SAL RESTIVO'S BLOG: THE SOCIOLOGICAL COGITO

       New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks and University of Chicago graduate (BA) has written a great deal in the public arena and now has revealed his spiritual evolution from agnostic to man of faith.   Faith came to him, he writes, through “numinous experience...moments of awe and wonder...”   He writes about moments of transcendence at the foot of a New England mountain and at Chartres Cathedredal in France.   I have stood at the foot of a mountain in New England, and in fact lived on a mountain in Vermont; and I’ve visited and written about the cathedral at Chartres.   I can imagine what Brooks must have felt at these times, but being as I am anchored to the earth I cannot be driven to awe and wonder as numinous experiences.   They did not open up vast mysteries for me as they did for Brooks.   He explains this in terms of “the emotions we feel when we are in the presence of a vast something j...

  I have called many times for an index of GDDP (Gross Domestic Disproduct) to measure the human and natural wastes that accompany the production of goods and services measured by Gross Domestic Product.   This could help offset the fact that we go stumbling along producing goods and services with no thought to the limits of natural resources. Remembering Jimmy Carter, we remember how he urged Americans to limit individual power consumption: “TURN OFF LIGHTS,” he said.   This is an example of what I call the law of marginal futulity.   Suppose we do turn off ights in our individual homes; who is going to turn off the lights in Las Vegas?   Who is even going to imagine that the lights of Las Vegas are the tip of the ice berg of our problem with assigning values and costs to using resources? Jimmy Carter’s Complicated Environmental Legacy, By Nitish Pahwa https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/12/jimmy-carter-death-environmental-legacy-cli...