Category: Asides

Our main advantage as human beings lies in our ability to think together. Our main threat has become our failure to think and act together on larger scales and to act on the understanding that the sheer existence of our species depends on how we think together — how we experience and treat each other. We can think of this as an autoimmune disorder. In recent years in the United States the number of people experiencing physiological autoimmune disorders has grown quite rapidly, and there is reason to believe that this growth is associated with increasing stress. Prolonged stress can confuse the immune system’s ability to distinguish between foreign invaders and parts of the body, so the immune system ends up attacking the body. Stress in learning communities produces a similar response…

[U]nder stress, we often take up fixed theories about people and ideas. We stereotype and begin to view difference as a threat. We shut down any ideas unlike our own and turn against the source of those ideas. Without difference, creativity drops, and the community’s ability to deal with novel threats becomes restricted. As the emotional and relational fabric of the community is undermined, the ability of the community to learn, adapt, nurture, and grow further deteriorates.

― Peter Johnston, Opening Minds

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

― Franz Kafka