What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars? - The Convivial Society
Another way of putting it is like this: a sunset is sublime because a human cannot make one, its existence transcends human ability; meanwhile, a picture of a sunset is merely beautiful because it reflects, through human invention, a thing that no amount of human ingenuity can actually replicate in real life. What’s more, a sunset is sublime becaus... See more
“There is an emptiness in us all that we strive to fill. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage. That has been true since the beginning of the age of mass media, but the garbage pump got 100 times more powerful in the 2010s.”
'The Anxious Generation': Things Are Worse Than We Realized
The literary critic and naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch put it this way: Thus though man has never before been so complacent about what he has, or so confident of his ability to do whatever he sets his mind upon, it is at the same time true that he never before accepted so low an estimate of what he is. That same scientific method which enabled him t
... See moreDonella H. Meadows • Thinking in Systems: International Bestseller
As Mumford observed almost a century ago, the world loses its soul when we place too much weight on the ideal of total quantification. By doing so, we stop valuing what we know to be true, but can’t articulate. Rituals lose their significance, possessions lose their meaning, and things are valued only for their apparent utility.