here's something clever from How Should We Then Live?. the book traces the flow of western thought since the romans to see how we arrived at our present day (well, 1975 present-day) ways of thinking. one of the themes is the course that humanistic thinking has taken, from the renaissance (man's ability to use his reasoning to discover ultimate meaning), through the enlightenment (breakdown of absolutes, society's ability to be perfected), to modern science and modernism (the universe as a closed system, relativism, absurdity, what is is right). the author quotes his son, who describes it like this:
Humanism has changed the Twenty-third Psalm:
They began - I am my shepherd
Then - Sheep are my shepherd
Then - Everything is my shepherd
Finally - Nothing is my shepherd.
earlier in the book he says: At the end of his life Leonardo da Vinci had foreseen that beginning humanistically with mathematics one has only particulars and will never come to universals or meaning, but will end only with mechanics. It took humanistic thought two hundred and fifty years to arrive at the place which Leonardo had foreseen, but by the eighteenth century it had arrived. Everything is the machine, including people.
***
i've been listening to a lot of pink floyd lately. i think if i'd listened to a bunch of david gilmour guitar solos instead of billy corgan guitar solos when i was learning to play, i'd be a much better guitarist than i am right now. not that billy's not awesome, he's just too much of an instinctive player; david gilmour's not nearly as fancy or all over the place, but his style is so expressive and lyrical and relatable.
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Wednesday, March 23, 2005
[warning: i just re-read this entry and it's pretty dour and unpleasant. must be the weather - early last week it was sunny and i was wearing shorts and sunglasses, and then two days later it SNOWED. stupid communist weather.]
this china-taiwan-america-north korea business is setting me on edge. what was the point of passing an anti-secession law? if china attacks taiwan, do they really think other countries will be ok with it just because china made it legal? at least the european arms embargo isn't gonna be lifted for awhile. i feel helpless reading about this stuff, like how i feel when some of my friends here tell me about their unhappy marriages and how they wished they'd never gotten married and how their kids are the only bright spots in their family lives, but a million times more so.
with my friends, i can't force them to love their spouses and i can't tell them to leave them either. nothing can be done, except to pray for them and to pray that my faith can be increased so that i can actually believe that something can change in their hearts, when their brightest source of hope right now is the possibility of divorce after their kids have grown up. for the past few months when i've told them that they must learn to love and that God can make things grow out of nothing, my words have sounded empty even to me. i know that God is not dependent on the strength of my faith in order to change people, but i need to learn hope and faith for my own sake, for my own peace.
my friend is getting married in may to a guy she met last december. i've hung out with them together a few times; my impression of him is probably a little below 'he seems allright'. regardless, i keep telling her that six months of knowing somebody would be too short even if he was the chinese brad pitt and to look at all the unhappy relationships around that resulted from a too-brief courtship, but she's feeling a lot of pressure from both her parents and the guy's parents. all i can do is hope they overcome the odds.
this year, the school's been trying to upgrade themselves from a county level school to a provincial level school (which comes with more government funds), so they've been putting up new buildings and stuff, to put on a good show for the inspectors from changsha who're coming soon. a friend of mine was asked to head up a local chapter of the communist youth league and she told me it was a big fake; apparently students are supposed to take a lot of special classes and go through special education in order to be able to join the league, but the school leaders told her to just swear in all the students first and then tell them what they'll need to know in order to impress the inspectors.
for the other stuff, a teacher told me that the school forced a 'mandatory donation' of at least 5000 RMB from each teacher in order to fund the new buildings, with promises to return the money in three years at 'a better interest rate than the bank'. if a teacher felt that they couldn't afford to give that much money or just didn't want to, it was taken directly from their salary.
ok, that's enough.
...
this china-taiwan-america-north korea business is setting me on edge. what was the point of passing an anti-secession law? if china attacks taiwan, do they really think other countries will be ok with it just because china made it legal? at least the european arms embargo isn't gonna be lifted for awhile. i feel helpless reading about this stuff, like how i feel when some of my friends here tell me about their unhappy marriages and how they wished they'd never gotten married and how their kids are the only bright spots in their family lives, but a million times more so.
with my friends, i can't force them to love their spouses and i can't tell them to leave them either. nothing can be done, except to pray for them and to pray that my faith can be increased so that i can actually believe that something can change in their hearts, when their brightest source of hope right now is the possibility of divorce after their kids have grown up. for the past few months when i've told them that they must learn to love and that God can make things grow out of nothing, my words have sounded empty even to me. i know that God is not dependent on the strength of my faith in order to change people, but i need to learn hope and faith for my own sake, for my own peace.
my friend is getting married in may to a guy she met last december. i've hung out with them together a few times; my impression of him is probably a little below 'he seems allright'. regardless, i keep telling her that six months of knowing somebody would be too short even if he was the chinese brad pitt and to look at all the unhappy relationships around that resulted from a too-brief courtship, but she's feeling a lot of pressure from both her parents and the guy's parents. all i can do is hope they overcome the odds.
this year, the school's been trying to upgrade themselves from a county level school to a provincial level school (which comes with more government funds), so they've been putting up new buildings and stuff, to put on a good show for the inspectors from changsha who're coming soon. a friend of mine was asked to head up a local chapter of the communist youth league and she told me it was a big fake; apparently students are supposed to take a lot of special classes and go through special education in order to be able to join the league, but the school leaders told her to just swear in all the students first and then tell them what they'll need to know in order to impress the inspectors.
for the other stuff, a teacher told me that the school forced a 'mandatory donation' of at least 5000 RMB from each teacher in order to fund the new buildings, with promises to return the money in three years at 'a better interest rate than the bank'. if a teacher felt that they couldn't afford to give that much money or just didn't want to, it was taken directly from their salary.
ok, that's enough.
...
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