Bluntly put, when democracy no longer delivers the goods, it will be consigned to the dustbin of history by an angry mob.
January 6, anyone?
We face a stark choice. We can expend our waning stocks of fossil fuels, our scarce capital, and our limited political will in a vain attempt to maintain industrial civilization as it exists, or we can use those same resources to effect a necessary transition to a radically different type of civilization. But we cannot do both, and we must choose reasonably soon.
Does anyone contend that we're still not trying to have our cake & eat it, too?
Byzantine art was monotonously sensuous even as it was austere, and with an irresistible splendor that “dumbfounded,” revealing a civilization that encompassed at once stirring liturgies and fierce doctrinal debates over the nature of Christ and the possession of the True Cross.
Having viewed a great deal of Byzantine (Orthodox) art in Romania, Turkey, Venice, and Sicily, I can confirm Kaplan's observation. It is at once simple, patterned, and predictable, but also awesome & inspiring.
And by reflecting on it we can perhaps detect one more characteristic which art must have, if it is to forgo both, entertainment-value and magical value, and draw a subject-matter from its audience themselves. It must be prophetic.
Most art is either "entertainment-value" or of "magical value" (subtly didactic & conformist), so the prophetic is rare indeed. Examples of "prophetic" art?
In art, religion, science, and history the true object is always the mind itself it is only the ostensible object that is other than the mind. That is to say, art and the rest are themselves philosophy, but implicit philosophy. Their true nature is to be philosophy, but this nature is concealed beneath an error in self-knowledge whose peculiar character produces the peculiar facies of the artistic or other consciousness. Art and the rest are the unconscious philosophies of a mind nescientis se philosophari; and this ignorance, which is the difference between the artist and the philosopher, is what prevents art, religion, and so forth from consciously studying their real object, the mind, and compels them to believe that their true aim is to contemplate those images and abstractions which are their ostensible objects.
But could the value of art and religion ever lie in the strictly articulate? The mind prefers the articulate, but the soul (psyche) responds to the symbol.
The professor stood at his lectern and noted that all autoimmune illnesses conform to a similar pattern. They all start with an insult to the body’s sense of homeostasis. That insult could be a virus, bacterial infection, splinter, transplant organ, whole-body hypothermia, fever or allergen that triggers an immune response, and, for reasons we barely understand, that immune response never turns off.
Our understanding of autoimmune disease is indeed limited, yet it is perhaps becoming more common. But then we tend to seek pallatives more eagerly than true cures. (Which would likely require changes in how we live and care for our environment.)
Until the invention of antibiotics in 1928, Western medicine couldn’t deliver much better results than indigenous medicine anywhere else in the world. In many cases, going to a shaman or witch doctor offered just about the same likelihood of recovery as seeing a Western doctor.
Wait! Didn't life expectancy expand rapidly before this date? Yes, but not so much because of medical practice but because of public health practices (sanitary sewers, potable water, etc.) and improved nutrition.
A stimulus is nothing else than a suggestion for a mental act (or any other kind of act), and an enriched consciousness contains its own suggestions within itself.
We can't control outcomes in any sphere of life. All you can do – and therefore the only responsibility you have – is to put in the time and effort: into relationships, parenting, finding happiness, whatever. The actual result, in a profound sense, is none of your business.
Control? No. But influence? Yes. In the end we must follow the path revealed to Arjuna by Krishna: "“Let your concern (or focus) be on your action, let it not be on the outcome of the action. Do not act only out of expectation of a result, but then do not slip into inactivity.”
