Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Theodore Roszak

American History Professor at California State University, best known for his 1969 text, "The Making of a Counter Culture" and "Where the Wasteland Ends:Politics and Transcendence in Post-Industrial Society"

"Nature composes some of its loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope."

"Centralized bigness breeds the regime of expertise, whether the big system is based on privatized or socialized economics."

"Data data everywhere but not a thought to think."

"Environmentalists, by and large, are very deeply invested in tactics that have worked to their satisfaction over the last thirty years, namely scaring and shaming people.... I am questioning whether you can go on doing that indefinitely ... [pushing] that same fear-guilt button over and over again. As psychologists will tell you, when a client comes in with an addiction, they are already ashamed. You don't shame them further."

"It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought."

"Meanwhile, as the party ascended to ever dizzier alcoholic altitudes..."

"People try non-violence for a week, and when it 'does not work' they go back to violence which hasn't worked for centuries."

"Sex is unclean, not because of the pleasure, but because of the suffering it brings."

"Technology has destroyed interrelations in the human community... We are living among dispirited and agonized teenagers who can't find any hope."

"Mentality is the basic, irreducible continuum of the universe... What, then, if the mechanistic model of reality is exactly the inverse of the truth?"

"The art of cinema begins with scraping the chewing gum off the seats."

"The blood is our strength, for it is the power of the heavens and the Earth within us"

"Nothing we ever imagined is beyond our powers, only beyond our present self-knowledge."

"The question grows more troubling with each passing year how much of what yesterday's science fiction regarded as unspeakably dreadful has become today's award-winning research."

"There might finally emerge a human animal of rare sensitivity whose curiosity could sense the existence of environments no longer physical, where the adaption required of all the species was a subtle change of consciousness."

"The search for a community reality takes the form of a massive rescue operation. I think this is the great adventure of our time, infinitely more valuable to man than the conquest of space. It represents the return and revival of ancient Gnosticism. For those who answer the call, what happens in the world of science, despite its place in politics still considerable governmental lose more existential sense. In their eyes, and many scientists will émoules archaic figure of clergy, liturgy professional absurd, busy exchanging knowledge, supposedly available to the public in the secret sanctuary of their church from the state."

"To bemoan the messiness of politics is not just a folly it betrays a dangerous impatience with basic realities. It is like becoming disturbed that people do not fall in love sensibly -- and so deciding to computerize the problem."

"We in the contemporary west may wake up each morning to cast out our sleep and dream experience like so much rubbish. But that is an almost freakish act of alienation. Only western society - and especially in the modern era - has been quite so prodigal in dealing with what is, even by the fictitious measure of our mechanical clocks, a major portion of our lives."

"Because girls are raised to specialize in a certain set of human characteristics, would they not, then, bring to science a different sensibility? Does that sensibility have the right to be represented in science?or, for that matter, in business, politics, law, or medicine?"

"Boyle was among the first who recognized that the withdrawal of sympathy licenses conduct that would not be permissible within an animistic vision of nature... The vision that he and his scientific colleagues were creating was fast becoming a mathematical abstraction lacking color, odor, texture, and personality... The task of the natural philosopher, we are told, is to "probe," "penetrate," and "pierce" nature in all her "mysterious," secret," and "intimate recesses.""

"Deprived of bread or the equal benefits of the commonwealth, the person shrivels. Obviously. And that is a clear line to fight on. But when the transcendent energies waste away, then too the person shrivels--though far less obviously. Their loss is suffered in privacy and bewildered silence; it is easily submerged in affluence, entertaining diversions, and adjustive therapy. Well fed and fashionably dressed, surrounded by every manner of mechanical convenience and with our credit rating in good order, we may even be ashamed to feel we have any problem at all."

"Freud also addressed himself to this issue asking the question, how do we define madness? If we decide, if we suspect that an entire culture may be embedded in what he called "collusive madness" or "communal neurosis." Where does the therapist then look for a baseline to define sanity and madness? Freud raised this issue, but he never came up with a successful answer to it. Later schools like radical therapists have. They have called into question the existing social definition of madness and sanity in ways that have profound social implications. Perhaps an entire society is mad, in which case you don't simply want to adjust people back into another condition of madness. The way in which I take this issue up is to suggest that there is a madness involved in urban industrial society that has to do with our lack of balance and integration with the natural environment and that this might be an interesting baseline to use for the definition of sanity as we move into the next century. That is, we need to recapture of being embedded in nature, being in the condition of reciprocity with nature that you do find in traditional forms of healing. I don't think we can simply adopt any other culture's conception of sanity and madness. We have to work out our own. And that I want to suggest is as much a job of the ecologist as it is of the therapist. So eco-psychology is the term I've used to try to define a common ground between two fields that have so far not been on speaking terms. Psychologists on the one side and ecologists on the other. Psychology needs ecology; ecology needs psychology. Ideally, you know, someday we wouldn't use a term like eco-psychology, psychology would be understood to have a ecological framework. But at this point, that is still to be worked out."

"Freud asked a question that was a pregnant question, an important one: What is the relationship of the human psyche to nature in general and to the universe at large? The question you would think every psychiatrist would want to address at some point. It's the big question-- how does the psyche connect with anything outside of the psyche in nature. Freud thought of himself as a scientist examining a scientific material called the human psyche, even though others in psychology think that he indulged in a lot of abstractions about the id and the ego and the super ego and so on. Freud himself thought he was a good solid materialistic scientist studying quite objectively a material called the psyche. When he asked the question "How does the psyche connects with nature at large," he came up with a very negative assessment. That is, he was convinced the human mind, the psyche, and life in general was a freakish development in the universe. And that decision on Freud's part haunts the practice of psychiatry and psychotherapy down to the present day. And it has led to the assumption that you can treat the psyche in isolation from the natural environment because there's no significant, meaningful, human connection. Freud went so far as to regard the human mind as freakish, as purely accidental and perhaps not natural in the sense that it would someday give a return to the unconscious state, to the inert state. Now the problem with that is that it has left us with a severely under-dimensioned psychology, a psychology in which the human mind does not connect with the natural environment. And it is therefore treated wholly within a social context, a family context, perhaps a very personal context but without any outreach to the world beyond -- the non-human world -- that surrounds us out of which we evolved."

"God en eye. Likewise, the devil, every time you blink."

"Goethe wondered at what point our instruments might be creating what we think we see out there in the world... his question is still a good one. Every science of observation must take care not to get lost among its own artifacts."

"Here, at the birth of modern science, is a fundamental insight. Our knowledge of nature Out There begins with knowledge of ourselves In Here. Until we have freed our minds and emotions of the hidden presuppositions that stand between us and the world, we can never be certain we are in touch with reality."

"Ideology is not absent in the technocracy... it is simply invisible, having blended into the supposedly indisputable truth of the scientific world view... The most effective ideologies are always those that are congruent with the limits of consciousness, for then they work subliminally."

"All the while, steadily and without fanfare and as invincibly as all things blossom, ripen, and mature, more people were living longer. And as they did so, they were creating a possibility not even the most far-sighted futurist had anticipated."

"If we could assume the view of nonhuman nature, what passes for sane behavior in our social affairs might seem madness. But as the prevailing reality principle would have it, nothing could be greater madness than to believe that beast and plant, mountain and river have a "point of view." ?minds exist, so we believe, nowhere but in human heads."

"In a time when so many artists have learned to confabulate with extremes of horror and alienation, the most daring thing an artist can do is to fill a book, a gallery, or a theater with joy, hope, and beauty."

"In four centuries of taking wealth and comfort from the body of the Earth, modern science has not troubled to produce a single rite or ritual, not even a minor prayer, that asks pardon or gives thanks. But then what sense would it make to ask anything of a dead body?"

"It will be enough to define the technocracy as that society in which those who govern justify themselves by appeal to technical experts who, in turn, justify themselves by appeal to scientific forms of knowledge. And beyond the authority of science, there is no appeal."

"Life... becomes an anomalous puzzle that cannot be "explained" until scientists in laboratories find a way to animate the dead matter that is the normal condition of things. This amounts to saying that life has no "place" in the world until men?the gender that originally dominated the world and still does?can create it... in a laboratory and express it in a formula. Only then will we "understand" what life is."

"It is characteristic of the technocracy to render itself invisible. Its assumptions about reality and its values become as unobtrusively pervasive as the air we breathe... the technocracy increases and consolidates its power... following the dictates of industrial efficiency, rationality, and necessity... the technocracy assumes a position similar to that of the purely neutral umpire in an athletic contest... we tend to ignore the man ...Yet ...he alone sets the limits and goals of the competition and judges the contenders."

"In the technocracy, nothing is any longer small or simple or readily apparent to the nontechnical man. Instead, the scale of intricacy or all human activities... transcends the competence of the amateurish citizen and inexorably demands the attention of specially trained experts... even the most seemingly personal aspects of life... In the absence of expertise, the great [productive} mechanism would surely break down, leaving us in the midst of chaos and poverty."

"I've been concerned about the fact that many environmentalists have been sounding out very few notes on appealing to the public. They refer to fear, they're afraid of guilt, they seek to shock, they seek to shame. I understand why. The problems are urgent, and I accept the urgency of these problems. I don't question that at all. But it may be important to ask at some point whether we've done too much of that in the environmental movement, which I consider myself to be a part of? And that perhaps we have to find other themes to introduce, other notes to sound that are more positive and more affirmative. At a certain point this becomes a challenge to the environmental movement. Do we believe that human beings are bonded to this planet in a way that would allow us to invoke trust, love, respect and reciprocity as positive motivations for becoming good environmental citizens? Or do we believe there's nothing more to fall back on than duty based upon guilt, based upon shame? Guilt and shame have their place. But an appeal that is exclusively related to guilt or to shame is, I think, at a certain point going to have detrimental effects. It's going to turn people off and it's going to sound terribly negative and challenging in that bad sense in which you confront people with a problem greater than they can take hold of. I would like to see the environmental movement ask it's self this question: Are we not bonded to this planet by something which is life enhancing and life affirming and which we can appeal to people to find within themselves a voice of the earth which speaks to them with a sense of love, respect and trust?"

"My hope is that people who grew up on J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the folk music of Pete Seeger, the protest ballads of Country Joe, the anarchic insolence of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the biting satire of Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, the acid rock of Bob Dylan, the sociology of Paul Goodman and Herbert Marcuse, the Summer of Love and the Days of Rage, will not be content to spend their retirement years on cruise ships or feeding their Social Security checks into slot machines at the nearest casino."

"Or perhaps... there is actually an infinity of universes among which only this one has by sheer accident produced the conditions for life and mind. It now requires such artful speculation to maintain an orthodox faith in chance. Skeptics, it would seem, are willing to believe anything."

"Some Calvinist divines identified an "idol" as anything "feigned in the mind by imagination." There is a haunting similarity between such teachings and Galileo's bold attack upon what he called "secondary qualities" in nature."

"Our goal should not be to borrow from elsewhere, but to search among our own cultural resources, perhaps even in modern science and industrialism, for ways to restore art to the status it has always held in traditional societies as a form of knowledge... art adds to what we learn from any combination of physics, biology, geology, and chemistry. It tells us the world is... deserving of reverence."

"Since the late 19th century, aging has been the normal state of all industrial societies; it is a sustained trend. Societies designed to cater to the needs of aging populations will soon become the accepted political condition of our species. Acknowledging that fact will, at some point, slide so smoothly into the conventional wisdom that future generations may not realize that this is a major new feature of modern life, this is different, this is not what human culture was ever meant to be?and it all started now."

"Reduced to the statistical permutations of genes, life became "nothing but" the marriage of chance and selection."

"Science, in broad outline, can be divided into three parts: the study of the vast, the study of the tiny, and the study of life which... acts as audience to both the vast and the tiny."

"The bond of sympathy, like the artist's eye for beauty, may stretch across many divisions."

"That is what Castle's work needed: a beginner's eye?my eye, before it became too schooled and guarded, while it was still in touch with the vulgar foundations of the art, still vulnerably naive enough to receive that faint and flickering revelation of the dark god whose scriptures are the secret history of the movies."

"The Earth's cry for rescue from the punishing weight of the industrial system we have created is our own cry for a scale and quality of life that will free each of us to become the complete person that we were meant to be."

"The alchemists of the ancient world had a teaching: "As above, so below." Four words that contain an entire cosmology... a grand cosmic unity, a harmony resounding in the mind of God."

"The elder culture that is being improvised all around us day by day... promises to be the road toward a saner, more compassionate, more sustainable world?altogether, a more important turning point than ever presented itself in the 1960s... This, at last, is what the dissenting idealism of the 1960s was, in its highest and brightest expression, all about: a transformation of values that may finally reveal the goal of industrialization... In raising that possibility I cling to one hope. They grew up... reveling in their willingness to search beyond the limits of convention... What Boomers left undone in their youth, they will return to take up in their maturity... we have won years back from death. That gives us the grand project of using those extra years to build a culture that is morally remarkable."

"The eyes are the gates of heaven and hell."

"The epidemic psychosis of our time is the lie of believing we have no ethical obligation to our planetary home."