“The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of contemporary violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activity neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” WantHelpingFormCommonViolenceModernActivityDemandProjectsCapacityConcernRootsPressureOneselfSurrenderCommitContemporaryMultitudesModern LifeFrenzyCarried AwayFruitfulness Author:Thomas Merton
“If you have ever seen the movie Night of the Living Dead, you have a rough idea how modern corporations and organizations operate, with projects and proposals that everybody thought were killed constantly rising from their graves to stagger back into meetings and eat the brains of the living.” IfsIdeasNightBrainModernProjectsOrganizationMeetingsGravesCorporationsRisingRoughProposalNight Of The Living Dead Book:Claw Your Way to the Top: How to Become the Head of a Major Corporation in Roughly a Week Source: Claw Your Way to the Top: How to Become the Head of a Major Corporation in Roughly a Week
“Humans in modern societies are driven by a perhaps desperate hope that they might find some way of mobilizing their theoretical and empirical knowledge and their evaluative systems so as both to locate themselves and their projects in some larger imaginative structure that makes sense to them. ... Furthermore, many modern agents would like it to be the case that the form of orientation which their life has is, if not true, at least compatible with the best available knowledge.” IfsWayHumansMightFormCasesModernProjectsStructureAvailableDrivenAgentsMake SenseDesperateImaginativeTheoreticalOrientationModern SocietyCompatible Author:Raymond Geuss
“The effect of the post-Enlightenment project for human society is that all human activity is absorbed into labor. It becomes an unending cycle of production for the sake of consumption. The modern concept of "built-in obsolescence" makes this clear. The cycle of production and consumption has to be kept going, and the work of the artist or craftsman who aims to create something enduring becomes marginal to the economic order.” HumansArtistOrderClearEconomicModernEffectsActivityProjectsEnlightenmentConceptsBuiltLaborAimEndureSakeProductionsPostsCyclesConsumptionConsumerismHuman SocietyOverconsumptionHuman ActivityUnendingCraftsmanObsolescenceEconomic Order Author:Lesslie Newbigin
“One of the things that's amazing about reading the private writing of these folks is that they enthusiastically describe things which we have now seen, and which are widely regarded as unappealing. They'll write, "It's going to be beautiful, we're going to have a town of 1,000 stone buildings that are all identical." And we as modern readers think, we've seen that; that's bad Soviet architecture or a public housing project. Nobody fantasizes about living there.” ThinkingWritingBeautifulReadingModernBuildingReaderProjectsStonesTownsFolksArchitectureSovietHousingIdenticalPublic Housing Author:Christine Jennings