Dialogues
Seven Voices
Awareness

Humane Village Journal
Volume 2, 1995

Compiled by
Alexander Manu

The Context for Survival

Hannah Arendt •

The world, the man-made home erected on earth and made of the material which earthly nature delivers into human hands, consists not of things that are consumed but of things that are used. If nature and The earth generally constitute the condition of human life, then the world and the things of the world constitute the condition under which this specifically human life can be at home on earth.

Christopher Lasch •

The global circulation of commodities, information, and populations, far from making everyone affluent, has widened the gap between rich and poor nations and generated a massive migration to the West, where the newcomers swell the vast army of the homeless, unemployed, illiterate drug ridden, derelict, and effectively disfranchised. Their presence strains existing resources to the breaking point. Medical and educational facilities, law enforcement agencies, and the available supply of jobs&emdash;not to mention the supply of racial tolerance and goodwill, never abundant to begin with&emdash;all appear inadequate to the enormous task of assimilating what is essentially a surplus or "redundant" population, in the cruelly expressive British phrase.

The poisonous effects of poverty and racial discrimination cannot be ghettoised; they too circulate on a global scale. "Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global, financial markets," Susan Sontag writes, "the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world . . . in which everything that can circulate does"&emdash;goods, images, garbage, disease. It is no wonder that "the look into the future, which was once tied to a vision of linear progress," has turned into a "vision of disaster," in Sontag's words, and that "anything . . . that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe."

Hannah Arendt •

The easier that life has become in a consumers' or labourers' society, the more difficult it will be to remain aware of the urges of necessity by which it is driven, even when pain and effort, the outward manifestations of necessity, are hardly noticeable at all.

The danger is that such a society, dazzled by the abundance of its growing fertility and caught in the smooth functioning of a never ending process, would no longer be able to recognize its own futility&emdash;the futility of a life which "does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject which endures after [its] labour is past."

Jacques Ellul •

The process of massification corresponds, moreover, to the disappearance of anything resembling a community. The majority of American psychosociologists insist on the importance of human social relations for the individual. As Jerome Scott and R. P. Lynton put it: "Every man requires emotional and intellectual satisfactions which alone secure for him his belonging to a community." When this need is suppressed, neuroses result. Some experts even maintain that most obsessive neurosis springs from a failure of social adaptation and from the suppression of community relations, for which technical relations are substituted...

Christopher Lasch •

What is not so obvious is that equality now implies a more modest standard of living for all, not an extension of the lavish standards enjoyed by the favoured classes in the industrial nations to the rest of the world. In the twenty-first century, equality implies a recognition of limits, both moral and material, that finds little support in the progressive tradition.

Jacques Ellul •

The adaptation of men to a mass society is not yet an accomplished fact; and recent research in the field of psychoanalytic sociology has revealed the gap which still exists between man and the collective society, a gap which is the cause of disequilibration. Every society has norms which represent a criterion of the normal. When these norms change their character, a disturbance of equilibrium ensues and, for the man who has not kept pace with the changes, neurosis. There is no doubt that the norms of our civilisationation have changed for reasons which are not "human"; men as a whole had no desire for the changes that occurred nor did they work toward them consciously. Indirect influences have operated on the norms of modern society, and these norms have been transformed without men knowing what was happening.

Thomas Berry •

Our imagination is filled with images that sustain the present direction of our culture Our spiritual values are disorientating with their insistence on the flawed nature of the existing order of things and the need for relief by escape from the earth rather than on a greater intimacy with the earth. Constantly we assert the value of the human over the merely resource values of the natural world. Our legal system fosters a sense of the human as having rights over the rights of natural beings. Our commerce, industry, and economics are based on the devastation of the earth. Disengagement from such basic life commitments requires a certain daring.

Jacques Ellul •

A precise question is posed: Into what has technique transformed man's efforts toward the spiritual? One answer to this question is that technique possesses monopoly of action. No human activity is possible except as it is mediated and censored by the technical medium. This is the great law of the technical society. Thought or will can only be realized by borrowing from technique its modes of expression. Not even the simplest initiative can have an original, independent existence.

Hannah Arendt •

Everything that is, must appear, and nothing can appear without a shape of its own; hence there is in fact nothing that does not in some way transcend its functional use, and its transcendence, its beauty or ugliness, is identical with appearing publicly and being seen. By the same token, namely, in its sheer worldly existence, every thing also transcends the sphere of pure instrumentality once it is completed. The standard by which a thing's excellence is judged is never mere usefulness, as though an ugly table will fulfil the same function as a handsome one, but its adequacy or inadequacy to what it should look like, and this is, in Platonic language, nothing but its adequacy or inadequacy to the eidos or idea, the mental image, or rather the image seen by the inner eye, that preceded its coming into the world and survives its potential destruction. In other words, even use objects are judged not only according to the subjective needs of men but by the objective standards of the world where they will find their place, to last, to be seen, and to be used.

Thomas Berry •

It would be easier for us if we would remember that the earth itself, as the primary energy, is finding its way both to interior conscious expression in the human and to outer fulfilment in the universe. We can solve nothing by dreaming up some ephemeral structure of reality or by giving the direction of the earth over to our bureaucratic institutions. We must simply respond to the urgencies imposed on us by the energy that holds the stars within the galactic clusters, that shaped the planet under our feet, that has guided life through its bewildering variety of expression, and that has found even higher expression in the exotic tribes and nations, languages literature, art, music, social forms, religious rituals, and spiritual disciplines over the surface of the planet. There is reason to believe that those mysterious forces that have guided earthly events thus far have not suddenly collapsed under the great volume of human affairs in this late twentieth century.

Jacques Ellul •

This new sociological mass structure and its new criteria of civilisation seem both inevitable and undeniable. They are inevitable because they are imposed by technical forces and economic considerations beyond the reach of man. They are not the result of thought, doctrine, discourse, will. They are simply there as a condition of fact. All social reforms, all social changes, are located unholly within this condition of fact, unless they are purely utopian. When social change is truly realistic, it accepts this condition buoyantly, vindicates it, and exploits it. Only two possibilities are left to the individual: either he remains what he was, in which case he becomes more and more unadapted, neurotic, and inefflcient, loses his possibilities of subsistence, and is at last tossed on the social rubbish heap, whatever his talents may be; or he adapts himself to the new sociological organism, which becomes his world, and he becomes unable to live except in a mass society.

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