The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself.
And this case [that of Bertolt Brecht] is of concern to all citizens who wish to share their world with poets. It cannot be left to the literature departments but is the business of political scientists as well. The chronic misbehavior of poets and artists has been a political, and sometimes a moral, problem since antiquity. In the following discussion of this case, I shall stick to the two assumptions I have mentioned. First, although in general Goethe was right and more is permitted to poets than to ordinary mortals, poets, too, can sin so gravely that they must bear their full load of guilt and responsibility. And, second, the only way to determine unequivocally how great their sins are is to listen to their poetry—which means, I assume, that the faculty of writing a good line is not entirely at the poet’s command but needs some help, that the faculty is granted him and that he can forfeit it.
Even so, one can often see in medieval historians that a critical skill is not absent; it is just that it is not their practice to remold the stories they are preserving in the image of their own critical opinion. They will, for example, retail contradictory stories and perhaps note that one is “scarcely credible,” rather than excising one of them. Compared to modern historians, they prefer to present evidence rather than conclusions and leave evaluation to the reader.77 Their practice is perhaps more comparable to that of a present-day archivist than a historian.
In France, the idea that the left-right contest required a final victor proved tenacious. On the right, supporters of reaction, liberal monarchy, and autocracy all took the French state as a prize to be captured and used for the service, respectively, of the old order, propertied wealth, or that imagined being, the people, thought of as the sensible and propertied middle classes.
This theory of knowledge is called ‘realism’; and ‘realism’ is based upon the grandest foundation a philosophy can have, namely human stupidity.
If the analysis of these and similar actions shows that they are not logical, that the professed goals are either too vague or, if definite, are as a general rule not in accordance with the actions that are taken in practice, then [Alfredo] Pareto is right, and the reformers and rationalists and moralists are wrong. Rational, deliberate, conscious belief does not, then, in general at any rate, determine what is going to happen to society; social man is not, as he has been defined for so many centuries, a primarily “rational animal.” When the reformers tell us that society can be improved by education, by increasing men’s knowledge, by projecting the correct program and then taking action to realize that program, they are wrong because men in society do not act that way. Their actions, their socially decisive actions, spring not from logical but from non-logical roots.
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