Words&Dirt

“It would be too much to ask, he thought to himself.  The chances are too remote.  It was a small miracle we discovered anything at all in here, that we are able to rescue those souls from such destruction a second time.  To ask for more…was probably pointless, but no more than natural.

What intelligent creature possessed of wit and feeling could do otherwise?  We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they but point the way to future triumphs.  But the universe does not have our own best interests at heart, and to assume for a moment that it does, ever did or ever might is to make the most calamitous and hubristic of mistakes.

To hope as he was hoping, hoping against likelihood, against statistical probability, in that sense against the universe itself, was only to be expected, but it was also almost certainly forlorn.  The animal in him craved something that his higher brain knew was not going to happen.  That was the point he was impaled upon, the front on which he suffered; that struggle of the lower brain’s almost chemical simplicities of yearning pitched against the withering realities revealed and comprehended by consciousness.  Neither could give up, and neither could give way.  The heat of their battle burned in his mind.”

––Look to Windward, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 35-6

“When the self is regarded as something complete within itself, then it is readily argued that only internal moralistic changes are of importance in general reform.  Institutional changes are said to be merely external.  They may add conveniences and comforts to life, but they cannot effect moral improvements.  The result is to throw the burden for social improvement upon free-will in its most impossible form.  Moreover, social and economic passivity are encouraged.  Individuals are led to concentrate in moral introspection upon their own vices and virtues, and to neglect the character of the environment.  Morals withdraw from active concern with detailed economic and political conditions.  Let us perfect ourselves within, and in due season changes in society will comes of themselves is the teaching.  And while saints are engaged in introspection, burly sinners run the world.  But when self-hood is perceived to be an active process it is also seen that social modifications are the only means of the creation of changed personalities.  Institutions are viewed in their educative effect:––with reference to the types of individuals they foster.  The interest in individual moral improvement and the social interest in objective reform of economic and political conditions are identified.  And inquiry into the meaning of social arrangements gets definite point and direction.  We are led to ask what the specific stimulating, fostering and nurturing power of each specific social arrangement may be.  The old-time separation between politics and morals is abolished at its root.

Consequently we cannot be satisfied with the general statement that society and the state is organic to the individual.  The question is one of specific causations.  Just what response does this social arrangement, political or economic, evoke, and what effect does it have upon the disposition of those who engage in it?  Does it release capacity?  If so, how widely?  Among a few, with a corresponding depression in others, or in an extensive and equitable way?  Is the capacity which is set free also directed in some coherent way, so that it becomes a power, or its manifestation spasmodic and capricious?  Since responses are of an indefinite diversity of kind, these inquiries have to be detailed and specific.  Are men’s senses rendered more delicately sensitive and appreciative, or are they blunted and dulled by this and that form of social organization?  Are their minds trained so that the hands are more deft and cunning?  Is curiosity awakened or blunted?  What is its quality: is it merely esthetic, dwelling on the forms and surfaces of things or is it also an intellectual searching into their meaning?  Such questions as these (as well as the more obvious ones about the qualities conventionally labelled moral), become the starting-points of inquiries about every institution of the community when it is recognized that individuality is not originally given but is created under the influences of associated life.  Like utilitarianism, the theory subjects every form of organization to continual scrutiny and criticism.  But instead of leading us to ask what it does in the way of causing pains and pleasures to individuals already in existence, it inquires what is done to release specific capacities and co-ordinate them into working powers.  What sort of individuals are created?”

––Reconstruction in Philosophy, by John Dewey, pg. 196-8