“Life, like holiness, can be known only by being experienced. To experience it is not to “figure it out” or even to understand it, but to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is. In suffering it and rejoicing in it as it is, we know that we do not and cannot understand it completely. We know, moreover, that we do not wish to have it appropriated by somebody’s claim to have understood it. Though we have life, it is beyond us. We do not know how we have it, or why. We do not know what it going to happen to it, or to us.”
“One of our problems is that we humans cannot live without acting; we have to act. Moreover, we have to act on the basis of what we know, and what we know is incomplete.”
“The journalists think it intellectually chic to stand open-mouthed before any wonder of science whatsoever. The media, cultivating their mediocrity, seem quite comfortably unaware that many of the calamities from which science is expected to save the world were caused in the first place by science—which meanwhile is busy propagating further calamities, hailed now as wonders, from which later it will undertake to save the world.”
The economy = legalized vandalism
“If modern science is a religion, then one of its presiding deities must be Sherlock Holmes. To the modern scientist as to the great detective, every mystery is a problem, and every problem can be solved. A mystery can exist only because of human ignorance, and human ignorance is always remediable. The appropriate response is not deference or respect, let alone reverence, but pursuit of “the answer.” This pursuit, however, is properly scientific only so long as the mystery is empirically or rationally solvable. When a scientist denies or belittles a mystery that cannot be solved, then he or she is no longer within the bounds of science.”
“Believing that whatever is intangible does not exist, Mr. Wilson like many materialists, atheists, rationalists, realists, etc., thinks he had struck a killing blow against religious faith when he has asked to see its evidence. But of course religious faith begins with the discovery that there is no “evidence.” There is no argument or trail of evidence or course of experimentation that can connect unbelief and belief.”
“Our daily lives are a daily mockery of our scientific pretensions. We are learning to know precisely the location of our genes, but significant numbers of us don’t know the whereabouts of our children. Science does not seem to be lighting the way; we seem rather to be leapfrogging into the dark along series of scientific solutions, which become problems, which call for further solutions, which science is always eager to supply, and which it sometimes cannot supply.”
“Modern scientists works with everybody’s proxy, whether or not that proxy has been given. A good many people, presumably, would have chosen to “stay out of the nuclei,” but that was a choice they did not have. When a few scientists decided to go in, they decided for everybody. This “freedom of scientific inquiry” was immediately transfixed into the freedom of corporate and/or governmental exploitation. And so the freedom of the originators and exploiters has become, in effect, the abduction and imprisonment of all the rest of us. Adam was the first, but not the last, to choose for the whole human race.”
“Public sexual revelations and public obscenity are now merely cliches, part of the uniform behavior of modish nonconformity and fashionable bad manners, but always performed by people who wish to be thought courageous. Has it increased freedom? Well, of course, people have become more free when they have earned or taken or been given the right to do what they previously were forbidden to do. But, as always, the worth of freedom depends upon how it is used. The value of freedom is probably not intrinsic and is certainly not limitless. It is generally understood by people who think about it that freedom can be abused, and that it rests, in the long run, on a common understanding of fairness: One should not increase one’s freedom by reducing somebody else’s.”
“I don’t believe that the connection between art and life can ever be finally or even very satisfactorily resolved, any more than can be the connection between science and life. We join ourselves to the living world by the artifacts of art and science—by made things. And we are always going to be at least somewhat at fault, because we are ignorant and fallible and small; the living world is larger and more complex than our works.”
“The world and its neighborhoods, natural and human, are not passively the subjects of art, any more than they are passively the subjects of science-industry-and-technology. They are affected by all that we do. And they respond. The world does not exist merely to be written about, any more than it exists merely to be studied. It is real, before and after human work. What we write is finally to be measured by the health of what we write about. What we think we know affects the health of the thing we think we know.”
“What I am against—and without a minute’s hesitation or apology—is our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at an incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves. If we state the problem that way, then we can see that the way to correct our error, and so deliver ourselves from our own destructiveness, is to quit using our technological capability as the reference point and standard of our economic life. We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.”
“The walls of the rational, empirical world are famously porous. What come through are dreams, imaginings, inspirations, visions, revelations. There is no use in stopping over these with a magnifying lens. Beyond any earthly reason we experience beauty in excess of use, justice in excess of anger, mercy in excess of justice, love in excess of deserving or fulfillment. We have known evil beyond imagining and forgiveness beyond measure. And all of this is in excess of what Mr. Wilson means by “religion” and of what he means by “ethics.””
“If innovation (the “qualitatively new”) is a primary requirement for art, then why are we still interested in works that are no longer new?”
“The complicity of the arts and humanities in this conquest is readily apparent in the enthusiasm with which the disciplines schools, and libraries have accepted their ever-growing dependence (at public expense) on electronic technologies that are, in fact as all of history shows, not necessary to learning or teaching, and which have produced no perceptible improvement in either. … It is the clearest demonstration so far that the cult of originality and innovation is in fact a crowd of conformists, tramping on one another’s heels for fear of being the last to buy whatever is for sale.”
“We should value familiarity above innovation. Boomer scientists and artists want to discover (so to speak) a place where they have not been. Sticker scientists and artists want to know where they are. There is no reason that familiarity cannot be a goal just as worthy, demanding, and exciting as innovation—or, as I would argue, much more so. It would certainly give worthwhile employment to more people. And in fact its boundaries are much larger. Innovation is limited always by human ingenuity and human means; familiarity is limited only by the limits of life. The real infinitude of experience is in familiarity.”
“Explanation is reductive, not comprehensive; most of the time, when you have explained something, you discover leftovers. An explanation is a bucket, not a well. What can’t be explained? I don’t think creatures can be explained. I don’t think lives can be explained. What we know about creatures and lives must be pictured or told or sung or danced. And I don’t think pictures or stories or songs or dances can be explained. The arts are indispensable precisely because they are so nearly antithetical to explanation.”
“The response is to ask if science and art are inherently at odds with one another. It seems obvious that they are not. To see that they are not may require extracurricular thought, but once we have cracked the crust of academic convention we can see that “science” means knowing and that “art” means doing, and that one is meaningless without the other. Out of school, the two are commonly inter-involved and naturally cooperative in the same person—a farmer, say, or a woodworker—who knows and does, both at the same time. It may be more or less possible to know and do nothing, but it is not possible to do and know nothing. One does as one knows. It is not possible to imagine a farmer who does not use both science and art.”