Words&Dirt

“‘Whoever heard of cats doing anything useful!’

‘Except for staring at one in a supercilious manner,’ said Strange. ‘That has a sort of moral usefulness, I suppose, in making one feel uncomfortable and encouraging sober reflections upon one’s imperfections.’”

––Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, pg. 756

“It’s uncomfortable, at the least, to recognize our connectedness. We are genetically more than 90 percent chimpanzee; Shakespeare had it only partly right when he said, ‘What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason.’ Reason is a gift, but it is also a threat. I really don’t want to think mindfully about my daily life. Who does? If we did, we would have to dramatically change our ways of living.

But facts, as Ronald Reagan said, are stubborn things. Many people might want a world in which science cannot predict the results of our consumption of fossil fuels, because the only ethical response to that knowledge is collective, global, and yes, democratic, majoritarian action.

But they don’t live in such a world. And neither do the rest of us.”

––Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, “Ethics as if Tomorrow Mattered,” by Carl Pope, pg. 300