Fire and Knowledge

Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth—so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane—quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count the throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.

–Jane Eyre in Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847; Reader’s Digest, 1984), p. 285

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

–Jeffrey Zeldman, “Understanding Web Design“

One can have the most exquisite taste and yet … be the dreariest of creeps. And of course one can have no taste at all and be wondrously good-hearted. The snob’s error is to put good taste before a good heart – to put good taste before almost everything else. Clearly a fine thing to have, good taste can lend harmony, elegance, and graciousness to one’s life. Yet to pride oneself on one’s good taste is not only the beginning of snobbery; it is also unseemly and, in and of itself, a piece of certifiably bad taste.

–Joseph Epstein, Snobbery: The American Version (2002), p. 81

A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.

–Wendell Berry, “The Total Economy” in Citizenship Papers (2003), p. 69

[Berry is relentless here. A corporation is still made up of people. It’s not just a “pile of money.” People make and implement the decisions, so a corporation can be as careful or as careless as the people who make it up. In a good corporation, no one has “sold their moral allegiance.” Employees can speak their minds and change policies. In fact, with the right people, a corporation can benefit society far more than one solitary person through innovation, implementation, cost-saving, and philanthropy.

If a person has to give up their morality to work for an employer, they’re working at the wrong place.]

Factory automation and labor-saving appliances were supposed to have all but eliminated the need to work. Yet in the past twenty years there has been an increase in the average number of hours worked in North America. Increased productivity was supposed to create universal affluence, to eliminate poverty as we know it. Yet despite the fact that GDP in Canada has doubled since the ‘70s, the level of “basic needs” poverty has remained unchanged. And what about those flying Jetson cars, or at least clean high-speed trains? Commuting has become a nightmare for most city-dwellers. And far from being clean, the average fuel efficiency of vehicles in North America has dropped.

Who could seriously have predicted, thirty years ago, that this is how things would play out? How is it that we can produce so much more wealth and yet fail to secure any measurable improvement in satisfaction?

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), pp. 100-1

Every nuclide with a half-life of less than 80 million years is missing from our region of the solar system, and every nuclide with a half-life of greater than 80 million years is present. Every single one. These data are an unbiased atomic sampling of our corner of the known universe. And the results are crystal-clear. There is a reason that the short-lived nuclides are no longer around, and the reason is obvious: The solar system is much older than 80 million years. In the billions of years since its formation, the short-lived nuclides have simply decayed themselves out of existence.

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 72

It is a failing of our species that we ignore and even despise the creatures whose lives sustain our own.

–Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1992, Harvard University Press), p. 308

Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be.

–E. F. Schumacher in Joseph Pearce, Small is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered (ISI Books: 2006), p. 152