Wednesday 11 January 2023
Imposing it at all costs on every occasion
As we all know, at the moment there is considerable mainstream media obsession with a recently published book. The quote below was taken from a book published less recently, but it still has something to say about maturity and experience.
One effect of growing experience is to render what is unreal uninteresting. Momentous alternatives in life are so numerous and the possibilities they open up so varied that imagination finds enough employment of a historic and practical sort in trying to seize them.
A child plans Towers of Babel; a mature architect, in planning, would lose all interest if he were bidden to disregard gravity and economy. The conditions of existence, after they are known and accepted, become conditions for the only pertinent beauty. In each place, for each situation, the plastic mind finds an appropriate ideal. It need not go afield to import something exotic. It need make no sacrifices to whim and to personal memories.
It rather breeds out of the given problem a new and singular solution, thereby exercising greater invention than would be requisite for framing an arbitrary ideal and imposing it at all costs on every occasion.
George Santayana - The Life of Reason (1905-1906)
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2 comments:
Yes, I think this accounts for the fact that we spend inordinate amounts of time and effort trying to solve problems which don't really exist; or at least don't exist in the way they are framed. In this respect, ideology is a form of immaturity. It makes people think of the ways they ought to change things, without ever asking whether those things need to be changed.
Sam - and there seems to be a link between education, ideology and immaturity. As if too many people are exposed to ideologies they can't handle other than by acceptance. Corby is a good example, but there are many.
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