Clippings

He put the cigar on the edge of the table beside him with a grimace of distaste and picked at his moustache with nervous fingers. He put the messages away once more and leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling and biting a fingernail. He ran fingers through his hair. He put the end of a finger between his collar and his neck. He sat up and took the envelopes out of his pocket again, but put them back without having looked at them. He chewed his lower lip. Finally he shook himself impatiently and began to read the rest of his mail. He was reading it when the telephone-bell rang.

In the dreaming man’s dream, the dreamed man awoke.

The men of principled simplicity
Will have no traffic with our subtle doubt.
The world is flat, they tell us, and they shout:
The myth of depth is an absurdity!

For if there were additional dimensions
Beside the good old pair we’ll always cherish,
How could a man live safely without tensions?
How could he live and not expect to perish?

In order peacefully to coexist
Let us strike one dimension off our list.

If they are right, those men of principle,
And life in depth is so inimical,
The third dimension is dispensable.

Those were wild and violent times, chaotic and Babylonian times in which peoples and parties, old and young, Red and White, no longer understood each other. After sufficient bloodletting and debasement, it came to its end; there arose a more and more powerful longing for rationality, for the rediscovery of a common language, for order, morality, valid standards, for an alphabet and multiplication table no longer decreed by power blocs and alterable at any moment. A tremendous craving for truth and justice arose, for reason, for overcoming chaos. This vacuum at the end of a violent era concerned only with superficial things, this sharp universal hunger for a new beginning and the restoration of order, gave rise to our Castalia. … Starting from the very bottom, they reconstructed intellectual life, education, research, culture.

… Today we live as their heirs in a building almost too splendid. And let it be said once again, we live in it like rather vapid and complacent guests. We no longer want to know anything about the enormous human sacrifices our foundation walls were laid on, nor anything about the ordeals of which we are the beneficiaries, nor anything about history which favored or at least tolerated the building of our mansion, which sustains and tolerates us today and possibly will go on doing so for a good many Castalians and Magisters after our day, but which sooner or later will overthrow and devour our edifice as it overthrows and devours everything it has allowed to grow.

…the general view of many, not all, neurobiologists is that consciousness is a function of the number and complexity of neuronal linkages of the architecture of the brain. Human consciousness is what happens when you get to something like 10¹¹ neurons and 10¹⁴ synapses. This raises all sorts of other questions: What is consciousness like when you have 10²⁰ synapses or 10⁵⁰? What would such a being have to say to us any more than we would have to say to the ants?

…there’s an extremely interesting statistical study by the American social scientist James Prescott, in which he has looked at the compilation by Stanford anthropologist Robert Textor of hundreds of different societies, not all of them still extant. …Textor just puts the various categories down as a compilation. What Prescott has done is to do a multivariate analysis, statistical correlation—what goes with what. And the things that apparently go with each other are essentially the two sets of characteristics I just described [powerful social hierarchies and almost nonexistent social hierarchies]. It is Prescott’s view that there are causal relations. That, in fact, in his view the key distinction has to do with whether cultures hug their children and whether they permit premarital sexual activity among adolescents. In his view those are the keys. And he concludes that all cultures in which the children are hugged and the teenagers can have sex wind up without powerful social hierarchies and everybody’s happy. And those cultures in which the children are not permitted to be hugged because of some social ban and a premarital adolescent sexual taboo is strictly enforced wind up killing, hating, and having powerful dominance hierarchies.

We have Ten Commandments in the West. Why is there no commandment exhorting us to learn? “Thou shalt understand the world. Figure things out.” There’s nothing like that. And very few religions urge us to enhance our understanding of the natural world. I think it is striking how poorly religions, by and large, have accommodated to the astonishing truths that have emerged in the last few centuries.