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“No breach in this world seems to heal,” he said. “We try to reason with one another, but only manage to tear ourselves apart.”
Reason is ineffective in cults because they are immune to data.
“Mr. Darwin blamed for the finding, and Dr. Gray for standing as its champion on our side of the Atlantic. And for bringing it to Vineland, I am threatened by my employer.” “And still your pupils depend on it, Thatcher. Their little families have come here looking for safety, but they will go on laboring under old authorities until their heaven collapses. Your charge is to lead them out of doors. Teach them to see evidence for themselves, and not to fear it.” “To stand in the clear light of day, you once said. Unsheltered.”
A poignant conversation between Thatcher and his friend Mary Treat (a real scientist in Darwin's time).
“I wonder what service is possible, Mary. When half the world, with no understanding of Darwin at all, will rally around whoever calls him a criminal and wants him hanged.” She said nothing to this. But it was no exaggeration, he’d witnessed this very thing in a market square in Boston: the crude effigy dangling from a noose, the monkey’s tail pinned to the stuffed trousers, the murderous crowd chanting Lock him up! The provocateur was an itinerant preacher in a threadbare rabat and pieces of an infantryman’s uniform, boots, and greatcoat he must have pulled from a dead soldier. Thatcher had
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Vilifying truth for power-- and very much what continues now, even after January 6th.
“I suppose it is in our nature,” she said finally. “When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.” “If that is our nature, then nature is madness. These are more dangerous times than we ever have known.”
True today. H.L. Menken had a few words on this.
She set up a fresh scolding from the rear flank as if nothing at all had just passed between them, and he wondered what part of his married life was real, what was performance.
Reading between some lines, Willa wondered if maybe Mary was on the spectrum. But so lovable! Not a Disney princess but a kind of natural-history savant, seemingly able to forget human cravings and immerse herself in the nonhuman lives around her.
Mary Treat, as re-created by Kingsolver is most certainly an easily identifiable favorite character along with Tig!
The dangerous allure of novelty might have sparked this torment, but in the eye of the storm they held on hard to the world they knew.
The amount of airtime devoted to that man was far out of proportion to any actual ideas he seemed to represent.
American current events....
There’s a lot of white folks out there hanging on to their God-given right to look down on some other class of people. They feel it slipping away and they’re scared. This guy says he’s bringing back yesterday, even if he has to use brass knuckles to do it, and drag women back to the cave by their hair. He’s a bully, everybody knows that. But he’s their bully.”
MAGA Mentality and actions to be sure.
“Really it’s just down to a handful of guys piling up everything they can grab and sitting on top of it. And a million poor jerks like Papu still hoping they can get into the club.
He was thinking of the painter Vermeer, an exhibition he’d seen in Boston, when the girl glanced up, startling him.
Vermeer, always a jewel.
The peasants don’t like hearing how they’ve been used, paying for land that will go back to Landis the day they lose their first crop. They refuse to believe they’re getting tricked into building wealth for the masters of this town.” “No man wants to hear he has been a fool.” “But they hear it, and still they persist. Landis passes around his bill of sale, this egalitarian Vineland where every man stands an equal chance, and they lap it up like cats at the dish. They are all for the great captain, while he indentures them and eats their souls and property. Somehow he gets them to side against
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Who would ever believe a similar con-man would also occupy the Oval office-- twice? And yet... "They refuse to believe they’re getting tricked into building wealth for the masters of this town.” "...and they lap it up like cats at the dish. They are all for the great captain, while he indentures them and eats their souls and property. Somehow he gets them to side against their own.”
As I read Kingsolver's novel, I wait for the catastrophe.
Any disagreement is an affront to his power. He won’t rest until he has remedied the so-called insurrection.
Well, now!
He truly knows nothing of Darwin, Mary. But he hates to discuss even the methods of scientific inquiry. His brand of science is an edifice built of scriptures and saints.” “A strange science that must be.” “Strange and fearsome. He needs no evidence to convict me as a witch. With my pupils watching, he will build his pyre and burn me before their eyes.”
“That is most people nowadays. They hunger for any crumb of explanation that sustains their old philosophies.”
See Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World for more on this.
“descent with modification.”
“Children, do not become confused by what you hear on this stage today, because we have proof of God’s plan for our wondrous sphere. Of course we do. It is our holy Bible. And this truth is credited by all men. No scrupulous scientist would try to steal from us God’s promises to man. And what are these promises?”
How can a scientist or any mortal human steal anything from a god that claims to be all powerful and all knowing? Does Cutler, in his warnings to the children of the school make an admission of god's weakness and acknowledge his limited power, in his creation, the best of all possible worlds?
Cutler shook his head sadly, sharing with the audience his deep sorrow for Thatcher. “The contract our Almighty has made with man. How could any of us forget his promises to us? Man’s supremacy over the earth. Man’s power of articulate speech, man’s gift of reason, his free will, his fall and his redemption. How could we forget the incarnation of the Eternal Son, and the indwelling of the Eternal Spirit? These gifts cannot be reconciled with any story of our creation except the divine. Children, do not let yourselves be degraded. You were created in the image of our redeemer.”
Here, Cutler mentions the gift of reason while he discredits it through indoctrination. The biblical mandate of man's supremacy over the Earth has justified our destructive behaviors with the environment. It continues to this day.
How tenacious, the minions of history, clinging to their flat earth.
Perfection
“Grow or die, that’s just the law of our economy, Tiggo. You can’t get around it. It’s like Darwin’s law of survival of the fittest.” “Except your law is invented and natural laws aren’t. What you can’t get around is there’s no more room to grow.”
A conversation between Zeke and his sister Tig. Tig nails him.
“I used to have this dream when I was little,” Tig said dreamily. Tig who was still, who would always be, little. “About trying to carry water. I was supposed to get it from here to over there, or something bad would happen. You or Dad or somebody might die. I didn’t have a bucket or anything, just my arms. I kept scooping up water like a bundle of sticks, and of course it would all just run out.”
To spend a night like this, inches from her daughter’s skull and everything it held inside, was a tender agony Willa could have explained to no one but her mother.
I’m saying you prepped for the wrong future. It’s not just you. Everybody your age is, like, crouching inside this box made out of what they already believe. You think it’s a fallout shelter or something but it’s a piece of shit box, Mom. It’s cardboard, drowning in the rain, going all floppy. And you’re saying, ‘This is all there is, it will hold up fine. This box will keep me safe!’”
“On God’s authority!” The hand slammed down, wood upon wood. “We were not put among the creatures of this world to live with them as equals. This world is ours!”
Anthropocentrism: that the universe was created solely for human benefit or purpose places humanity at the center of existence and divine intent solely for human exploitation or domination. The arrogance of this has led to minimizing moral considerations and justifying damage to our environment and and other life on Earth.
Note: wood on wood refers to the man's wooden hand hitting a wood lectern. A prosthetic.
When multiple explanations confront us, we have a rule. We assume the simplest one is best.”
Occam's Razor
“William of Occam was a man of God, a Franciscan friar in the fourteenth century. He argued that a complex explanation, when it does not hold water, will always grow more complex as it attempts to patch its own holes. The less adorned explanation is the one more directly tested, and more plainly proven. And in science, proof is all.”
Occam's Razor
“Sir, couldn’t the shaping of life be God’s gift to us? Adaptation is a greater marvel than rigid stasis, for it opens a path to survival. We don’t change ourselves deliberately, for no leopard can change its own spots. Each of us is stuck with our birthright of traits and habits.”
Thatcher again spoke pointedly to Landis. “Scientific theories can only rely on physical causes. Gravity does not ask God for help.
“A belief that would lead to anarchy! The animal kingdom needs man as its ruler, just as a town needs firm governance to keep it from falling into riotous free-for-all.”
Anthropocentric belief again coming from the the fundamentalist in the story.
These poor reeling planets craved safety in their universe, in any false form their master might pull from his pockets.
Desires, beliefs, versus the realities of the Universe. Here, Thatcher is thinking and observing a group as they listen to a fundamentalist speaker, Landis, and they seem to be attracted to a seemingly safer place rather than acknowledge reality and find truth in our world.
Some will name this the progress of our times. Some will try to make our Bible a fairy tale. We do not let them! We seal our town against the enemies of gracious authority. We do as our hearts tell us, and slam the portals.”
Hahaha!!!!!!!!! Oh my... As the fundamentalist refers to science.
Thatcher met his gaze. “Scientists are not like other people, sir. We cannot slam our portals. We have to follow evidence where it leads, even if no one likes that place. Even if it suggests that all we have ever believed might be mistaken.”
Explaining the previous quote
There in the street, for a millisecond, Willa caught sight of the world through her daughter’s eyes: the global contempt for temperance and nurture, the fierce entitlement to every kind of consumption.
Individuals have a choice in how they engage with the world, and that recognizing the harm caused by our actions is the first step towards creating positive change. In this case Willa dealing with her contemptable father-in-law.
A great shift was dawning, with the human masters’ place in the kingdom much reduced from its former glory. She could see how this might lead to a sense of complete disorientation in the universe. But still. The old paradigm was an obsolete shell; the writing on the wall was huge. They just wouldn’t read.
John Cheever wrote a short story called "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" which refers to the biblical phrase "the writing on the wall" from the book of Daniel.
In that story, the phrase "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" is the writing on the wall that prophesies the downfall of the Babylonian kingdom. Here, Kingsolver makes a clear connection to the current political mess and that supporters and followers of the president are short sighted and threaten our downfall.
She’d kindly offered no judgment on Willa for failing to see the resemblance, absolving the evergreen human crime of denying the past and seeing oneself as original.
Mary had lived her discipline. Both of them had, she and Thatcher, with an integrity that led them to give up, practically speaking, their lives. Born under the moon of paradigm shift, they got to be present to a world turning over on itself. Willa ached for a devotion like that, something to move her beyond herself.
“Pine box with a body inside, no preservatives. That’s how most of these people went down. So now they’re part of those trees. Isn’t that where you want to end up, Mom? In a tree like that?” Willa looked at the oak over their heads. Its trunk was a monument to resilience and its branches to tenderness, touched at their tips with the faint rose color of baby oak leaves. Who would not want to end up in a tree like that?
“Of course you think that. When everybody around you thinks the same way, you can’t even see what you’re believing in.”
Refer to Cheever's "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin"
One percent of the brotherhood has their hands on most of the bread. They own the country, their god is the free market, and most people are so unhorrified they won’t even question the system. If it makes a profit, that’s the definition of good. If it grows, you have to stand back and let it. The free market has exactly the same morality as a cancer cell.
“I believe I am called here to speak of our times. From a darker era of fear and magical thinking, we move toward an age of reason. Landis was beloved, is still beloved, because he claims he can protect us from mythical beasts that prowl the swamps at the edge of our understanding. Perhaps he does protect us. Some of us. But in this courtroom he alleges he has lost his capacity to make out the difference between myth and fact.
Here, in Landis' criminal trial he claims temporary insanity as a defense, while he simultaneously claims faith protects believers from evil in the Universe. Oh, the irony and the pity! Consider the contrast between expectations and reality.(Hemingway).
He was finished with declaring himself to a public without ears to hear his language. Without shelter, we stand in daylight, she’d insisted once, and he had thought only of death. Simple man. He might sleep in a bed of cactus thorns or a tree under the stars, but he could choose the company he kept and it would not be this fearful, self-interested mob shut up in airless rooms. They would huddle in their artifice of safety, their heaven would collapse. His would be the forthright march through the downfall.
Again, Thatcher contemplating his life and picking those he associates with, not accepting the delusion of false belief systems that will ultimately fail.
She thought of something Tig had told her once about Cubans: that they’d perfected all the kinds of fun that didn’t cost anything. Willa couldn’t recall the exact list, only that it was sultry enough to end in a need for good child care.
Funny as balls!
Tig’s batshit hopes notwithstanding, she believed material desires were toxic. She aimed to be immune to the ambitions and disappointments that had maimed her parents’ existence and now were stirring up a national tidal wave of self-interest that Willa found terrifying. It was pretty clear there would be no stopping the Bullhorn, or someone like him. Here was the earthquake, the fire, flood, and melting permafrost, with everyone still grabbing for bricks to put in their pockets rather than walking out of the wreck and looking for light. Iano persistently didn’t get Tig’s view of the world,
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“I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.” Both kids stared at Willa. They looked so alike. “It’s from My Àntonia. By Willa Cather. Mama’s favorite book.”
Wonderful quote by Willa Cather
Unsheltered, I live in daylight. And like the wandering bird I rest in thee.
Love this!
If the man is only a man, his rule will be resisted. The utopia would ravel at the seams and show itself as a costume covering naked greed.
Nor did he tell Mary now that he could see her soul. It was a giant redwood: oldest and youngest of all living things, the tree that stood past one eon into the next. He would see them in California, not as drawings in a book but as living forests.
Thatcher and Mary Treat, the scientist colleague of Darwin
