What Humans are Capable of Inflicting

Excerpt from "Witnessing" by Susan Sontag from the introduction to Don McCullin:

"I would suggest that it is a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one's sense of how much suffering there is in the world we share with others. I would insist that anyone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to experience disillusionment (even incredulity) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, of amnesia.

We now have a vast repository of images that make it harder to preserve such moral defectiveness. Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens and cannot encompass all the reality of a people's agony, they still serve an immensely positive function. The image says: keep these events in your memory."

See also: Don McCullin

To Get Back There

Excerpt from The Science of Enlightenment (Session 3) by Shinzen Young: 

When we practice meditation, we may practice within a certain tradition, but we are linked to a global phenomenon that has been at the core of human experience all over this planet for a long time. 

In point of fact, it is probably the case that our very ancient ancestors—before the arising of civilization, when we were still in a tribal state—lived an awful lot of their lives in a meditative state just naturally. 

And then, with the arising of civilization, that becomes lost and it's necessary to create conceptual frameworks and specific practice techniques to get back there. 

So we are linked with something very, very large when we practice meditation. And I think that's just a very wonderful and beautiful thing.  

The Holy See

The Holy See

A new film by Godfrey Reggio, Philip Glass, and Jon Kane

Which Capitalism It's Going To Be

George Saunders in conversation with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW's Bookworm, Jan. 31, 2013: 

Photo of George Saunders by Damon Winter for The New York TimesI think [these are hard times], but also they've probably always been, in the sense that we aren't really born very well equipped [for] the struggles that we're gonna go through. We're kind of born with this idea that we're permanent and we're central and we're enduring and we're the most interesting person in the room, and then, especially in times like these. 

When I was growing up, the sort of things was that capitalism was in a battle with socialism and communism and anarchy was sort of the crazy uncle over there on the side. And now, in our time, I think capitalism has just won. There's no question. It's just overwhelming victory for capitalism.

But I think we're in an interesting time, in that maybe capitalism is trying to decide which  capitalism it's going to be. And it seems to me that just in my lifetime, it's kind of been decided that the form of capitalism we're going to embrace is the one that says, "If you got it, you deserve it. No guilt. Don't worry about it. And anybody who doesn't like that is whining."

Whereas, the one I like is sort of a Emersonian-Whitmanesque form which says, "There's no point in any of this—democracy and capitalism—if we're not simply making more citizens—making brighter citizens, making the lives of the least among us better. 

So I think it's some kind of weird diffuse way, fiction can remind us that even those people are on a continuum with us and that remembering that actually enobles us. 

See also:

• Saunders, G. (2013). Tenth of December: Stories. New York: Random House. [excerpt]
• "George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year," by Joel Lovell, The New York Times Magazine [cover story], Jan. 3, 2013

Working Together

Working together from Tim Marriott on Vimeo.

We shape our self
to fit this world,
and by the world
are shaped again.
 
The visible and the invisible
working together
in common cause
 
to produce
the miraculous.
 
~ David Whyte