Willy Staley (2021):

The notion that individual action might help us avoid any coming or ongoing crises is now seen as hopelessly naïve, the stuff of Obama-era liberalism. Whether that’s true or not, it offers us all permission to become little [Tony Sopranos], lamenting the sad state of affairs while doing almost exactly nothing to improve ourselves, or anything at all. This tendency is perhaps most pronounced online, where we are all in therapy all day, and where you can find median generational opinions perfectly priced by the marketplace of ideas — where we bemoan the wrongs of the world and tell ourselves that we can continue being who we are, and enjoy the comforts we’ve grown accustomed to. Climate change? Everyone knows it’s caused by five corporations. Amazon? Someone in power ought to do something about that, but you shouldn’t ask people to boycott it, even for a day. The widespread exploitation of undocumented workers by food-delivery apps? Neoliberal capitalism has exhausted me to the point that I cannot make my own pasta. There’s no point, these forces are too powerful to disrupt, it’s true — at least you can tell yourself that.

Marilynne Robinson (1998):

The problem is that there is something about the way we teach and learn that makes it seem naive to us to talk about these things outside a classroom, and pointless to return to them in the course of actual life. In other words, whatever enters the curriculum becomes in some way inert.

What used to be meant by “humanism,” that old romance of the self, the idea that the self is to be refined by exposure to things that are wonderful and difficult and imbued with what was called the human spirit, once an object of unquestioned veneration, has ended. Both institutional education and all the educating aspects of the civilization — journalism, publishing, religion, high and popular culture — are transformed and will be further transformed until the consequences of this great change have been absorbed. Education as it was practiced among us historically reflected its origins in the Renaissance, when beautiful human creations were recovered from the obscurity of forgotten languages and lost aesthetics, or of prohibition or disapprobation or indifference, and were used to demonstrate the heights which human beings can attain. It is not unusual now to hear religion and humanism spoken of as if they were opposed, even antagonistic. But humanism clearly rested on the idea that people have souls, and that they have certain obligations to them, and certain pleasures in them, which arise from their refinement or their expression in art or in admirable or striking conduct, or which arise from finding other souls expressed in music or philosophy or philanthropy or revolution.

When people still had sensibilities, and encouraged them in one another, they assumed the value and even the utility of many kinds of learning for which now we can find no use whatever. It was not leisure that was the basis of culture, as many have argued, but the profoundly democratic idea that anyone was only incidentally the servant of his or her interests in this world; that, truly and ideally, a biography was the passage of a soul through the vale of its making, or its destruction, and that the business of the world was a parable or test or temptation or distraction and therefore engrossing, and full of the highest order of meaning, but in itself a fairly negligible thing.

… Given our power and influence, which seem only to grow as disorder and misfortune afflict so many populations, it seems a sad failure that we have not done more to make the world intelligible to ourselves, and ourselves to the world.

And again:

The use of the word [“natural”] implies a tendentious distinction. Billions of dollars can vanish into the ether under the fingers of a bad young man with a dark stare, yet economics is to be regarded as if it were lawful and ineluctable as gravity. If the arcane, rootless, disruptive phenomenon we call global economics is natural, then surely anything else is, too. […]

But economics is simply human traffic in what people make and do and value and need, or think they need, a kind of epitome of civilization. It is the wealth of nations, and also their fraudulence and malice and vainglory. It is no more reliably benign or rational than any other human undertaking. That is to say, it requires conscious choice and control, the making of moral and ethical judgments. […]

The idea of progress implies a judgment of value. We are to believe the world will be better if people are forced into severe and continuous competition. If they work themselves weary making a part for a gadget assembled on the other side of the earth, in fear of the loss of their livelihoods, the world will be better for it. If economic forces recombine and shed these workers for cheaper ones, the world will be still better. In what sense, better? To ask is to refuse to accept the supposedly inevitable, to deny the all-overriding reality of self-interest and raw competition, which will certainly overwhelm us if we allow ourselves some sentimental dream of a humane collective life. This economics implies progress and has no progress to show. […]

This school of thought — ordinarily referred to as modern thought — tells us nothing more urgently than that we are wrong about ourselves. We are to believe we are the dupes of the very reactions that make us judges of circumstance, and that make us free in relation to it. Obviously, if we must act in our own interest, crudely understood, we have few real options. But if we act from a sense of justice, or from tact or compassionate imagination, then we put the impress of our own sense of things on the external world. If this is another version of the will to power, it is in any case the kind of power that religion, and civilization in its highest forms, has always sought to confer. If this is another version of self-interest, it is also a proof of the fact that the definition of that term is very broad indeed, classically friendly to paradox — “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” for example, or “it is in dying we live.” […]

I am sure I would risk offending if I were to say outright that modern thought is a failed project. Still, clearly it partakes as much of error as the worst thinking it has displaced. […]

The modern fable is that science exposed religion as a delusion and more or less supplanted it. But science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality. It can give us no reason to prefer a child to a dog, or to choose honorable poverty over fraudulent wealth. It can give us no grounds for preferring what is excellent to what is sensationalistic. And this is more or less where we are now. […]

Our hypertrophic brain, that prodigal indulgence, that house of many mansions, with its stores, and competences, and all its deep terrors and very rich pleasures, which was so long believed to be the essence of our lives, and a claim on one another’s sympathy and courtesy and attention, is going the way of every part of collective life that was addressed to it — religion, art, dignity, graciousness. Philosophy, ethics, politics, properly so called. It is a thing that bears reflecting upon, how much was destroyed, when modern thought declared the death of Adam.

Jonathan Malesic:

Academic and professional cultures get people like me to locate our identity within them, in part by separating us from people and place. The business scholar Gianpiero Petriglieri (Sicilian, married to an Englishwoman, teaching in France) calls his elite MBA students “a peculiar tribe. A tribe for people unfit for tribalism.” To ease their careers in multinational corporations, they’re tied to no country. They identify themselves by their skills, intellect, and work ethic, which they’re always ready to take to their next job, wherever it might be. In the cosmopolitan ideal, you belong to the world, equally at ease in Berlin or Bangkok, knowledgeable of local customs, ready to join a conversation anywhere, with anyone. It’s an ideal of connoisseurship. It’s knowing to pronounce the Czech capital Pra-ha, not Progg, when you’re chatting about Bohemian pilsners.

But it also means being equally ill-at-ease anywhere, including among citizens of your home country. The desire to belong is incongruous with the individualistic culture of America’s elite. To live out the cosmopolitan ideal means you know someone everywhere but have close ties nowhere, because you’ve moved so many times for work. It means you never realize the dream of the Cheers theme song. There’s no place you can go where everybody knows your name.

Barry Lopez:

These two incidents came back to me often in the four or five years that I traveled in the Arctic. The one, timeless and full of light, reminded me of sublime innocence, of the innate beauty of undisturbed relationships. The other, a dream gone awry, reminded me of the long human struggle, mental and physical, to come to terms with the Far North. As I traveled, I came to believe that people’s desires and aspirations were as much a part of the land as the wind, solitary animals, and the bright fields of stone and tundra. And, too, that the land itself existed quite apart from these.

The physical landscape is baffling in its ability to transcend whatever we would make of it. It is as subtle in its expression as turns of the mind, and larger than our grasp; and yet it is still knowable. The mind, full of curiosity and analysis, disassembles a landscape and then reassembles the pieces—the nod of a flower, the color of the night sky, the murmur of an animal—trying to fathom its geography. At the same time the mind is trying to find its place within the land, to discover a way to dispel its own sense of estrangement. […]

Human beings dwell in the same biological systems that contain the other creatures but, to put the thought bluntly, they are not governed by the same laws of evolution. With the development of various technologies—hunting weapons, protective clothing, and fire-making tools; and then agriculture and herding—mankind has not only been able to take over the specific niches of other animals but has been able to move into regions that were formerly unavailable to him. The animals he found already occupying niches in these other areas he, again, either displaced or elinminated. The other creatures have had no choice. They are confined to certain niches—places of food (stored solar energy), water, and shelter—which they cannot leave without either speciating or developing tools. To finish the thought, the same technological advances and the enormous increase in his food base have largely exempted man from the effect of natural controls on the size of his population. Outside of some virulent disease, another ice age, or his own weapons technology, the only thing that promises to stem the continued increase in his population and the expansion of his food base (which now includes oil, exotic minerals, fossil ground water, huge tracts of forest, and so on, and entails the continuing, concomitant loss of species) is human wisdom.

Walking across the tundra, meeting the stare of a lemming, or coming on the tracks of a wolverine, it would be the frailty of our wisdom that would confound me. The pattern of our exploitation of the Arctic, our increasing utilization of its natural resources, our very desire to “put it to use,” is clear. What is it that is missing, or tentative, in us, I would wonder, to make me so uncomfortable walking out here in a region of chirping birds, distant caribou, and redoubtable lemmings? It is restraint.

Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his foodbase. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependent. Not because he must, because he lacks inventiveness, but because herein is the accomplishment of the wisdom that for centuries he has aspired to. Having taken on his own destiny, he must now think with critical intelligence about where to defer.

Voltaire:

There are some charlatans who admit of no doubts. We know nothing of first principles. It is surely very presumptuous to define God, the angels, spirits, and to pretend to know precisely why God made the world, when we do not know why we can move our arms at our pleasure.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Miguel de Unamuno:

Those who say they believe in God and yet neither love nor fear him, do not in fact believe in him but in those who have taught them that God exists, and those in their turn often enough do not believe in him either. Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God-Idea, not in God Himself.

Daniel Taylor:

So which is more compatible with faith—doubt or certainty? I’m going to vote for doubt. I believe doubt and faith need each other, whereas certainty does not need faith at all. If I am certain of something—no possibility of being wrong—then why do I need faith? And even if I only have certitude—the psychological feeling of certainty—that feeling is going to greatly diminish any sense of risk that is inherently part of the concept of faith. I may speak of “my faith in God,” but if I require it to be certain, then I am really speaking more of my certitude about God than of either certainty or faith.

George MacDonald:

How much more than Job are we bound, who know him in his Son as Love, to trust God in all the troubling questions that force themselves upon us concerning the motions and results of things! …

In the confusion of Job’s thoughts—how could they be other than confused, in the presence of the awful contradiction of two such facts staring each other in the face, that God was just, yet punishing a righteous man as if he were wicked?—while he was not yet able to generate, or to receive the thought, that approving love itself might be inflicting or allowing the torture—that such suffering as his was granted only to a righteous man, that he might be made perfect—I can well imagine that at times, as the one moment he doubted God’s righteousness, and the next cried aloud, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him,’ there must in the chaos have mingled some element of doubt as to the existence of God. Let not such doubt be supposed a yet further stage in unbelief. To deny the existence of God may, paradoxical as the statement will at first seem to some, involve less unbelief than the smallest yielding to doubt of his goodness. I say yielding; for a man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to rouse the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood; and theirs in general is the inhospitable reception of angels that do not come in their own likeness. Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed. In all Job’s begging and longing to see God, then, may well be supposed to mingle the mighty desire to be assured of God’s being. To acknowledge is not to be sure of God. One great point in the poem is—that when Job hears the voice of God, though it utters no word of explanation, it is enough to him to hear it: he knows that God is, and that he hears the cry of his creature. That he is there, knowing all about him, and what had befallen him, is enough; he needs no more to reconcile seeming contradictions, and the worst ills of outer life become endurable.

Debbie Chachra at Comment (emphasis added):

At the city water treatment plant, I learned that someone comes in each and every day of the year to take bacterial plates out of an incubator and verify that there are no pathogens in the drinking water. Then they prepare another set to be read the next day. And the next, and the next. Water treatment plants are a physical instantiation of the idea that politics are the structures we create when we are in a sustained relationship with other people. They’re more than just the technological systems. They’re also a connection to the expertise, labour, and care of all the people that make sure that the water is safe to drink, and a recognition by the city’s residents that they are connected to each other through the landscape and the human-made watershed of pipes that are laid on top of it (or buried beneath). In the rainy northeastern United States, municipal water and sewage systems function as the smallest-scale proof of concept for the value of building out collective systems to provide for our bodily needs—not for nothing is “indoor plumbing” still a metonym for “civilization.” And it’s just one of many infrastructural systems that we rely on.

Rhina P. Espaillat, on the poetry of Anthony Hecht:

More important than bringing indictments against specific institutions, what Anthony Hecht does in much of his work is to warn, convincingly and justly – which is to say, with love – of those elements in religion that allow it to degenerate into zealotry or cant, and make possible behavior that runs counter to the avowed intent of religious faith. To deny that such dangerous elements exist, even today, in institutions we may value – and even deep in the impulses that gave rise to them – is to deny that fire is capable of burning, disfiguring and destroying what it touches, on the grounds that we are disloyal and ungrateful to find fault in what warms us so well when we are cold.

No poem or prose, however good, is going to bring about a change in human nature that will do away with injustice, cruelty, or cynicism, whatever its source. But excellent writing can sharpen the senses, challenge the intellect, kindle the imagination, and encourage the reader to generous thought. And great writing – like that of Anthony Hecht, which so qualifies on all counts, aesthetic, moral, and intellectual – can do more. It can teach us to confess doubt, to acknowledge the moral ambiguities inherent in every human impulse, and to guard against self-satisfied overconfidence in ourselves and in those institutions we have created in our image.