an immovable belief in a Living Law in obedience to which the whole universe moves. Gandhi

The essential contribution Gandhi made to the 20th century thought was his insistence on the need for a lower standard of living... He maintained that the essence of civilization consists not in the multiplication of wants but in their deliberate and voluntary renunciation. He preached a higher standard of living and maintained that a lower level of material well-being was a necessary pre-requisite. Ronald Duncan

At a time when a large part of humankind is beginning to discard Christianity, it is worth while to understand clearly why it was originally accepted. It was accepted in order to escape, at last, from the brutality of antiquity. As soon as we discard it licentiousness returns, as is impressively exemplified by life in modern cities. Carl Gustav Jung

1700 years ago, Romans packed the Coliseum to cheer wild animals eating live human beings. This slaughter was, arguably, the ancient world's most sought-after entertainment. Royalty, nobility, professionals, artisans, laborers and peasants prized "a good seat at the games."

It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness. Self-interest remains the very religion of the corporate world. Paul Wachtel

Intentional activity is based on belief. Whether human beings subscribe to animist totems, to squabbling deities atop Mount Olympus, to the transcendental Father God of Judeo-Christianity, the agnosticism of Buddhism, the atheism of Jainism, the Golden Calf of free market capitalism, or Hinduism's lingam and yoni, belief is essentially religious. All core values intend to "re-ligature" ("re-ligare" = "re-ligion") the primordial rent in the human spirit. Open consideration of Belief qua Belief, whether "sacred" or "secular," "religious" or "political," "philosophical" or "theological," obliges us to re-value all cultural phenomena as attempts to ligate this existential breach.

Without this re-valuation, the military-industrial-educational complex becomes the "default value system." And so, the Golden Calf grows increasingly autonomous, arrogating to itself "the terms" of every debate. In consequence, debate is rendered meaningless by the force of bureau-institutional fascism predicated on unipolar (mono-polistic) Materialism. Simultaneously, Materialism places itself beyond debate while carefully conditioned citizens prostrate themselves as thoroughly scripted Consumer Units. Inexorably, the compulsive acquisition of "things" results in such deep narcotization that people lose the meta-level ability to formulate meaningful criticism of context. The sensory bias of materialism focuses people on consumable content, negligent of immaterial factors that comprise the contextual framework of their lives. When the unipolar Materialist trap is definitively sprung, everyone of us will serve simultaneously as warden and inmate. William Blake observed that "we become what we perceive." Spellbound by the unacknowledged Deity whose intentions we serve but fail to limn, we deify things and reify people. Worship is inevitable. At stake is the "God" in whose image humankind remakes itself. Alan Archibald

Radix malorum est cupiditas. ("The root of evil is cupidity." Cupidity is the self-interested desire for "things," or, for people who are construed as things.) Chaucer

America! The land of stuff, more stuff and where the hell am I going to store the stuff?

Through and through the world is infected with quantity. To talk "sense" is to talk in quantities. Albert North Whitehead

Science can only speak of quantity. The definition of quality depends on the definition of "proper ends."

I believe that in actual fact, philosophy ranks before and above the natural sciences. Thomas Mann

It is characteristic that Einstein and Planck had the greatest admiration for Kant's work, agreeing with his view that philosophy should be the basis of all sciences. Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider, "Reality and Scientific Truth"

Philosophers have to regain their nerve to trust in the use of human reason. It does seem intellectually dishonest, even cowardly, to refuse to make distinctions in the name of tolerance. While accepting that people may disagree, we need not treat every position as equal, every argument as valid. Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, editor "First Things"

A legitimate plurality of positions has yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based upon the assumption that all positions are equally valid. John Paul II

We have turned science into a sacred cow and are suffering the consequences idolatry invariably exacts. Houston Smith

People pay for what they do and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply, by the lives they lead. James Baldwin (Quoted by dying protagonist of Spike Lee's movie "Bamboozled")

"To make one's own rules is the highest freedom." Martin Heidigger

I often hear that right and wrong are up to the individual. Of course, that is nonsense. Right and wrong are not up to us. If right and wrong were up to us, that would make Hitler right because he thought he was right. And he was not right. Right and wrong exist. They are invisible realities that we discover. We do not invent them. Barbara Ward

If what is good, what is right, what is true is only what the individual chooses to invent, then we are outside the tradition of civility. We are back in the war of all against all. Walter Lippmann, 1955

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." Declaration of Independence as originally written by Thomas Jefferson, 1776.

Jefferson highlights the essential question. Can morality survive if value, truth and right do not subsist in the Ground of Being? It is often argued that personal idealism is sufficient guarantee of human rights. This notion is romantic debris from the 19th century. Human beings - certainly myself - provide few (if any) dependable guarantees. Of course, nothing prevents our assertion that rights can be warranted by human validation. However, in that event, I believe - and believe it is demonstrable - that Mao Tse Tung's argument prevails: "Political power comes from the barrel of a gun."

Human law has the true nature of law only insofar as it corresponds to right reason, and therefore is derived from the eternal law. Insofar as it falls short of right reason, a law is said to be a wicked law; and so, lacking the true nature of law, it is rather a kind of violence. Thomas Aquinas

The history of the 20th century proves the view that as the vision of God fades, we first become clever monkeys; then we exterminate one another. Paul Johnson

Unless the cause of peace-based-on-law gathers behind it the force and zeal of a religion, it hardly can hope to succeed......There must be added that deep power of emotion which is a basic ingredient of religion. Einstein

H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw placed their trust in their own systems of belief, which were based on human reason. Unable to find lasting inner peace, they slowly lost confidence in what they believed. Wells' final literary work has been aptly called "a scream of despair." And shortly before Shaw died in 1950, he wrote, "The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. Its counsels, which should have established the millennium, have led directly to the suicide of Europe. I believed them once. In their name I helped to destroy the faith of millions. And now they look at me and witness the great tragedy of an atheist who has lost his faith."

Near the end of his life, Jean-Paul Sartre told Pierre Victor: "I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God." Fellow philosopher and long-time companion Simone de Beauvoir protested: "How should one explain the senile act of a turncoat?"

All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been blind as a bat not to have seen, long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader. George MacDonald (the Scottish fantasist) had done more to me than any other writer; of course it was a pity he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed. On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete -- Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire -- all seemed a little thin, what as boys we called "tinny." It wasn't that I didn't like them. They were all (especially Gibbon) entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books..... The only non-Christians who seemed to me really to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them were dangerously tinged with something like religion, even at times with Christianity. The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed in a perversion of Roland's great line in the Chanson --- "Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores."

Scrooge trembled... "But you were always a good man of business, Jacob," faltered Scrooge. "Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business." Charles Dickens

The Prince and the two children were standing with their heads hung down, their cheeks flushed, their eyes half closed; the strength all gone from them; the enchantment almost complete. But Puddleglum, desperately gathering all his strength, walked over to the fire. Then he did a very brave thing. He knew it wouldn't hurt him quite as much as it would hurt a human; for his feet (which were bare) were webbed and hard and cold-blooded like a duck's. But he knew it would hurt him badly enough; and so it did. With his bare foot he stamped on the fire, grinding a large part of it into ashes on the flat hearth. And three things happened at once. First, the sweet, heavy smell grew very much less. For though the whole fire had not been put out, a good bit of it had, and what remained smelled very largely of burnt Marsh-wiggle, which is not at all an enchanting smell. This instantly made everyone's brain far clearer. The Prince and the children held up their heads again and opened their eyes. Secondly, the Witch, in a loud, terrible voice, utterly different from the sweet tones she had been using up till now, called out, "What are you doing? Dare to touch my fire again, mud-filth, and I'll turn the blood to fire inside your veins." Thirdly, the pain itself made Puddleglum's head for a moment perfectly clear and he knew exactly what he really thought. There is nothing like a good shock of pain for dissolving certain kinds of magic. "One word, Ma'am" he said coming back from the fire; limping because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. C. S. Lewis

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. Thus he believed that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth. He admired youth because it was young and age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand... The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious and everything else becomes lucid... A symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. G. K. Chesterton

If materialism is everything, everything tends toward compulsion:

Materialists "can't do without" and consequently are trapped by their accumulations.

Alternatively, metaphysicians divest and are liberated to the extent they "can do without."

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all. I found it invariably true, the poorer I am the richer I am. Thoreau

Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Without the inner beauty of a free and harmonious life, (fine food) and eau de cologne can become merely forms of barbarism. Without tolerance and broad spiritual understanding, hygiene will only make for clean animals, very clean and very healthy, but also very animal. External riches will merely smother us, if we do not cultivate inner riches. Miguel de Unamuno

The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up. Dorothy Day

Seek first the reign of God and God's justice, and all these things will come to you as a matter of course. Y'eshua the Nazarene

'When a man stops believing in God he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes anything.' Chesterton paraphrase

If there is no God, nothing matters. If there is a God, nothing else matters. Attributed to H. G. Wells

"If God does not exist, everything is permissible." Dostoyevsky, "The Brothers Karamozov

A thankful heart is not the greatest virtue but the parent of all others. Cicero

Grateful people are happy people: ingrates tend toward misery. The greater the object of one's gratitude, the greater one's happiness. It is easier to be grateful to a person -- or a meta-person --- than to a thing.

The atheist's hell is waking up feeling grateful and not knowing to whom. Chesterton paraphrase

"I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up - they have no holidays." Henny Youngman

Trains stop at the train station.

Buses stop at the bus station.

I have a workstation. Steven Wright

The only way to enjoy a day of rest is to honor holy days (i.e., holidays). Researching her book, "Nickel and Dimed," Barbara Ehrenreich was astonished to learn that medieval serfs participated in nearly 150 feast day --- holy days when work was minimal or put off 'til tomorrow.

It should be pointed out that if we tried to build education on the single pattern of "the scientific idea of man" and carry it out accordingly, we could only do so by distorting or warping this idea: for we should have to ask what is the nature and destiny of man, and we should be pressing the only idea at our disposal, that is the scientific one, for an answer to our question. Then we would try, contrary to its type, to draw from it (i.e., from the scientific idea) a kind of metaphysics. From the logical point of view, we would have a spurious metaphysics disguised as science and yet deprived of any really philosophical insight; and from the practical point of view, we would have a denial or misconception of those very realities and values without which education loses all human sense or becomes the training of an animal for the utility of the state. Jacques Maritain (Emphasis mine.)

In the spirit of Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem," John Conroy (author of "Ordinary People, Unspeakable Acts") interviews victims of torture as well as the torturers themselves. Conroy observes that the latter have a remarkable ability for rationalization, and describes most of them as cordial, likeable people.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679419187/ref=pd_cp_sr/103-2905432-4740659

Behind all phenomena and discrete entities in the world, we may observe, intimate or experience existentially in various ways something like a general "order of Being." The essence and meaning of this order are veiled in mystery; it is as much an enigma as the Sphinx, it always speaks to us differently and always, I suppose, in ways that we ourselves are open to, in ways, to put it simply, that we can hear. Alongside the general miracle of Being - both as a part of that miracle and as its protagonist, as a special reiteration of it and a rebellious attempt to know, understand, control and transcend it - stands the miracle of the human spirit, of human existence. Into the infinite silence of the omnipresent order of Being, then, there sounds the impassioned voice of the order of human freedom, of life, of spirit. The subtly structured world of meaningful and hopeful human life, opening new vistas of freedom and carrying man to a deeper experience of Being, the countless remarkable intellectual (mystical, religious, scientific) and moral systems, that special way in which the order of Being both re-creates and, at the same time, lends its own meaning to mythology (in earlier times) and artistic creation (today, i.e., in the historical period), in short the way in which man becomes man in the finest sense of the word - all of this constitutes the "order of life," "the order of the spirit," "the order of human work." Together, it all constitutes an objectivized expression of that "second creation of the world," which is human experience. I would say that this "order of life" is a kind of "legitimate son" of "the order of Being," because it grows out of an indestructible faith in the latter's meaning and a fearless confrontation with its mystery. Over and against this passionate order, which is the work of people created "in God's image," there constantly recurs its evil caricature and misshapen protagonist, "the bastard son of Being," the offspring of indifference to the meaning of Being and vindictive fear of its mystery: the chilling work of man as "the image of the devil": the order of homogenization by violence, perfectly organized impotence and centrally directed desolation and boredom, in which man is conceived as a cybernetic unit without free will, without the power to reason for himself, without a unique life of his own, and where that monstrous ideal, order, is a euphemism for the graveyard. (I refer you to Fromm's excellent analysis of fascism.) Thus against "the order of life," sustained by a longing for meaning and experience of the mystery of Being, there stands this "order of death," a monument to non-sense, an executioner of mystery, a materialization of nothingness.

Vaclav Havel "Letters to Olga" (from prison)

Only by looking outward, by caring for things that,

in terms of pure survival, you needn't bother with at all...

and by throwing yourself over and over again into the tumult

of the world, with the intention of making your voice count -

only thus will you really become a person." Vaclav Havel, "Letters to Olga"

The destiny of man is not decided by material computation. When great causes are on the move in the world ... we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.

Radio broadcast to America

Receiving an honorary degree from the University of Rochester

"I believe that when death closes our eyes we shall awaken to a light, of which our sunlight is but the shadow." Arthur Schopenhauer

"Every one of us is like a man who sees things in a dream and thinks that he knows them perfectly and then wakes up to find that he knows nothing." Plato

Whatever you may say something is, it is not ... the map is not the territory ... the word is not the thing. Alfred Korzybski

We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink. Epicurus

All human rights are endowed by the creator, and if this dogmatic truth is not believed, all human rights will eventually wither. They literally have no ground to be rooted in. In a profound sense, the modern agnostic world is living off the accumulated capital of Christendom, without realizing who provided its dwindling bankroll. G. K. Chesterton

Hobbes, Kant, Locke and Mill believed virtues are necessary to the origin of liberalism. Liberalism lives off the inheritance of pre-modern virtue without having the resources to replenish it. "Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism" by Peter Berkowitz, Princeton U. Press

Even those who have abandoned the theological specifics of the religious view continue to linger in its afterglow by believing that human beings are endowed with certain unique properties (inherent dignity and inalienable rights), that other organisms do not possess, and that (as a consequence) the highest priority a democratic society can set for itself is to respect the sanctity and worth of the individual. Evolutionists try to justify these tenets as emergent values, but what passes unnoticed (as Walker Percy pointed out) is that the moment the sanctity of the individual is turned into a "value" a huge act of devaluation has already occurred. Houston Smith

'In his farewell address to the General Assembly of the United Nations in October 1971, the retiring Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, Mr. Paul Hoffman, summed up the situation thus: "Far too much of our technological wizardry has been needlessly employed for exploiting the earth's resources, rather than for rationally using and continually replenishing them. And far too much of our technology has been applied without due consideration for its impact on the human spirit, on our cultures and on our ways of life. As a result, while technology has made it possible for hundreds of millions of people to improve their material conditions, our planet is in many ways becoming a more dangerous and less humanly satisfying home-site for the entire race of man."

The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. Simone Weil

Jesus answered and said, "It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God'" We now live in an intellectual milieu of philosophical mono-poly, and will soon discover whether the attempt to live by "bread alone" serves humankind well. I observe that the fascist presumptions built into the presumed superiority of one's "material standard of living" do not bode well. All philosophies predicated on "bread alone" tend toward the philosophical conclusion that "s/he who dies with the most toys wins."

Satan is wiser than of yore,

And tempts by making rich,

(instead of) making poor. Alexander Pope

I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions . .Kurt Vonnegut

Only 68 of 200 Anglican priests polled could name all Ten Commandments, but half said they believed in space aliens.

I think you should know I worry a lot. Like the Nobel sperm bank. Something bothers me about the world's greatest geniuses sitting around reading pornography and jerking off. Jane Wagner

During the decade now beginning, we must learn a new language, a language that speaks not of development and underdevelopment but of true and false ideas about man, and his needs and his potential. Ivan Illich

There are a number of small movements abroad All these movements share this in common, that they preach revolt against hustling for hustling's sake. One of the first conditions for attaining a just distribution of resources is that people must abandon their hysterical hustle and their hysterical greediness. Sigrid Undset, Nobel Laureate, 1882 1949

Our modern mode of life has been transformed. This transformation is due chiefly to the increase in the rapidity of communication. Each individual does a great many more things than formerly. Quiet and unemployed moments are exceptional in his existence. The narrow groups of the family and the parish have been dissolved. Intimacy no longer exists. Solitude is looked upon as a punishment or as a luxury. Alexis Carrel Nobel Prize for Medicine, 1912

The lives of our ancestors, when we look back to them, appear to have been infinitely less troubled and momentous than our own - it is rather as if fate had designed us for the denouement of the drama in which we are acting." Andre Breton

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

Thoreau, "Life Without Principle"

The poor learn to fend in dignity, where no education could teach the rich to survive. Ivan Illich

I wasn't yet aware that most of the world's population would rather go hungry than deny food to a stranger.

Brian M. Schwartz, "A World of Villages"

Men should not consider his material possessions as his own, but as common to all, so as to share them without hesitation, when others are in need. Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas does lift Faith above Reason; but does not lowerreason. He does put the supernatural higher than the natural; but does not lower the natural. He says that the lower thing is in every sense worthy' except that compared with the higher it is worthless. This led to a habit of thinking on two levels, or even on three. G. K. Chesterton

The modern experiment to live without religion has failed, and once we have understood this, we know what our "post-modern" tasks really are. E. F. Schumacher

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around. G. K. Chesterton

We live in a universe where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning. Jean Baudrillard

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. Gertrude Stein

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? T. S. Eliot

.... Information has become a form of garbage, and ourselves garbage collectors.... Like the sorcerer's apprentice, we are awash with information without even a broom to help us get rid of it. Information comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular.... And there is no loom to weave it all into fabric. No transcendent narratives to provide us with moral guidance, social purpose, intellectual economy. No stories to tell us what we need to know and what we do not need to know. Neil Postman

We Americans are an unprincipled nation, when you come down to it. Not that we're bad or anything. It's just that it's hard for us to pay attention to abstract matters when we have so many concrete matters -- cellular phones, ski boats, salad shooters, trail bikes, StairMasters, snow boards, pasta-making machines, four-door sport utility vehicles, palmcorders, rollerblade skates and CD players for our cars -- to occupy us. No wonder all the great intellectual concepts ... come from pastoral societies...

Our society is dedicated almost entirely to the celebration of the ego, with all its sad fantasies about success and power, and it celebrates those very forces of greed and ignorance that are destroying the planet. Sogyal Rinpoche

Everything is so relativized. I think we've got ourselves into a terrible jam there, with all kinds of ideologies that have taught us not to be judgmental. Not being judgmental also, in a way, means not thinking. Salman Rushdie, Mother Jones, July-August, 1999

The grudge against God is the keystone to all one's unhappiness. Follow all your petty, middling, and major grudges back to this keystone grudge, and then ask yourself the question, "Is it more likely that God was wrong to make the world this way, or that I am somehow wrong in the way I'm looking at it?" If you decide that God is wrong --- or that there is no God, just a faceless, mechanical universe that cares nothing about the human drama --- then there isn't much you can do. But if you realize that you can always adjust your perceptions of the world, you can start learning and contributing again. This seems to be the way to both humility and power. Patrick Miller, A Primer on Forgiveness, "The Sun", 9/94

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned Huston Smith's view of the universe as seen from the vantage of a dropped ice cream cone.

Here's Smith's verbatim explanation of the toppled cone, with a little context.

Most moderns assume that "the disposition" of the universe is neutral, or, perhaps, hostile. It is probably fair to say that most moderns who honor "survival-of-the-fittest" as the ultimate framework for viewing and interpreting life, believe that the universe is brutally neutral.

In "Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief," Huston Smith (America's most renowned professor of comparative religion) suggests a radically different view. "If a two year old drops her ice-cream cone, that tragedy is the end of the world for her. Her mother knows that this is not the case. Can there be an understanding of life so staggering in its immensity that, in comparison to it, even gulags and the Holocaust seem like dropped ice-cream cones?"

The second and third paragraphs of "Why Religion Matters" read: "I think I have a different window onto the world, one that enables me to see things that others do not. I was born into a loving family whose parents committed their lives to the highest calling they could conceive - that of being missionaries to China. Sacrifices were to be expected, and (in the disease-ridden China of that time) they arrived on schedule: their first born died in their arms on his second Christmas Eve. My parents did good things. In the town they chose for their lifework there was no education for girls, so their first act was to start a girls' school. Now coeducational, it has become the most important primary school in the town. The most important thing I inherited from my parents was faith. Its substance made me, on average, a trusting person, and its content can be stated equally simply: we are in good hands, and in gratitude for that fact we do well to bear one another's burdens. On coming to America, for college, I brought that faith with me, and the rest of my life has been a struggle to keep it intact in the face of modern winds of doctrine that assail it. If those winds were powered by truth, I would bow to them, but as I have not found them to be so, I must point that out.

19th century zoologist Ernst Haeckel said that if he could have one question answered authoritatively it would be, "Is the universe friendly?"

The most idealistic is the realistically most practical. Buckminster Fuller

PS I mentioned J. B. Priestley in connection with Smith's "ice cream calamity," and - to my surprise - was able to google the pertinent quotation by entering the key words "Priestley, lambency"

"Just before I went to America, during the exhausting weeks when I was busy with my Time Plays, I had such a dream, and I think it left a greater impression on my mind than any experience I had ever known before, awake or in dreams, and said more to me about this life than any book I have ever read. The setting of the dream was quite simple, and owed something to the fact that not long before my wife had visited the lighthouse here at St. Catherine's to do some bird ringing. I dreamt I was standing at the top of a very high tower, alone, looking down upon myriads of birds all flying in one direction; every kind of bird was there, all the birds in the world. It was a noble sight, this vast aerial river of birds. But now in some mysterious fashion the gear was changed, and time speeded up, so that I saw generations of birds, watched them break their shells, flutter into life, mate, weaken, falter and die. Wings grew only to crumble; bodies were sleek, and then, in a flash bled and shrivelled; and death struck everywhere at every second. What was the use of all this blind struggle towards life, this eager trying of wings, this hurried mating, this flight and surge, all this gigantic meaningless effort?

As I stared down, seeming to see every creature's ignoble little history almost at a glance, I felt sick at heart. It would be better if not one of them, if not one of us, had been born, if the struggle ceased for ever. I stood on my tower, still alone, desperately unhappy. But now the gear was changed again, and the time went faster still, and it was rushing by at such a rate, that the birds could not show any movement, but were like an enormous plain sown with feathers. But along this plain, flickering through the bodies themselves, there now passed a sort of white flame, trembling, dancing, then hurrying on; and as soon as I saw it I knew that this white flame was life itself, the very quintessence of being; and then it came to me, in a rocket burst of ecstasy, that nothing mattered, nothing could ever matter, because nothing else was real but this quivering and hurrying lambency of being. Birds, men and creatures not yet shaped and coloured, all were of no account except so far as this flame of life travelled though them. It left nothing to mourn over behind it; what I had thought was tragedy was mere emptiness or a shadow show; for now all real feeling was caught and purified and danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life. I had never before felt such deep happiness as I knew at the end of my dream of the tower and the birds." Rain Upon Godshill

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Blaise Pascal

Suffer the little children come unto me, for theirs is the Kingdom of God.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

Thoreau "Where I Lived and What I Lived For," Walden

Adults are obsolete children. Dr. Seuss

There are others whose state of mind is still more extraordinary. They not only do not need the landscape to corroborate their history, but they do not care if the landscape contradicts their history... If the map marks the place as a waterless desert, they will declare it as dry as a bone, though the whole valley resound with the rushing river. A whole huge rock will be invisible if a little book on geology says it is impossible. This is at the opposite extreme to the irrational credulity of the rustic, but it is infinitely more irrational... This great delusion of the prior claim of printed matter, as something anterior to experience and capable of contradicting it, is the main weakness of modern urban society. The chief mark of the modern man has been that he has gone through a landscape with his eyes glued to a guidebook, and could actually deny in the one, anything that he could not find in the other. One man, however, happened to look up from the book and see things for himself; he was a man of too impatient a temper, and later he showed too hasty a disposition to tear the book up or toss the book away. But there had been granted to him a strange and high and heroic sort of faith. He could believe his eyes. G. K. Chesterton, "William Cobbett"

At the beginning of the road they put up a sign that said MACONDO and another larger one on the main street that said GOD EXISTS. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Do not chase after all kinds of knowledge, enlightenment, and understanding in the hope of gaining the hearts of others. You will gain those hearts more surely by showing openness and graciousness to them. St. John Chrysostom

It is a greater miracle to feed the poor than to raise the dead. St. John Chrysostom

What is the law of nature? Is it to know that my security and that of my family, all my amusements and pleasures, are purchased at the expense of misery, deprivation, and suffering to thousands of human beings by the terror of the gallows; by the misfortune of thousands stifling within prison walls; by the fears inspired by millions of soldiers and guardians of civilization, torn from their homes and besotted by discipline, to protect our pleasures with loaded revolvers against the possible interference of the famishing! Do I purchase every fragment of bread that I put in my mouth and the mouths of my children by the numberless privations that are necessary to procure my abundance? How can I be certain that my piece of bread belongs only to me when I know that no one should starve while I eat? Leo Tolstoy

The supremacy of the law of self-interest is the conclusion of Herbert Spencer's materialistic philosophy; and of the wretched pessimism of Hartmann and Schopenhauer. It is the principle upon which Cain slew his brother. It was the seductive whisper of the serpent in Eve's ear. It is the principle upon which crime is committed. It is the principle upon which the capitalist acts who treats labor as no more than a commodity subject to the lowest market rate and the law of supply and demand. It is the principle upon which railroads are bonded and bankrupted for private ends. It is the law by which money (is loaned to farmers at) usurious and impoverishing rate of interest It is the principle upon which a Chicago financier proceeds, with no more moral justification than the highwayman's robbery of an express train, to "corner" the pork market, and thus force from the mouths of toiling families a million and a half of dollars into his private treasury - a deed for which the giving of some thousands to found city missions and orphans' homes will be no atonement in the reckoning of the God who judges the world in righteousness and not by the ethics of the stock exchange. The law of self-interest is the eternal falsehood which mothers all social and private woes; for sin is pure individualism - the assertion of self against God and humanity. George D. Herron, "The Message of Jesus to Men of Wealth," 22 September 1890 Occasion: An address delivered before the Minnesota Congregational Club, at its annual meeting held in Plymouth Church, Minneapolis, September 22, 1890

Pascal said that within every person there is a "God-shaped vacuum."

Nature abhors a vacuum.

I believe in the sun even when it is not shining

I believe in love even when I am alone

I believe in God even when He is silent.

(Written on a basement wall where a Jewish refugee had been hiding from agents of the Holocaust.)

Albert Camus said future historians would summarize modern man: "He fornicated and read newspapers."

Sex without religion is like an egg without salt. Luis Buñuel

Our highly vaunted sexual freedom has turned out to be a new puritanism. I define puritanism as a state of alienation from the body, separation of emotion from reason, and use of the body as a machine. Rollo May

The supreme reality of our time is our indivisibility as children of God and the common vulnerability of this planet.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Pascal was right in noting that 'humans sink lower than beasts when we aspire to become like angels.' It is also true, however, that humankind must aspire to some spiritual destiny if we would avoid zoological calamity. The notion that humans are children of God - whether or not God exists - is a mantle that wears well. At minimum, it offers more protection to humankind as members of the animal kingdom than "liberating" clever humans as mere animals. Alan Archibald

There are people for whom killing a whale is not very different from killing a human being. In fact, for some people killing a whale is worse than killing a human.

Animal rights spokesperson quoted in an NPR spot reviewing a recently approved Native American whale hunt. June, 1999

Whether you believe you can or can't, you're right. Henry Ford.

The genius of Christianity is to have proclaimed that the path to the deepest mystery is the path of love. Andre Malraux

Love... is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Iris Murdoch

To most, even good people, god is a belief. To the saints, God is an embrace. Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Kurt Vonnegut

(In 1855) la Ley Lerdo obliged the Church to sell its lands with sales tax going to the state. Speculators snapped up lands. The educational and charitable functions which the Church carried on among Indios ceased. For all its encouragement of superstition and reverence for the existing order, the religious corporations never, as the liberals came to admit, matched the rapacity and cruelty of the new private owners. The Ley Lerdo, in the name of progress, caused a further barbarization of the countryside. "Fire and Blood" (an excellent one volume history of Mexico by T. R. Fehrenbach)

The merely rich are not rich enough to rule the modern market. The things that change modern history, the big national and international loans, the big educational and philanthropic foundations, the purchase of numberless newspapers, the big prices paid for peerages, the big expenses often incurred in elections - these are getting too big for everybody except the misers; the men with the largest of earthly fortunes and the smallest of earthly aims.

There are two other odd and rather important things to be said about them. The first is this: that with this aristocracy we do not have the chance of a lucky variety in types which belongs to larger and looser aristocracies. The moderately rich include all kinds of people even good people. Even priests are sometimes saints; and even soldiers are sometimes heroes. Some doctors have really grown wealthy by curing their patients and not by flattering them; some brewers have been known to sell beer. But among the Very Rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it. G.K. Chesterton

Alan, I've known a lot of millionaires in my time. But I never knew one who wasn't a sonofabitch. Jackie Imburgia c. 1975

It is not strange...that such an exuberance of enterprise should cause some individuals to mistake change for progress.

I want first to consider society, the society we may expect to have after this war. We may expect a society that is highly centralized. It may be organized for peace: we hope it will. It may have to be organized against future wars, and if so, so much the worse. But in either case it will be very tightly knit; it will be planned; and it will be bureaucratic. Bureaucracy, in a technical age like ours, is inevitable. The advance of science means the growth of bureaucracy and the reign of the expert. And as a result, society and the state will be the same thing.

This has never happened in the past. Society used to be much more diffuse. The government was there, making laws and wars, but it could not interfere so much with the individual: it had not the means. When I was a boy there was no wireless, no motor-cars: at an earlier date there were no telegrams, no railways: earlier still, no posts. You cannot interfere with people unless you can communicate with them easily. Society was diffuse, and in the midst of the diffusion the artist flourished. If he was a painter he painted for the king and the courtiers, who probably had some individual ideas about painting, or for the great aristocrats, or for the local squire, or for the church, which was not an individual but which knew what it wanted as regards subject matter. He lived in a society which was broken up into groups and he had the chance of picking the group which suited him. That society, after lasting for thousands of years, has suddenly hardened and become centralized, and in the future the only effective patron will be the state. "Does Culture Matter?" E. M. Forster, 1940

"This is the huge modern heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul. If soap boiling is really inconsistent with brotherhood, so much the worst for soap-boiling, not for brotherhood. If civilization really cannot get on with democracy, so much the worse for civilization, not for democracy. Certainly, it would be far better to go back to village communes, if they really are communes. Certainly, it would be better to do without soap rather than to do without society. Certainly, we would sacrifice all our wires, wheels, systems, specialties, physical science and frenzied finance for one half-hour of happiness such as has often come to us with comrades in a common tavern. I do not say the sacrifice will be necessary; I only say it will be easy." Chesterton, "The Insane Necessity"

We of today can hardly imagine how seamlessly traditional peoples have woven the great world of nature into the spiritual aspects of their lives. To cite a single example, the Pawnee people of Oklahoma patter their houses after the architecture of nature as they understand it. Still today, often sitting at night on rooftops, children hear from their parents how Evening Star and the Moon created the first girl child, and Morning Star and the Sun created the first boy child. The Great Chief star that shines from the direction of the winter wind and never moves is pointed out to them, and until sleep overcomes them, they watch the rest of the stars circle around him. The Great Chief star reminds tribal chiefs of their responsibility to care for their people. Nothing like this sense of belonging can be derived from the scientific worldview. In his 9th decade now, Czeslaw Milosz sees himself as having lived to see the dawning of "the age of homelessness." Houston Smith

No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself toward which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope... Consequently, the only choice is between worshipping the true God or an idol. Every atheist is an idolater --- unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters." Simone Weil

Idolatry is in our very nature, she (i.e., Weil) is declaring, and when disguised (as scientific pursuit, as politics, as a deep affection for nature, as a religious ritual and practice) is no less what it is, though perhaps more dangerous, potentially, because not even acknowledged. If only some of us who have been psychoanalyzed, and who look deeply into the psychological life of others, were able to be so forcefully analytic about ourselves! I remember an aphorism I used to hear from William Carlos Williams as he went from home to home, making his rounds (of the NJ working class poor), still recovering he'd say from some disappointment or serious impasse in his 'other life,' that of the writer. "It's gold or glory or God --- what people worship.' Once when I added the worship intellectuals accord their own ideas and theories, he replied curtly, annoyed with my lack of imagination, "I think that comes under glory, or maybe God!'" "Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage" by Robert Coles M.D.

We are convinced that theories do not matter... Never has there been so little discussion about the nature of men as now, when, for the first time, anyone can discuss it... Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed. Sixty years ago it was bad taste to be an avowed atheist... now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian. But there are some people nevertheless - and I am one of them - who think that the most important thing about man is still his view of the universe... We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them. G. K. Chesterton

Nothing more strangely indicates an enormous and silent evil of modern society than the extraordinary use which is made nowadays of the word "orthodox." In former days the heretic was proud of not being a heretic. It was kingdoms of the world and the police and the judges who were heretics. He was orthodox... All the tortures torn out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was heretical... The word "heresy" not only means no longer "being wrong"; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word "orthodoxy" not only no longer means being right, it practically means being wrong... (This) means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right... The dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to insist that, whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox... General theories are everywhere contemned... We will have no generalizations... We are more and more to discuss art, politics, literature. A man's opinon on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinon on all things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe, for if he does, he will have a religion and be lost. Everything matters, except everything. G. K. Chesterton

The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversation these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape. Leonard Cohen

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. Thomas Jefferson

Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

"(Democracy) was dependent on the existence of virtue among the people. It was such virtue that they expected to resolve the tension between private interest and public good." "Habits of the Heart," Robert Bellah, University of California, Berkeley

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind of self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God. James Madison

...Religion...(is) the basis and foundation of government...before any man can be considered as a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe. James Madison

The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.

People wish to be settled. Only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them. Emerson

To be happy at home is the end of all human activity. Samuel Johnson

In this modern world we are confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideas because they have not tried the old. Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Chesterton

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried. Chesterton, 1910

Sins become more subtle as you grow older: you commit sins of despair rather than sins of lust. Piers Paul Reid

According to Aquinas, sin partakes of three characteristics.

I remember two: loss of splendor and loss of perspective.

Our irrational contemporary Western impatience and our blind adulation of speed for speed's sake are wreaking havoc on the education of our children. We force them as if they were chicks in a pullet factory. We drive them into premature awareness of sex even before physical puberty has overtaken them. In fact we deprive our children of the human right of having a childhood. Arnold Toynbee

There are more things to life than increasing its speed. Mahatma Gandhi

To be thoroughly modern is to confine oneself to an ultimate narrowness.G. K. Chesterton

The modern world is a culture of death. Pope John Paul II

Yesterday, nine weeks into the NATO bombing of Kosovo/Serbia, an ongoing NPR report on the life of a young Kosovar, had this to say: "The war has gotten to the point where there's nothing to do but stay inside all day and watch television."

In a consumer society, there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. Ivan Illich