The unspoken but commonly accepted truism that anything that can't be positively demonstrated to exist can't be said to exist except theoretically - which is a kind of partial existence, an almost-being, an inferior mode - means that anything beyond the reach of language and touch is denied the legitimacy given to things which can be explained and dissected.
This is a valuable tool for discrimination between the useful and the distracting for the exploring scientist, but it's a constricting handicap for the moral philosopher.
What this means is that something as central to human experience as the end result of all this cycling of birth and death and the labor involved in it is kept back from discussion, held in a secondary position, and is made to serve by its absence or adulteration the immediately pronounceable aims of those whose voices dominate the argument.
"Where are we going?" is more easily answered with "Heaven", or by its twin "With technology, to other worlds", than it is by a kind of un-sketched-in diagram of possibility. Yet that's a more accurate description of what this has been all along than either of those pat answers can ever be.
So that what most of us still feel, though we can't name it precisely - the cloudy goal at the unterminating end of all our lives together - is pushed to the side, and replaced by the firmly stated goals of a minority, because they're the only goals around that can be stated clearly.
This is mirrored in the domination of common lives and endeavors by corporations and their enforcers in politics, whose clamorous insistence on profit as the sacred, ultimate, and only value, and on business success as more central to human experience than the lives of the now secondary ordinary people, has filled the world with inhuman noise and subtle poisons.
Because those goals can be articulated clearly, and the nebulous but more valid and more human goal - of "keeping on keeping on", of continuing, of honoring the hopeful progress that led to our own moment of living by turning that hope toward the indescribable future - can't be stated clearly without limiting it into non-existence, or making it sound silly , the truly human impulse is denigrated - while the purest forms of selfishness, in the individual and in aggregate, are deified and worshiped.
It's that limitlessness that makes it inarticulable at the same time it makes it what it is. Human.
The rest is slavery.
This is a valuable tool for discrimination between the useful and the distracting for the exploring scientist, but it's a constricting handicap for the moral philosopher.
What this means is that something as central to human experience as the end result of all this cycling of birth and death and the labor involved in it is kept back from discussion, held in a secondary position, and is made to serve by its absence or adulteration the immediately pronounceable aims of those whose voices dominate the argument.
"Where are we going?" is more easily answered with "Heaven", or by its twin "With technology, to other worlds", than it is by a kind of un-sketched-in diagram of possibility. Yet that's a more accurate description of what this has been all along than either of those pat answers can ever be.
So that what most of us still feel, though we can't name it precisely - the cloudy goal at the unterminating end of all our lives together - is pushed to the side, and replaced by the firmly stated goals of a minority, because they're the only goals around that can be stated clearly.
This is mirrored in the domination of common lives and endeavors by corporations and their enforcers in politics, whose clamorous insistence on profit as the sacred, ultimate, and only value, and on business success as more central to human experience than the lives of the now secondary ordinary people, has filled the world with inhuman noise and subtle poisons.
Because those goals can be articulated clearly, and the nebulous but more valid and more human goal - of "keeping on keeping on", of continuing, of honoring the hopeful progress that led to our own moment of living by turning that hope toward the indescribable future - can't be stated clearly without limiting it into non-existence, or making it sound silly , the truly human impulse is denigrated - while the purest forms of selfishness, in the individual and in aggregate, are deified and worshiped.
It's that limitlessness that makes it inarticulable at the same time it makes it what it is. Human.
The rest is slavery.
