Don't You Know the Legacy of Reason
by JBEZL
Sep. 18, 2006 22:40

Don't you know that our ancestors lived by reason?

Look at the men and their construction -- the mastery of grading the land and building durable structures. Impossible without reason.

Look at the women and their homespun yarn, fibers making warm and durable clothing. Without the spinning technique, it's just a pile of fuzz.

What if ours is a legacy of reason? And what if we've only been momentarily sidetracked? What if instead of wandering around talking about how the sky is falling because of all the bullshit in the world, what if we did what our ancestors did and rose through it?

[I mean there's a whole world here of illustrations about human civilization. Imagine what the average human looked out upon several thousand years ago when facing the problem of survival. Compare that to what the problem of survival means to one of my contemporaries.]

But my cheerleading can't survive my wondering if our ancestors at large were friends of reason.

I mean it's self-evident that there was a spectacular rising. We know that we rose, because we're here. But something about endowing all of them with such ubiquitous rationality just doesn't feel genuine to me. So perhaps what's wrong is me assuming there was massive, across-the-board reason, which there wasn't.

Perhaps it was very few who understood the art of non-contradiction. And the power of reason is such that it lifted the whole reeking lot as it heaved mankind into a higher level of existence. And droves of them decry reason, not realizing they are held aloft by it.

It's like logic was just beneath the surface, but making possible all of the bullshit above. Like the press: the most wondefully intelligent invention, making possible mass printings of books that actually belittle reason.

But even if we only spent our time celebrating the greatness of man, we'd have our hands full for the rest of our lives.

Let's start with a week on Wool. I'm not talking about the stuff that dangles from sheep and collects mud. I'm talking about the warm fabric after it's been spun and knitted by human hands.

We'll spend the weekend celebrating The Teapot as a vessel in which to steep leaves in hot water. And we'll finish out the month with a bender in celebration of Sharpened Flint.

Edited Sep. 18, 2006 23:08