“In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a Man I am the chief of sinners.”
—G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy (via gkchestertonquote)
November 2011
35 posts
“There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”
—G.K. Chesterton in Heretics (via gkchestertonquote)
“What image does a first-rank college or university present today to a teen-ager leaving home for the first time, off to the adventure of a liberal education? He has four years of freedom to discover himself — apce between the intellectual wasteland he has left behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate. In this short time he must learn that there is a great world beyond the little one he knows, experience the exhilaration of it and digest enough of it to sustain himself in the intellectual deserts he is destined to traverse. He must do this, that is, if he is to have any hope of a higher life. These are the charmed years when he can, if he so chooses, become anything he wishes and when he has the oppurtunity to survey his alternatives, not merely those current in his time or provided by careers, but those available to him as a human being. the importance of these years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization’s only chance to get to him”
—Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
“The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”
—Francis Fukuyama “The End of History?”
“Modern liberalism itself was historically a consequence of the weakness of religiously-based societies which, failing to agree on the nature of the good life, could not provide even the minimal preconditions of peace and stability. ”
—Francis Fukuyama “The End of History?”
“It was said of Socrates, that he brought philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee houses.”
—
Joseph Addison (via ayjay)
I’ll settle for bringing it out. The indwelling will depend on someOnes else.
“I am not suggesting, of course, that everybody ought to be a farmer or a forester. Heaven forbid! I am suggesting that most people now are living on the far side of a broken connection, and that this is potentially catastrophic. Most people are now fed, clothed and sheltered from sources toward which they feel no gratitude and exercise no responsibility. There is no significant urban constituency, no formidable consumer lobby, no noticeable political leadership, for good land-use practices, for good farming and good forestry, for restoration of abused land, or for halting the destruction of land by so-called “development”.
We are involved now in a profound failure of imagination. Most of us cannot imagine the wheat beyond the bread, or the farmer beyond the wheat, or the farm beyond the farmer, or the history beyond the farm. Most people cannot imagine the forest and the forest economy that produced their houses and furniture and paper; or the landscapes, the streams and the weather that fill their pitchers and bathtubs and swimming pools with water. Most people appear to assume that when they have paid their money for these things they have entirely met their obligations.
Money does not bring forth food. Neither does the technology of the food system. Food comes from nature and from the work of people. If the supply of food is to be continuous for a long time, then people must work in harmony with nature. That means that people must find the right answers to a lot of hard practical questions. The same applies to forestry and the possibility of a continuous supply of timber.
One way we could describe the task ahead of us is by saying that we need to enlarge the consciousness and the conscience of the economy. Our economy needs to know — and care — what it is doing. This is revolutionary, of course, if you have a taste for revolution, but it is also a matter of common sense.
” —Wendell Berry, “In Distrust of Movements” (via settledthingsstrange)
“Now the pathos involved in the triumph of the therapeutic is this: One reason to throw over the spiritual perspective evil/holiness was to reject the idea that our normal, middle-range existence is imperfect. We’re perfectly all right as we are, as “natural” beings. So the dignity of ordinary, “natural” existence is even further enhanced. This ought to have liberated us from what were recognized frequently as the fruits of sin: impotence, division, anguish, spleen, melancholy, emptiness, incapacity, paralyzing gloom, acedia, etc. But in fact these abound. Only now, as afflictions of beings destined for middle-range normalcy, they must be seen as the result of sickness. They must be treated therapeutically. But the person being treated is now being approached as one who is just incapacitated. He has less dignity than the sinner. So what was supposed to enhance our dignity has reduced it.”
—Another major provocation from A Secular Age. (via ayjay)
“
The new rebel in our time is a skeptic and will not entirely trust anything, and therefore he has no loyalty and he can’t even be a revolutionary.
The fact that he doubts everything, and he must doubt everything, bars his way when he wants to denounce anything.
For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine, and you can’t believe in a moral doctrine if all things are meaningless.
The modern revolutionary doubts not only the institutions that he denounces, but the doctrine of moral truth by which he denounces it.
As a politician he will cry out that war is a waste of life, yet as a philosopher he has to admit that all life is a waste of time.
A Russian philosopher denounces a policeman for killing a peasant and then in his other writings proves that by the highest philosophical theory that the peasant should have killed himself.
A scientist goes to a political meeting where he complains that we are treating native peoples as beasts, and then he goes to a scientific meeting where he proves that we are beasts.
In short, the modern revolutionary, being an infinite skeptic, which he must be, is always engaged in undermining his own mind.
In his books on politics he attacks persons for trampling on morality, but in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on persons.
Therefore the modern rebel has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt by rebelling against everything, he has lost his right to rebel against anything…
There is a kind of thought that stops thought, and that is the only kind of thought that ought to be stopped.
” —G.K. Chesterton
(That’s actually one paragraph. I inserted line breaks because, frankly, every single one-hundred-ton line of it deserves to be held up to the light and considered. So… if life is meaningless, we have no basis whatsoever to say that anything or anybody is wrong. But if life isn’t meaningless, then there is such a thing as wisdom and folly. The question, then, is this: Who is wise? Who reveals truth? Who shows us the Way, the Truth, and the Life? If you want to explore this further, I highly recommend you take a few minutes and listen to this amusing and enthusiastic talk by Tim Keller. - Jeffrey Overstreet)
Settled Things Strange: “Don’t you like a rather foggy day in a wood in autumn? You’ll find we... →
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“Don’t you like a rather foggy day in a wood in autumn? You’ll find we shall be perfectly warm sitting in the car.”
Jane said she’d never heard of anyone liking fogs before but she didn’t mind trying. All three got in.
“That’s why Camilla and I got married,” said Denniston as they drove off. “We…
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
—Kurt Vonnegut (via settledthingsstrange)
“
The Arabian Nights is a collection of extraordinarily good stories, and while the modern aesthetic critic will probably find the book too long, the person with a taste for literature will find it too short. Surely the greatest compliment we can pay to it or any other book is to find it too short. This defect is the highest of all possible perfections.
…A short Arabian Nights is as unthinkable as a neat wilderness or a snug cathedral. The whole plan of the book is one vast conspiracy to entrap the reader into a condition of everlasting attention.
” —G.K. Chesterton (via settledthingsstrange)