Fragmentation and Obsession
Chapter 3
Ideas Have Consequences
Pg 52:
The believer in truth, on the other hand, is bound to maintain that the things of highest value are not affected by the passage of time; other wise the very concept of truth becomes impossible
They are making the ancient affirmation that there is a center of things, and they point out that every feature of modern disintegration is a flight from this toward periphery.
(Try to get a grasp of that one. That word periphery is key.)
Pg 55:
…people had some comfort in the thought that policy was being made by men of ‘broad views’- for such are the inculcations of liberal education. Gentlemen did not always live up to their ideal, but the existence of an ideal is a matter of supreme importance.
…materialism has given its rewards to the sort of cunning incompatible with any kind of idealism.
The American South not only had cherished the ideal but had given it an infusion of fresh strength, partly through its social organization but largely through its education in rhetoric and law. the South’s tradition of learning was the Ciceronian tradition of eloquent wisdom, and this circumstance explains why the major creative political figures of America, from Jefferson through Lincoln to Wilson, have come from this section. But the Civil War brought defeat to Ciceronian humanism, and thereafter the South turned to commerce and technology in its economic life and to the dialectic of New England and of Germany in its educational endeavors. The gentleman was left to walk the stage an impecunious eccentric, protected by certain sentimentality but no longer understood.
( Suggested reading: Penhally
by Caroline Gordon)
Pg 56:
By far the most significant phase of the theory of the gentleman is its distrust of specialization. It is an ancient belief going back to classical antiquity, that specialization of any kind is illiberal in a freeman.
…they are expressions of contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed; and one deformed is the last person to be thought of as a ruler; so runs the irresistible logic of the position.
(I love it!!)
Pg 56:
The position of the philosophic doctor and of his secular heir, the gentleman, was thus correct. For them the highest knowledge concerned, respectively, the relation of men to God and the relation of men to men.
…if Plato’s philosopher had left the city to look at the trees and then had abandoned speculative wisdom for dendrology. The people who would urge just this course are legion among us today. The facts on the periphery, they feel, are somehow more certain.
SWISH
Pg 58:
So the scientist, having lost hold upon organic reality, clings the more firmly to his discovered facts, hoping that salvation lies in what can be objectively verified.
From this comes a most important symptom of our condition, the astonishing vogue of factual information.
Having been told by the relativists that he cannot have truth, he now has ‘facts.’ One notes that even in everyday speech the word fact has taken the place of ‘truth’…
And the public is being taught systematically to make this fatal confusion of factual particulars with wisdom.
The acquisition of unrelated details becomes an end in itself and takes the place of the true ideal of education.
The same attention to peripheral matter long ago invaded the schools, at the topmost levels, it must be confessed, where it made nonsense of literary study and almost ruined history.
Pg 59:
…..that the former distrust of specialization has been supplanted by its opposite, a distrust of generalization.
This is a process of emasculation.
…that modern man is suffering from a severe fragmentation of his world picture. This fragmentation leads directly to an obsession with isolated parts.
pg 60-61
Such obsession with fragments has grave consequences for individual psychology, not the least of which is fanaticism.
(The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity..Yeats)
Let us not question the genuineness of a sigh of relief when people are allowed to go back to their test tubes and their facts.
Pg 61-62
The world no longer has use for a liberally educated class. Surely the answer lies in this abandonment of generalization for specialization, which is the very process of fragmentation.
Pg 66-67
The enforced irresponsibility has itself become a factor in pathology, for
A burden of responsibility is, after all, the best means of getting anyone to think straight.
There is every indication that he retains the same capacity for loyalty, but what has he to be loyal to?
We cannot be surprised at monstrous perversions
This is the exaltation of ‘becoming’ over ‘being.’
Pg 68:
The provincial in time sees that interpretations of the past requires reflection and generalization, which take him beyond the moment.
The very possibility that there may exist timeless truths is a reproach to the life of laxness and indifference which modern egotism encourages.
and it would also be a way to plumb the ultimate depths of memory loss and truth telling. If there is one thing I have learned from blogging it’s that negativity sells