Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Three movies to elevate your perspective

Each of these movies offers a valuable lesson in decision making. They raise questions about our motivations, our prejudices, and the values that govern our lives.

1. 12 Angry Men

2. The Bridge on the River Kwai

3. Sophie Scholl - The Final Days


Monday, October 26, 2009

Reverence for the pursuit of knowledge

"A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it will live to regret his steps." (Carlos Castenada, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, 1968)

While I doubt that anyone can have an "absolute assurance" of the consequences of their going to war or their pursuit of knowledge, Don Juan makes a powerful point with his analogy. Knowledge has the power to destroy or to create. If those who seek knowledge desire to be good stewards of their discoveries, they must approach their quest with reverence and humility. They must remain ever vigilant against the counterfeit conclusions and vain assumptions that would deceive them. Not all knowledge is truth. Knowledge will take your ignorance and innocence, but it does not have to take your optimism or virtue.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

The Power of Ideas

Friday, October 23, 2009

From Wendell Berry's "A Continuous Harmony"

"If you aren't for us you're against us, somebody is always saying. That seems like a sad little pair of options, insofar as to any kind of intelligence the possibilities ought to be numerous, if not infinite. Intelligence consists in being for and against such things as political movements up to a point, which it is the task of the intelligence to define. In my judgement intelligence never goes whole hog for anything public, especially political movements. Across the whole range of politics now (and I suppose always) you find people willing to act on the assumption that there is some simple abstraction that will explain and solve the problems of the world, and who go direct from the discovery of the abstraction to the forming of an organization to promote it. In my opinion those people are all about equally dangerous, and I don't believe anything they say. What I hold out for is the possibility that a man can live decently without knowing all the answers, or believing that he does--can live decently even in the understanding that life is unspeakably complex and unspeakably subtle in its complexity. The decency, I think, would be in acting out of the awareness that personal acts of compassion, love, humility, honesty are better and more adequate responses to that complexity than any public abstraction or theory or organization. What is wrong with our cities--and I don't see how you can have a great civilization without great cities--may be that the mode of life in them has become almost inescapably organizational.
"It used to be that every time I heard of some public action somewhere to promote some cause I believe in, I would be full of guilt because I wasn't there. If they were marching in Washington to protest the war, and if I deplored the war, then how could my absence from Washington be anything but a sin? That was the organizational protestant conscience: In order to believe in my virtue I needed some organization to pat me on the head and tell me I was virtuous. But if I can't promote what I hope for in Port Royal, Ky., then why go to Washington to promote it?
"What succeeds in Port Royal succeeds in the world." (Wendell Berry, "A Continuous Harmony", 1972, pp. 49-50)