+

"An article in U.S. Catholic asks: 'Heaven: Will it be Boring?' The article answers no, for in heaven souls are called 'not to eternal rest but to eternal activity—eternal social concern.' Yet this answer only underlines the problem, since there is nothing to be concerned about in heaven. Concern presupposes that something can go wrong or can be lost; otherwise we would not care. An eternal activity—just as much as an eternal rest—is of concern to no one, since it cannot be stopped and does not have to be maintained by anyone. The problem is not that an eternal activity would be 'boring' but that it would not be intelligible as my activity. Any activity of mine (including a boring activity) requires that I sustain it. In an eternal activity, there cannot be a person who is bored—or involved in any other way—since an eternal activity does not depend on being sustained by anyone." Martin Hägglund   "The great misfortune of our time is precisely that politics pretends to furnish us at once with a catechism, a complete philosophy, and at times even with a way of loving. But the role of politics is to set our house in order, not to deal with our inner problems. I do not know for myself whether or not there is an absolute. But I do know that this is not a political concern. The absolute is not the concern of all: it is the concern of each. And all must so order their relations with one another that each can have the inner leisure to ask himself about the absolute. Doubtless our life belongs to others and it is proper that we give it to others when that is necessary. But our death belongs to ourselves alone. Such is my definition of freedom." Albert Camus   "What is so intolerable about the Republic, as Plato shows, is the demand that men give up their land, their money, their wives, their children, for the sake of the public good, their concern for which had previously been buttressed by these lower attachments. The hope is to have a happy city made up entirely of unhappy men." Allan Bloom   "It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Christianity, by taking the side of everything ill-constituted, and weak, and feeble, had made all of humanity sick. Nietzsche lamented what Christians had done to classical civilization. He admired the Greeks not despite but because of their cruelty. Indeed, so scornful was he of any notion of ancient Greece as a land of sunny rationalism that large numbers of students, by the end of his tenure as a professor, had been shocked into abandoning his classes. 'In the days before mankind grew ashamed of its cruelty,' he wrote, 'before pessimists existed, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now.'" Tom Holland   "You become less effective as an artist the more interested you become in yourself as a person; and the more you become interested in yourself as a person, the more you're in danger of becoming a fatheaded, lazy artist. Better to wear your hairshirt and hide in a cave than come out and try to be a beautiful person. There are so many beautiful people in the world now—so many in the New York nightclubs and the London clubs—that I don't think a writer should attempt to swell that particular throng. It's one thing to wish your books to be elegant, another to wish to be elegant yourself. I'm all for elegance in the right places, and my concern is to try to be elegant in the books. But I'm not sure that elegance is the supreme human quality we should aspire to. It seems to be like a pear. It goes rotten very quickly. Maybe we need some sturdier virtue, something more like a potato that will keep for months and even a year in the cellar." John Updike   "The amateur politician sees the political world more in terms of ideas and principles than in terms of persons. Politics is the determination of public policy, and public policy ought to be set deliberately rather than as the accidental by-product of a struggle for personal and party advantage. Issues ought to be settled on their merits; compromises by which one issue is settled other than on its merits are sometimes necessary, but they are never desirable. If the arena in which the amateur acts is the city and the question at hand a limited one, his tendency is to endow the issue with generality—either by making it a national issue or by finding in it wider implications. The amateur takes the outcome of politics—the determination of policies and the choice of officials—seriously, in the sense that he feels a direct concern for what he thinks are the ends these policies serve and the qualities these officials possess. He is not oblivious to considerations of partisan or personal advantage in assessing the outcome but (in the pure case) he dwells on the relation of outcome to his conception, be it vague or specific, of the public weal. Although politics may have attractions as a game of skill, it is never simply that." James Quinn Wilson   "The evil is in the White House at the present. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America, and who likes to ride a horse. He's cold. He's mean. He's got ice water for blood." Tip O'Neill   "'With the religious sense,' Greene claimed, 'went the sense of the importance of the human act.' The novel as the West knows it was born of Christendom, and the possibilities of good and evil, heroism and villainy are crucial to it. George Eliot's Middlemarch is a far more intricate, organic, passionately mimetic construct than The Pilgrim's Progress, but both basically concern the protagonist's effort to save her or his soul. Without souls to save, are mundane lives worth writing about?" John Updike   "I say it once again: everything that is truly elevated cannot and must not be judged by its utility; having to be useful is completely alien to art's divine nature and to insist that it be so is to strip what should be sublime of its nobility and to debase it to the level of the basic needs of humanity. Of course man needs lots of different things, but his spirit must not be degraded to become the servant of his body—the servant of his servant in other words. Like any good head of a household, he must attend to material needs, but must not allow this concern to be his be-all and end-all. Art is the guarantee of our immortality." Ludwig Tieck   "It is peculiar to express great concern about the plight of the poor when it comes to climate but not in other policy domains. Levels of charitable giving and official development aid suggest that we are actually not that bothered. Our trade and migration policies would even suggest that we like to see them suffer. More importantly, there are two ways to mitigate the excessive impact of climate change on the poor: Reduce climate change, and reduce poverty." Richard Tol   "We are not only interested in material advancement either for ourselves or for other peoples. We have a concern that the democratic principles in which we believe are applied. We respect a government not primarily because it is efficient but because it secures the freedom and dignity of its people." Henry Kissinger   "We often think of trust, reliable communication, and enforceable contract as good things. We like people to overcome distrust, confusion, and competing interests and reach an outcome beneficial to both. In the literature of social psychology I notice a greater interest in building trust than in collapsing it, in promoting co-operation than in frustrating it. But when we turn to the Ku Klux Klan, corruption in the police force, extortion in the junior high schools, or the silent conspiracy that keeps non-Aryans out of a medical school or an oil company, our concern is to spoil communication, to create distrust and suspicion, to make agreements unenforceable, to undermine tradition, to reduce solidarity, to discredit leadership, and to sever any moral bond that holds the conspirators together." Thomas Schelling   "By trying to eliminate every anomaly, every weakness, we end up denying the principal virtue of health: a lack of concern about oneself or, as Leriche put it, the 'silence of the organs' (even if the latter may be deceptive). The hair shirt is not worn to restrain the impulses of rebellious flesh, but rather to punish an imperfect body for not corresponding to the ideal model. This is the outcome of the old Christian prediction of immortality and the resurrection of 'glorious bodies' that are incorruptible, will never rot or wither, and are found in science fiction. Our wild scientific fantasies come directly from religion, of which they claim to be the fulfillment." Pascal Bruckner   "The leading German statesmen, and above all Kaiser Wilhelm, have looked into the distant future and are striving to make Germany's already swiftly-growing position as a world power into a dominating one, reckoning hereby upon becoming the ingenious successor to England in this respect. People in Berlin are, however, well aware that Germany would not be in the position today or for a long time to assume this succession, and for this reason a speedy collapse of English world power is not desired since it is fully recognised that Germany's far-reaching plans are at present only castles in the air. Notwithstanding this, Germany is already preparing with speed and vigour for her self-appointed future mission. In this connection I may permit myself to refer to the constant concern for the growth of German naval forces." Ladislaus von Szogyenyi   "My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us." Kenneth Minogue   "There is not and cannot possibly be any hard and fast antithesis between self-interest and care for others, for man is a social creature, born into family, clan, community, nation, brought up in mutual dependence. The founders of our religion made this a cornerstone of morality. The admonition: love thy neighbour as thyself, and do as you would be done by, expresses this. You will note that it does not denigrate self, or elevate love of others above it. On the contrary, it sees concern for self and responsibility for self as something to be expected, and asks only that this be extended to others. This embodies the great truth that self-regard is the root of regard for one's fellows. The child learns to understand others through its own feelings. At first its immediate family, in course of time the circle grows." Margaret Thatcher   "To the vulgarity of the Nietzschean 'last man' entirely devoted to his little pleasures, the whole twentieth century, from T.E. Lawrence to the Red Brigades via the Futurists and the Freikorps, has opposed the Romanticism of volcanic spirits impatient to lose themselves in 'storms of steel' (Ernst Jünger) and trample on 'that filthy culture.' We have to choose between being 'hard or soft,' as the theoreticians of National Socialism put it, we have to choose between the consistency of a block of stone or the inconsistency of gruel, we have to cultivate the 'camaraderie of the machine,' which will give us souls and hearts of iron. Finally, we know how twentieth-century intellectuals, all of bourgeois origin, were fascinated by violence and brutality, and their taste for 'limit situations' (Jaspers), their tendency, disguised as a concern for justice, to seek to bring about change by making things worse." Pascal Bruckner   "Liberalism is a theory not of 'value-free government' but of limited government. More specifically, it is founded on a conception of a division of moral labor within which the state occupies the narrow but crucial role of upholding the rule of law, thereby vindicating persons' basic rights. The task of formulating and pursuing conceptions of the good is decentralized to individuals acting in their private capacity. This division of labor is meant not to diminish the magnitude of the gulf between good and evil but rather to mark it off as too portentous and too personal a concern to be consigned to the broad brush of a one-size-fits-all centralized apparatus." Loren Lomasky   "When she came to the throne, Elizabeth had prayed God to give her grace to govern with clemency and without bloodshed. To keep her people united was her great aim. 'If I should say the sweetest speech with the eloquentest tongue that ever was in man,' she told one of her parliaments, 'I were not able to express that restless care which I have ever bent to govern for the greatest wealth.' She was apt to rejoice more over one Catholic who was loyal than over ninety and nine hot-gospellers whose loyalty needed no demonstration. 'This good man is a clergyman of the old religion,' she proudly told the Spanish ambassador, when on a progress through the country a subject approached her open carriage and cried, 'Vivat Regina! Honi soit qui mal y pense.' No doubt her kingdom was to be Protestant, and in times of danger Cecil and her keener councillors were allowed to harry disobedient Catholics. But she wanted no inquisitorial practices, opening windows into men's souls. Outward conformity was enough; a man's conscience should be his own, not the State's concern." John Ernest Neale   "The threat we face is not an abstract concern for the future. It is already upon us, and its effects are being felt worldwide, right now. In four years, the Arctic is projected to experience its first ice-free summer—not in 2030—in 2013." John Kerry