Discuss: The Barbaric Heart

Many thanks for the comments posted.  Just a few observations.

1. I am always stunned at the willingness of some people to think that being a “professor” is some sort of intellectual failing in itself.  This is called an ad hominem argument.  It is the weakest form of argument.  Sorry to be pedantic.

2.  The purpose of the essay and the book is to stop lying to ourselves.  I don’t know that I know the truth (maybe the truth has something to do with sin after all), but I do believe that telling ourselves that sustainability initiatives like Obama’s new auto mpg rules will help something is a kind of lie.  It is what I call a “good without light” (borrowing from Simone Weil).  You can’t green things that believe it is okay to profit from violence.

3.  I have A LOT more to say about “nature red in tooth and claw,” the role of science and technology, the role of work, the role of economics in the book.  (You can call this comment product placement if you like.)

4.  Beauty.  This is an issue that is always just beginning.  I propose this term and the term “thoughtfulness” knowing full well that there is something tautological about their use in my argument.  The beautiful isn’t a thing, it’s a desire.  It is like justice.  We don’t know exactly what it is, and yet we stake our lives on it.  In my mind, beauty, justice, thought are always evolving.  Which is to say that for me God too is evolving.  The destiny of humans as a species should not be mistaken for the destiny of animals, especially not one that means to gore you with its antlers.

Mr. White:

We may disagree on the fate of humans and animals.  But that’s a quibble next to this on which we agree:  “telling ourselves that sustainability initiatives like Obama’s new auto mpg rules will help something is a kind of lie.  ...You can’t green things that believe it is okay to profit from violence.”

There’s another way to say that:  Insanity is doing what you have always done, and expecting a different result.

I kinda think the Barbaric Heart is our evolutionary endowment.  I’m just hoping that whatever She is, God won’t hold it against us, having, well, put it there.

Ah, as in only a few times in Internet history, the Voice descends to the comment sections to rebuke the hoi polloi.
1. No ad hominem attack here - just an observation that professorial obtuseness is a blight upon our ludicrous intellectual scene. If that perspective stunned you, and other people are actually giving the professoriate some lip, why feign such disinterest in your examining your regrettable inwardness?  Why is professorial obtuseness not fair game for ridicule?
2. You claim such rigorous intensity for yourself as “the purpose of the essay and the book is to stop lying to ourselves,” and then you invoke such monumental nonsense as “sin” and the “Which is to say that God for me too is evolving” - evidence the neo-transcendental mysticism is the same old badly conflicted religionism, which seems to accrue to those who give up on anger as they age and acquire status.
3. Please, use your intellectual gifts to face the natural world: we are polluting our way to destruction, in countless ways, including the academic, economic, and literary arenas. We desperately need sociological truth-tellers, not criticism-avoiding aestheticians.

mjosef: Dude, switch to Sanka.

Mr. White, thanks for posting your observations. My hope is that you will post again.

Was it Proust who said that most of the ills of this world are attributable to man’s inability to sit alone in a room and do nothing? I think it was. I know what he meant. I think that you do too.

Donn: I think the BH is part of our evolutionary heritage, but in my mind it’s more a cultural than a biological evolution.  See JH Breasted’s worthy old book The Dawn of Conscience.

mjoseph: I’m privileged that people read and respond to my writing.  I have never not responded to emails, posts, letters, fan mail from some flounder, etc.  As for professors, I probably have more reservations about them as a class than you do.  (As my book the Middle Mind testifies.) But blaming individuals for the sins of a class is a form of bigotry.

Plowboy: Sounds like Proust wrapped up snug in his bed for the day.  Or the reclining Buddha.  My email is at the Illinois State University Web site if you ever want to chat.

Actually, Plow, that quote (which I understand as “all human evil stems from man’s inability to sit still in a room”) might have been the mathematician Blaise Pascal.  Believe I saw that on the Internet once, so it’s probably wrong.  And I’m too lazy to check; and where I am right now, I’d just be checking the Internet.  Um, I’m in a library.  So just check “lazy.”

Curtis:  I think our cultural evolution is indistinguishable from our biological evolution, i.e., culture is to us what the antlers are to the elk.  I don’t know what that says about choice, or about the choices we’ve made, of course.  If that means maybe there’s a “spark” in this machine, and thus a glimmer of hope somewhere, OK, I can go with that.  I just have the sneaking suspicion that we were endowed with self- and evolution-consciousness; choice; and…well, the total option to go the way of the dinosaurs, or not.  Which says nothing about whether we got Something Higher or, duh, I’ll take the hot fudge sundae over the broccoli, on balance, given the option.  (i.e., The Sense of the Right Thing, not doing much more for the species at the moment than the appendix.) Looks like the dinosaurs will win at the rate things are going; but we did get nastier toys to play with, I guess.

OK, I checked http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/870.html, and here it is: 

——————————————
I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

- Blaise Pascal
French mathematician, physicist (1623 - 1662)
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For what that’s worth, and they told you not to believe it just ‘cause it’s in the papers, neither.

But the guy who said it was smart, and right.  ‘Course that’s where a lot of Beauty comes from, too.  I think God intended this to be difficult:  great privilege great responsibility etc.

Mr. White: Well, I read “The Middle Mind” but didn’t make the connection to you. I bought it in a bookstore in Highlands, N.C…..won out over Dylan’s “Chronicles”, as I recall.(To be fair to him, his was still in hardcover.)  It was a stimulating read which I enjoyed very much. Yep, golly, there’s your name, right there on the front cover. Handy how they do that now.

Knowing that, it is very clear that you and Mssr./Mlle. Josef are pulling for the same side.

BTW, I’ve looked for the attribution for that quote and can’t find it anywhere in Proust…so maybe I’ll just claim it as my own for now.