(believe it or not, these two entries catch up my old notebook scribblings. I did get my weekday daytime shifts, so I have access to a computer at the new post and no supervisors.. and the laptop cometh soon. Be a fortnight or so as I adjust to the odd experience of a schedule syncronized to most of the mainstream... I will probably fill up with entries from what I've been reading for awhile.)

"Money is the bastard."
- Graffitti done in marker on the fiberglass art pony sculpture in front of my building


I've heard that history is defined by the battle for the control of symbols. Socialist theory postulates that all history is defined by the conflict between labor and management. I'm sure both are true. Yet, if the history of man matches the evolution of nature, how much deeper does it run? What is the importance of the response to change, as between those who advance forward inside their cultural millieu, and those who fight to hold back against the forces of historical transformation? If the force of history is unstoppable, is conflict as a theme neutralized? Then could man not be defined by the mythological crucible of conflict, but by the dynamic construction of continuity?
Posit: Free will is not just the will to go on, but the will to contribute to the greater totality of self-as-species.

"Although these assertations might be overstated if applied to affirmative action, it nonetheless seems evident that while affirmative action has shifted the pattern of social inequalities, it has not substantially diminished, and may have even bolstered, the overall amount of inequality. Derrick Bell has suggested that affirmative action mechanisms "have flourished because they offer more benefit to the institutions that adopt them than they do to the minorities whom they're nominally intended to serve." Yet the conclusion to draw is not, as some critics have claimed, that people of color and white women, or American society as a whole, would have been better off without aggressive affirmative action programs; one balance, they clearly have done more good than harm. The point is to look closely at the inadequacies of affirmative action in order to learn how to do more to remove inequality, not less. If remedies based on principles of liberal individualism have proved incapable of pulling society away from entrenched class, race, and gender privilege, and in fact have tended to reinforce it, other strategies out to be considered.
An alternative approach would encourage society to embrace the actualization of communal rights, rights that are simultaneously individual and shared with other citizens, especially rights to social resources. Expanding the original concept of "compensatory justice" sketched in the mid-1960s by black leaders such as Whitney Young, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin, this strategy would call for the rethinking and comprehensive reordering of social priorities. It would aim not at individual solutions but at far-reaching collective ones: reconstruction of public education from the ground up, especially for the poor, to realize the right to a good education; innovative job training programs of a quality and relevance never tried; publicly subsidized work geared to the physical and spiritual rebuilding of American society; diverse and creative housing programs to solved homelessness; community-controlled national health care orientated to prevention as much as treatment. For women in particular, communal rights to compensatory justice would include free and safe abortions, universal child care, paid parental leaves, benefits and pensions for part-time work, a liveable income, and commitment to comparable worth. Ultimately these programs would not only refashion the American political economy, but lead to "new definitions of work and leisure," as Rustin posited in 1965.
The implementation of communal rights would necessarily entail structural reforms that both hinged upon a major redistribution of social power and resources and propelled such redistribution - reform that was thus "non-reformist." Rather than zero-sum game pitting individual against individual and group against group, communal rights would be inclusive not exclusive, motivated by and enhancing cooperation not competition, capable of expansion not driven by scarcity. Properly understood, communal rights would tend to transcend narrow individual or group interests and move toward the realization of universal entitlements for all citizens."

from A PEOPLE'S CHARTER: The Pursuit of Rights in America by James MacGregor Burns and Stewart Burns

Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.

- John Stuart Mill

I finally finished Pierre De Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man.
(note: this fragment was written mid-December.) It only took me three months. Hell, last time I read the whole Old Testament, it took me a week. Then, this was a very powerful book on the metaphysical direction of evolution and thought. I took so long because of how hard I'd hammered at the concept that biological evolution could be a flow of life toward metaphysical unity, or a force that is unstoppable in its motion toward Omega, final unification.
In the epilogue, Chardin posits a question that might come from his readers, and definitely would have come from me: How can humans appear to move backward historically and culturally while evolution generates the forces that move life irrevocably forward? In other words, can we be moving in a positive progression when reality is full of humans fighting to slide backwards into negation. Chardin's answer made as much sense as any French philosopher, whose writings are usually as dense as a two-year-old Christmas fruitcake, but I managed to get the gist of it. History moves in all directions, as life always moves forward. I'm beginning to fully feel the immense potential power of life as dynamically-powered pistons for the cosmogenetic engine. In this way, there is the possibility of faith that can be used to escape the limitations of suffering and prejudice without turning away from the amorality of the power of nature.....

Couldn't nostalgia be considered a necrophiliac act, since it is passionate love made with dead time?

(Amazingly enough, I didn't lose my notebook before New Year, so the catch-up continues.)

History is the study of how insane we were in comparison to how insane we are now.

Another alternative Christian history question:
What would the world be like if Jesus slit his wrists in the Garden of Gethsemane? What if all the disciples threw themselves into the sea with stones tied to their feet, soon afterwards?