Fire and Knowledge

In a sense Luddism ended because in fifteen months it had made its point, and indelibly so: the progress of industrial capitalism, and the misery and pain and humiliation and displacement that came with it, was hurtful and odious to the English working family and demanded resistance and rebellion, at least by those thousands courageous enough to act out the resentment of the millions… who could have come up with any other way to protect the past and forestall the future?

–Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future (1995), p. 191

We haven’t accepted—we can’t really believe—that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so.

–Wendell Berry, “The Rise” in The Long-Legged House (1969), pp. 106-107

What counts, in the long run, is not what you have read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in your by your reading.

–Eleanor Roosevelt, quoted in The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life (2005) by Steve Leveen, p. 98

We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars that are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for “excellence,” to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to go to “a church of our choice” and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God.

–Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 4

Martin Accad, the academic dean of the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary in Lebanon, has written a passionate plea about the crisis in Lebanon entitled “Evangelical Blindness on Lebanon.” It’s a different perspective than is normally heard and worth reading and considering. His conclusion:

I am angry at self-centered Hezbollah, which has done the inadmissible of taking a unilateral war decision without consulting the Lebanese government of which it is part, never giving a second thought to the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Lebanese who will perish as a result of its selfish decision. I am angry that citizens of a nation like Israel, who have so suffered at the hands of others, would allow themselves such an out-of-proportion reaction, oh-so-far from the “eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth” principle that we might have forgiven them. I am just as angry at—I have lost hope in—the international community that is keeping silent and not even budging with an official condemnation of this senseless instinct of extermination. By both sides, I would be lynched for what I have just said, if they had the chance. But what have I got to lose anymore?

The defining achievement of the Industrial Revolution [was] the creation of a society in which people are reduced to a choice between wage labor and starvation.

–Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future (1995), p. 47

I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.

–C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955), p. 237

Dear News Industry,

The President is a human being. He uses the same words as you do. It’s not newsworthy, like most of what you publish. You seem to see this as an opportunity to degrade the President and the Presidency, and as usual, you take every opportunity to do so. That this is front page news is pathetic and shows the worthlessness of your entertainment-driven news. May your viewers be appalled and your ratings plummet.

Sincerely,

Josh Sowin

PS: I say this also to the bloggers who regurgitate whatever the news industry feeds them.