Words&Dirt

“Just as this separation of some things as ends-in-themselves from other things as means-in-themselves, by their very nature, is a heritage of an age in which only those activities were called ‘useful’ which served living physiologically rather than morally, and which were carried on by slaves or serfs to serve men who were free in the degree to which they were relieved from the need of labor that was base and material, so the primary need of the new state in which resources vastly different both qualitatively and quantitatively are at our command involves formation of new ends, ideals and standards to which to attach our new means.  It is morally as well as logically impossible that a thoroughly changed kind of means should be harnessed to ends which at most are supposed to be changed only in the ease with which they can be reached.  The thoroughgoing secularization of means and opportunities that has been going on has so far revolutionized the conduct of life as to have unsettled the old scene.  Nothing is more intellectually futile (as well as practically impossible) than to suppose harmony and order can be achieved except as new ends and standards, new moral principles, are first developed with a reasonable degree of clarity and system.

In short, the problem of reconstruction in philosophy, from whatever angle it is approached, turns out to have its inception in the endeavor to discover how the new movements in science and in the industrial and political human conditions which have issued from it, that are as yet only inchoate and confused, shall be carried to completion.  For a fulfillment which is consonant with their own, their proper, direction and momentum of movement can be achieved only in terms of ends and standards so distinctively human as to constitute a new moral order.”

––Reconstruction in Philosophy, by John Dewey, pg. xxxviii-xxxix

“He was a hermit, and a snob, and a nigger-lover, and no better than a pervert.  God knows what he did with those girls upstairs.  Maybe all he did was make them take off their clothes and put them on again while he watched.  She had heard of such things.  And yet––

She couldn’t make herself believe there was anything basically wrong with Randy.  She had voted for him in the primaries and stood up for him at the meetings of the Frangipani Circle when those garden club biddies were pecking him to bits.  After all, he was a Bragg, and a neighbor, and besides––

He obviously needed help and guidance.  Randy’s age, she knew, was thirty-two.  Florence was forty-seven.  Between people in their thirties and forties there wasn’t too wide a gap.  Perhaps all he needed, she decided, was a little understanding and tenderness from a mature woman.”

––Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, pg. 6