These ancient stories, full of symbolism, bear witness to a conviction which we today share, that everything is interconnected, and that genuine care for our own lives and our relationships with nature is inseparable from fraternity, justice and faithfulness to others.
(Location 758)
All it takes is one good person to restore hope!
(Location 762)
78. . . . Judaeo-Christian thought demythologized nature. While continuing to admire its grandeur and immensity, it no longer saw nature as divine. In doing so, it emphasizes all the more our human responsibility for nature. This rediscovery of nature can never be at the cost of the freedom and responsibility of human beings who, as part of the world, have the duty to cultivate their abilities in order to protect it and develop its potential. If we acknowledge the value and the fragility of nature and, at the same time, our God-given abilities, we can finally leave behind the modern myth of unlimited material progress. A fragile world, entrusted by God to human care, challenges us to devise intelligent ways of directing, developing and limiting our power.
(Location 810)
79. In this universe, shaped by open and intercommunicating systems, we can discern countless forms of relationship and participation.
(Location 816)
One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draftsman and a disgusting human being. . . .The first thing we demand of a wall is that it stand up. If it stands up, it was a good wall , and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it's around the concentration camp.
George Orwell
William Ophus, sage
From his Requiem for Modern Politics:
More participation, for example, is often put forward as the panacea for our political ills. But this is a singularly inappropriate remedy – unless those who participate do so in a responsible and public-spirited fashion, which is less and less the case. 68
Our myth, of course, is that in partisan debate "the marketplace of ideas" will result in good ideas driving out bad. But the actuality seems to be that all marketplaces, including those including that of political discourse, are dominated by Gresham's law. So slogans and symbols have driven out reasoned discussion; and systemic mendacity has largely preempted reasonable argument. Public discourse in a hyper pluralistic polity therefore generates heat, not light. In fact, that is the real purpose, for the winners of the political struggle are those who build the hottest fires under the politicians feet. 69-70
In effect, politics is now a spectator sport: the moral and social vacuum left by the decay of Lockean society has been filled by an ersatz media community. 78
In the age of Pythagoras, the unconscious Paganism, with its traditional clothing of beautiful ritual and of magical rites, was passing into a new phase under two influences. There were waves of religious enthusiasm, seeking direct enlightenment into the secret depths of being; and at the opposite pole, there was the awakening of critical analytical thought, probing with cool dispassionateness into ultimate meanings. In both influences, so diverse in their outcome, there was one common element—an awakened curiosity, and a movement towards the reconstruction of traditional ways.
Critical persuasion is not the same as political compromise, of course. Physicists did not sit across a bargaining table and make a deal over Planck’s constant.
Wikipedia figured out how to bring the Constitution of Knowledge online. It made itself a microcosm of the reality-based community, and it embodied the community’s commitments. Fallibilism: anyone can always be corrected and no entry in the matrix of knowledge is final. Objectivity: truth is public, not individual; it is what we persuade each other we know, not what you or I claim to know. Disconfirmation: we hunt for truth by correcting errors. Accountability: we answer to others and must justify our claims.
[T]he concept of society as an organism (again, including but not restricted to economies) functions well as a story that anyone can understand.
Since these abilities [to consider probabilities] are acquired even before infants have learned to speak, it is clear that humans have pre-linguistic abilities to respond to and reason about probabilities, confirming the view of The Science of Conjecture that the story of probability is one of bringing to consciousness existing but implicit probabilistic knowledge.
The captain of that ill-fated aircraft [that crash-landed in Sioux City, IA in the 1980s], Al Haynes, has since identified several factors that contributed to the relative success of the crash-landing, in particular luck, communications, preparation, and cooperation.
Seems that these factors might be useful in other emergencies as well, don't you think?
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