(3089/898) Vision and reality

307) Compounding [the] problem, education throughout Indonesian New Guinea is in the national language, not in Ketengban and the 300 other indigenous languages. Radio, TV, newspapers, commerce, and government also use the Indonesian language. While the reasoning behind such decisions is, of course, understandable, the outcome is that all but 200 of the modern world's 6,000 languages are likely to be extinct or moribund by the end of the next century. As humanity's linguistic heritage disintegrates, much of our traditional, mostly unrecorded knowledge base vanishes with it. [...] The analogy that occurs to me is that final destruction, in A.D. 391, of the largest library of the ancient world, at Alexandria. The library housed all the literature of Greece, plus much literature of other cultures. [...] The ongoing loss today that draws most public attention is that of biodiversity. In that loss, nature is viewed as the victim, humans as the villains. But there is also a parallel loss in which humans are both victims and unwitting villains. Not only are species going extinct, but so is much of our information about those species that survive.

Jared Diamond
"Stinking Birds and Burning Books" in
Natural History magazine (2/94)

308) You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream of things that never were; and say "Why not?"

[George] Bernard Shaw
Back to Methuselah (play) (1921)
used by Robert F. Kennedy
as a campaign slogan (1968)

309) Nothing displays human hubris more than the old textbook designation of recent geological times as the "age of man." First of all, if we must use an eponymous designation, we live today, and have always lived, in the "age of bacteria." Second, if we insist on multicellular parochialism, modern times must surely be called the "age of insects." *Homo sapiens* is one species, mammals a few thousand. By contrast, nearly a million species of insects have been described (and several million more remain undiscovered and uncataloged). Insects represent more than 70 percent of all named species.

Stephen Jay Gould
"In the Mind of the Beholder" in
Natural History magazine (2/94)

310) Scientists reach conclusions for the damnedest of reasons: intuitions, guesses, redirections after wild goose chases, all combined with a dollop of rigorous observation and logical reasoning [...] The myth of a separate mode [of scientific thought] based on rigorous objectivity and arcane, largely mathematical knowledge, vouchsafed only to the initiated, may provide some immediate benefits in bamboozling the public to regard [scientists] as a new priesthood, but must ultimately prove harmful in erecting barriers to truly friendly understanding and in falsely persuading so many students that science lies beyond their capabilities.

Stephen Jay Gould
"In the Mind of the Beholder" in
Natural History magazine (2/94)

311) Now, my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. [...] I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy, and must be my excuse for dreaming.

J.B.S. Haldane
Possible Worlds (1927) [B16]

312) According to business school-types, when superstores [such as Home Depot, Toys-R-Us and Wal-Mart] gather like a pod of whales [...] it's called a power center, a creation unique to our time. The superstore could only survive in a human ecosystem dominated by a genus of car owners for whom a spin on the interstate is but a few minutes drive. There are no buses or jitneys to [the power center]. It would be logistically impossible to walk there. [...] When predatory capitalists talk shop among themselves, they call superstores "category killers," for their destructive efficiency. [...] Not long ago a superstore tactician told a newspaper reporter that when hunting for a good corridor of [late-20th-century eco-wasteland] in which to roost, he searches in a strip that is "overstored" or "overmalled" because "the more stores we have in the area, the better. We call it cannibalizing."

Jack Hitt
"More and More and More and More"
New York Times Magazine (1/23/94)

313) Tragic as the [Vietnam] war was, it was not Vietnam's apocalypse. The Vietnamese see life in terms of centuries, and no matter how many bombs it dropped, harbors it mined or acres it poisoned, America is only an infinitesimal part of Vietnam's history. Vietnam has had 1,000 years of Chinese rule and 100 of the French. American hyperbole aside, the face of Vietnam is not the broken face of war, and the 1963-75 intervention [...] is just one fleeting image in a 2,000 year history.

Lan Cao
"The Details Are Vietnamese,
The Vision, Guilty American"
Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure Section (1/23/94)

Sources

[B16] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (1993)


Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 778 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.