Historians From The United States

"Roszak makes a signal contribution to the environmental debate by turning us toward questions of psychology rather than science, and meaning rather than fact. But while raising the indispensable question of how sanely we have treated the Earth, Roszak overstates the degree of uncertainty surrounding the scientific assessment of environmental issues. There is... a fair degree of consensus concerning a number of environmental issues..."

"Roszak argues that our habits of abusing nature, as well as out patterns of overconsumption, betray a sickness of the soul rooted in our estrangement from the natural world. The roots of this sickness lie in modernism's account of a dead and purposeless universe. ...modern psychology made it irrational to care for the world. The result is we left ourselves with only a cultural or conventional basis for defining sanity, based upon the individual's adaptation to society."

"The final stage of life... offers us the opportunity to detach from competitive, high-consumption priorities... At that point, life itself—the opportunity it offers for growth, for intellectual adventure, for the simple joys of love and companionship, for working out our salvation—comes to be seen as our highest value. ...That is what I have always assumed it means to be countercultural."

"My hope is that people who grew up on J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the folk music of Pete Seeger, the protest ballads of Country Joe, the anarchic insolence of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the biting satire of Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, the acid rock of Bob Dylan, the sociology of Paul Goodman and Herbert Marcuse, the Summer of Love and the Days of Rage, will not be content to spend their retirement years on cruise ships or feeding their Social Security checks into slot machines at the nearest casino."

"The elder culture that is being improvised all around us day by day... promises to be the road toward a saner, more compassionate, more sustainable world—altogether, a more important turning point than ever presented itself in the 1960s... This, at last, is what the dissenting idealism of the 1960s was, in its highest and brightest expression, all about: a transformation of values that may finally reveal the goal of industrialization... In raising that possibility I cling to one hope. They grew up... reveling in their willingness to search beyond the limits of convention. ...What Boomers left undone in their youth, they will return to take up in their maturity... we have won years back from death. That gives us the grand project of using those extra years to build a culture that is morally remarkable."

"The Earth's cry for rescue from the punishing weight of the industrial system we have created is our own cry for a scale and quality of life that will free each of us to become the complete person that we were meant to be."

"The epidemic psychosis of our time is the lie of believing we have no ethical obligation to our planetary home."

"If we could assume the view of nonhuman nature, what passes for sane behavior in our social affairs might seem madness. But as the prevailing reality principle would have it, nothing could be greater madness than to believe that beast and plant, mountain and river have a "point of view." …minds exist, so we believe, nowhere but in human heads."

"Here, at the birth of modern science, is a fundamental insight. Our knowledge of nature Out There begins with knowledge of ourselves In Here. Until we have freed our minds and emotions of the hidden presuppositions that stand between us and the world, we can never be certain we are in touch with reality."

"We are discovering that natural philosophy needs bonds of sympathy as well as precision of intellect."

"The bond of sympathy, like the artist's eye for beauty, may stretch across many divisions."

"Goethe wondered at what point our instruments might be creating what we think we see out there in the world. ...his question is still a good one. Every science of observation must take care not to get lost among its own artifacts."

"Because girls are raised to specialize in a certain set of human characteristics, would they not, then, bring to science a different sensibility? Does that sensibility have the right to be represented in science—or, for that matter, in business, politics, law, or medicine?"

"Women enter the sciences, but "womanliness"—those qualities that have always been stereotypically attributed to females—is not yet entirely welcome, whether it comes into the laboratory wearing pants or a skirt."

"When theoretical physicists censor the public's spontaneous visualizing response by warning us we must not try to picture the underlying nature of the world, whether atoms or quarks or preons, they are drawing upon an intellectual discipline devised by Calvin. Reality is beyond the senses; only the rigorously logical mind, leaping bravely into the intangible, can grasp it. No images."

"Some Calvinist divines identified an "idol" as anything "feigned in the mind by imagination." There is a haunting similarity between such teachings and Galileo's bold attack upon what he called "secondary qualities" in nature."

"You and I, whole human beings, are, so Richard Dawkins insists, merely "survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." At its most fundamental level, he finds the living universe populated by John Wayne genetics and Clint Eastwood chemicals."

"The macho is in the metaphors, not the phenomena."

"Without apoptosis, life would not be possible. ...when cells lose their ability to die, they run rampant, assuming that life-threatening form we call cancer. ...The process of apoptosis by which life and development are governed is profoundly communal. ...Cells ...need to be "encouraged" to live."

"Or perhaps... there is actually an infinity of universes among which only this one has by sheer accident produced the conditions for life and mind. It now requires such artful speculation to maintain an orthodox faith in chance. Skeptics, it would seem, are willing to believe anything."

"Science, in broad outline, can be divided into three parts: the study of the vast, the study of the tiny, and the study of life which... acts as audience to both the vast and the tiny."

"In four centuries of taking wealth and comfort from the body of the Earth, modern science has not troubled to produce a single rite or ritual, not even a minor prayer, that asks pardon or gives thanks. But then what sense would it make to ask anything of a dead body?"

"This is the point at which the "rape of nature" ceases to be a metaphor. It is an accurate depiction... rape stems from a compulsive need to control, to control completely. ...From ...inadequacy flow fear, anger, the need to punish and subjugate. ...the objective is... to dominate this elusive, troubling female so that she will do what she is ordered to do. ...that requires the objectification of the other; she must become what he wants her to become."

"Reduced to the statistical permutations of genes, life became "nothing but" the marriage of chance and selection."

"Boyle was among the first who recognized that the withdrawal of sympathy licenses conduct that would not be permissible within an animistic vision of nature. ...The vision that he and his scientific colleagues were creating was fast becoming a mathematical abstraction lacking color, odor, texture, and personality. ...The task of the natural philosopher, we are told, is to "probe," "penetrate," and "pierce" nature in all her "mysterious," secret," and "intimate recesses.""

"Life... becomes an anomalous puzzle that cannot be "explained" until scientists in laboratories find a way to animate the dead matter that is the normal condition of things. This amounts to saying that life has no "place" in the world until men—the gender that originally dominated the world and still does—can create it... in a laboratory and express it in a formula. Only then will we "understand" what life is."

"When it is another human being who is being... objectified, everybody (except the rapist) can clearly see the act as a crime. But when we objectify the natural world, turning it into a dead or stupid thing, we have another word for that. Science."

"It is characteristic of the technocracy to render itself invisible. Its assumptions about reality and its values become as unobtrusively pervasive as the air we breathe. ...the technocracy increases and consolidates its power... following the dictates of industrial efficiency, rationality, and necessity. ...the technocracy assumes a position similar to that of the purely neutral umpire in an athletic contest. ...we tend to ignore the man ...Yet ...he alone sets the limits and goals of the competition and judges the contenders."

"It will be enough to define the technocracy as that society in which those who govern justify themselves by appeal to technical experts who, in turn, justify themselves by appeal to scientific forms of knowledge. And beyond the authority of science, there is no appeal."

""Technocracy," in The Meaning of Technology. Selected Readings from American Sources (2004) ed. Montserrat Ginés Gibert"

"In the technocracy, nothing is any longer small or simple or readily apparent to the nontechnical man. Instead, the scale of intricacy or all human activities... transcends the competence of the amateurish citizen and inexorably demands the attention of specially trained experts. ...even the most seemingly personal aspects of life. ...In the absence of expertise, the great [productive} mechanism would surely break down, leaving us in the midst of chaos and poverty."

"Our goal should not be to borrow from elsewhere, but to search among our own cultural resources, perhaps even in modern science and industrialism, for ways to restore art to the status it has always held in traditional societies as a form of knowledge. ...art adds to what we learn from any combination of physics, biology, geology, and chemistry. It tells us the world is... deserving of reverence."

"In a time when so many artists have learned to confabulate with extremes of horror and alienation, the most daring thing an artist can do is to fill a book, a gallery, or a theater with joy, hope, and beauty."

"That is what Castle's work needed: a beginner's eye—my eye, before it became too schooled and guarded, while it was still in touch with the vulgar foundations of the art, still vulnerably naive enough to receive that faint and flickering revelation of the dark god whose scriptures are the secret history of the movies."

"The joy of this quest is not in triumph over others, but in the search for the qualities we share with them and for our uniqueness, which raises us above all competition."

"In our time a secret manifesto is being written. Its language is a longing we read in one another's eyes. It is the longing to know our authentic vocation in the world, to find the work and the way of being that belong to each of u s . . . I speak of the Manifesto of the Person, the declaration of our sovereign right to self-discovery. I cannot say if those who have answered its summons are indeed millions, but I know that its influence moves significantly among us, a subterranean current of our history, that awakens in all those it touches an intoxicating sense of how deep the roots of the self reach, and what strange sources of energy they embrace...."

"Ideology is not absent in the technocracy... it is simply invisible, having blended into the supposedly indisputable truth of the scientific world view. ...The most effective ideologies are always those that are congruent with the limits of consciousness, for then they work subliminally."

"The truth of the matter is no society, not even our severely secularized technocracy, can ever dispense with mystery and magical ritual."

"Gentlemen, the time is coming when there will be two great classes, Socialists, and Anarchists. The Anarchists want the government to be nothing, and the Socialists want government to be everything. There can be no greater contrast. Well, the time will come when there will be only these two great parties, the Anarchists representing the laissez faire doctrine and the Socialists representing the extreme view on the other side, and when that time comes I am an Anarchist."

"Any prosperity policy is a delusion and a path to ruin. There is no economic lesson which the people of the United States need to take to heart more than that. In the second place the Spanish mistakes arose, in part, from confusing the public treasury with the national wealth."

"About half a century before the Depression, a Yale philosopher named William Graham Sumner penned a lecture against the progressives of his own day and in defense of classical liberalism. The lecture eventually become an essay, titled "The Forgotten Man". Applying his own elegant algebra of politics, Sumner warned that well-intentioned social progressives often coerced unwitting average citizens into funding dubious social projects."

"728. Moral anarchy. The antagonism between a virtue policy and a success policy is a constant ethical problem. The Renaissance in Italy shows that although moral traditions may be narrow and mistaken, any morality is better than moral anarchy. Moral traditions are guides which no one can afford to neglect. They are in the mores and they are lost in every great revolution of the mores. Then the men are morally lost. Their notions, desires, purposes, and means become false, and even the notion of crime is arbitrary and untrue. If all try the policy of dishonesty, the result will be the firmest conviction that honesty is the best policy. The mores aim always to arrive at correct notions of virtue. In so far as they reach correct results the virtue policy proves to be the only success policy."

"What we prepare for is what we shall get."

"You see the expansion of industrial power pushed forward by the energy, hope, and thrift of men, and you see the development arrested, diverted, crippled, and defeated by measures which are dictated by military considerations."

"The history of civil liberty is made up of campaigns against abuses of taxation. Protectionism is the great modern abuse of taxation; the abuse of taxation which is adapted to a republican form of government. Protectionism is now corrupting our political institutions just as slavery used to do."

"Civil liberty is the status of the man who is guaranteed by law and civil institutions the exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare."

"If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control."

"As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or in the better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X. … What I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is the man who never is thought of. … He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays."

"The man who started with the notion that the world owed him a living would once more find, as he does now, that the world pays him its debt in the state prison."

"It is often said that the earth belongs to the race, as if raw land was a boon, or gift."