“The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything.”
-Albert Einstein
Apathy kills.
On the Real Danger of an Apathetic Nature
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Monthly Archives: December 2007
On History, Philosophy, and Perspective
“So many people today… seem to me like someone who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation…”
-Albert Einstein
We are fast becoming a nation with no sense of history, from high school graduates that kind can’t find Europe on the map to a presidential press secretary that didn’t know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was while talking to reporters.
We are disconnected from the past and disinclined to see why it matters; stuck in the prejudice and hubris of the now that is nothing but an illusion, a lack of perspective of which is the consequence of narcissism, arrogance, and apathy.
On the Rebel Becoming the Authority
“To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself”
-Albert Einstein
By rejecting the status quo and revolutionizing physics with his rebellious notions of space and time, Einstein eventually became the scientific establishment – the authority that younger physicists rebelled against through a “quantum” leap of thought and imagination.
But it was upon the former rebel’s shoulders that these young turks stood in their rebellion – just as it was for Einstein himself two decades before.
And so it is that human history progresses: through a cycle of rebellion and revolution, of one sort or another, against established authority, thus becoming the new authority from which, one day, new revolution foments.
On Being Religious and Grateful for the Mystery
“Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.”
To at once use our capacities to question, to discern as best we can, the workings of nature, while stopping short in reverent awe at the precipice of understanding, like a child looking up in wonder at the clear night sky, is to find religion of the truest kind.