... whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. There may be truths beyon...d speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political bei...ng.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuatio...n or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thus will the fondest dream of Phallic science be realized: a pristine new planet populated entirely by little boy clones of great... scientific entrepeneurs ... free to smash atoms, accelerate particles, or, if they are so moved, build pyramids--without any social relevance or human responsibility at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The structure of a jazz performance is, like that of the New York skyline, a tension of cross-purposes. In jazz at its characteris...tic best, each player seems to be--and has the sense of being--on his own. Each goes his own way, inventing rhythmic and melodic patterns which, superficially, seem to have as little relevance to one another as the United Nations building does to the Empire State. And yet the outcome is a dazzlingly precise creative unity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the inclusive mesh of the TV image, in particular, that spells for a while at least, the doom of baseball. For baseball is a... game of one-thing-at-a-time, fixed positions and visibly delegated specialist jobs such as belonged to the now passing mechanical age, with its fragmented tasks and its staff and line in management organization. TV, as the very image of the new corporate and participant way of electric living, fosters habits of unified awareness and social interdependence that alienate us from the peculiar style of baseball, with its specialist and positional stress. When cultures change, so do games. Baseball, that had become the elegant abstract image of industrial society living by split-second timing, has in the new TV decade lost its psychic and social relevance for our new way of life. The ball game has been dislodged from the social center and been conveyed to the periphery of American life. In contrast, American football is nonpositional, and any or all of the players can switch to any role during play. It is, therefore, a game that at the present is supplanting baseball in general acceptance. It agrees very well with the new needs of decentralized team play in the electric age.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All right, so there he is, our representative to the world, Mr. Western Civilization, in codpiece and pantyhose up there on the bo...ards, firing away at the rapt groundlings with his blank verses, not less of a word-slinger and spellbinder than the Bard himself and therefore not to be considered too curiously on such matters as relevance, coherence, consistency, propriety, sanity, common decency.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal,... but the expression of those principles requires continual development.... The great point to be kept in mind is that normally an advance in science will show that statements of various religious beliefs require some sort of modification. It may be that they have to be expanded or explained, or indeed entirely restated. If the religion is a sound expression of truth, this modification will only exhibit more adequately the exact point which is of importance. This process is a gain. In so far, therefore, as any religion has any contact with physical facts, it is to be expected that the point of view of those facts must be continually modified as scientific knowledge advances. In this way, the exact relevance of these facts for religious thought will grow more and more clear. The progress of science must result in the unceasing codification of religious thought, to the great advantage of religion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »