Nascence is “beginning to exist or develop”. Can we not, accurately, say that Western CULTURE ceased developing perhaps 100 years ago? That science is a thought form that can master nature, but not reach deep places in the human spirit, in whose very existence our cultural elites have ceased to believe? Have ceased to experience?
If my work had a slogan, it would be “We can do and be better.”
The thought of the possibility of progress is the first step, the first move, in progress. If you complacently assume you are all you can and should be, you will not even perceive the work you can do to improve, much less actually do it.
I have on my wall a saying from Boddhidharma: “All men know the way, but few follow it.” In our modern age, that would likely need to be modified to: “Few men see the way; fewer still follow it.”
It all starts with bad metaphysics.
In what does “progress” consist for most of our intellectual elites, our graduates of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford? It consists in furthering their visions of SOCIAL morality, social “justice”. And it consists in individual perfection only in the quantitative realms, which is to say life extension, and increased cognitive capacity. The Singularity, which is seemingly a mania for nearly everyone who works with computers.
But this social morality, necessarily, must be imposed by force precisely because it rejects individual moral progress and the judgement which must necessarily accompany it. No one is asking black people to do and be better, and in so doing to improve their lots in life. No one is asking Islamic nations to improve their treatment of women.
No, we need to restart the march of progress, after a century of determined efforts to retard it, and repeal it. And it all starts with the notion of individual moral agency–as tempered, to be sure, by psychological processes, which we can understand better and better. We can understand the vital importance of shared ritual and communion better and better. We can develop and refine better technologies of the soul.
And we CAN use science to discover the existence of the soul.
If my work had a slogan, it would be “We can do and be better.”
The thought of the possibility of progress is the first step, the first move, in progress. If you complacently assume you are all you can and should be, you will not even perceive the work you can do to improve, much less actually do it.
I have on my wall a saying from Boddhidharma: “All men know the way, but few follow it.” In our modern age, that would likely need to be modified to: “Few men see the way; fewer still follow it.”
It all starts with bad metaphysics.
In what does “progress” consist for most of our intellectual elites, our graduates of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford? It consists in furthering their visions of SOCIAL morality, social “justice”. And it consists in individual perfection only in the quantitative realms, which is to say life extension, and increased cognitive capacity. The Singularity, which is seemingly a mania for nearly everyone who works with computers.
But this social morality, necessarily, must be imposed by force precisely because it rejects individual moral progress and the judgement which must necessarily accompany it. No one is asking black people to do and be better, and in so doing to improve their lots in life. No one is asking Islamic nations to improve their treatment of women.
No, we need to restart the march of progress, after a century of determined efforts to retard it, and repeal it. And it all starts with the notion of individual moral agency–as tempered, to be sure, by psychological processes, which we can understand better and better. We can understand the vital importance of shared ritual and communion better and better. We can develop and refine better technologies of the soul.
And we CAN use science to discover the existence of the soul.