Re: value judgements, optimism, machinery

["Dan Fiscus" <***>]

Mike,

Nice quote - very optimistic indeed to fit such a role for our
machinery! Better than all the techno-nightmares in pop
culture these days like Matrix or Terminator movies.

And thanks for the Tao translation recommendation. I'll
look up that one and the one Tim suggested to add to my
other 3 English versions.

Also wanted to reply, related to this...

McIntyre, Mike S. wrote:

snip

> fill it.  What we need are new reserves of potential energy -- moral
> energy this time.  So let us not merely say, as we did above, that
> the mystical summons up the mechanical.  We must add that the body,
> now larger, calls for a bigger soul, and that mechanism should mean
> mysticism.  The origins of the process of mechanization are indeed
> more mystical than we might imagine.  Machinery will find its true
> vocation again, it will render services in proportion to its power,
> only if mankind, which it has bowed still lower to the earth, can
> succeed, through it, in standing erect and looking heavenwards."

...with quotes from Teilhard de Chardin, in The Phenomenon
of Man:

pp. 244-245. "The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the
entry into the super-human ---these are not thrown open to a few of
the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others.
They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in
which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual
renovation of the earth..."

"No evolutionary future awaits man except in association with all
other men. " p 246.

"...under the combined influence of machinery and the super-heating
of thought, we are witnessing 'a formidable upsurge of unused
powers' (his in italics). Modern man no longer knows what to do
with the time and potentialities he has unleashed. We groan under
the burden of this wealth. We are haunted by the fear of
'unemployment'. Sometimes we are tempted to trample this
super-abundance back into the matter from which it came without
stopping to think how impossible and monstrous such an act
against nature would be." p252-253

"A new domain of psychical expansion - that is what we lack. And
it is staring us in the face if we would only raise our heads to look
at it.
    Peace through conquest, work in joy. These are waiting for us
beyond the line where empires are set up against other empires, in
an interior totalisation of the world upon itself, in the unanimous
construction of a 'spirit of the earth'" (italics). p253

It seems de Chardin agrees with Bergson but takes the too big
"body" in need of a comparable soul to be a global one of all
humankind, or perhaps of all lifekind, as a unified whole.

Dan