The shape of a plant reflects the history of what [it] has sensed

"Cool could even prove to be the new mode of individualism, an adaptation to life in post-industrial consumer democracies, much as the Protestant work ethic that Max Weber described was a way of living the discipline of industrial societies."

...discovering platonic forms in the mud

…in that sense –– that’s the animistic, the thing that the scientific side (properly) goes as far away from as possible but there’s a certain part of us I think that still likes to feel that we are living in a world that’s alive, and has to be respected. And can be angry at us. And our car won’t start because it doesn’t like us for some reason.

The contemporary post-Marxist left seems to me to differ from the earlier Marxist one mainly in that the latter had a specific revolution in mind –– one in which selective replacement of private by public ownership of capital would bring about far-reaching desirable consequences, and in particular increasingly participatory democracy. From the point of view of that earlier left, it was plausible to claim that Dewey-style reformist tinkering had become merely an obstacle to the required revolution. But contemporary radicals have no such specific revolution to support. So I find it hard to see their purported non-membership in the culture of the liberal democracies, and their vehement anti-Americanism, as more than a wistful desire that there be some sort of revolution, any sort. This desire is, perhaps, the result of an understandable rage at the very slow extension of hope and freedom to marginal social groups, and at the frequent betrayals of past promises. But I do not think that the over-theoretical and over-philosophized form this rage is currently taking is of much use.

Mankind lies groaning, half-crushed beneath the weight of its own progress