(so let's keep talking)
Nov 19, 2010
“…[w]e know all we need to know when we have acquainted ourselves with a few simple formulae. We have been optimized by competition and environment, we are shaped by economic forces and means of production, we are inheritors of a primal guilt, we are molded by experiences of frustration and reinforcement.
These are all assertions that have shaped modern thought. But they are not to be reconciled to one another. The Freudian neurasthenic is not the Darwinian primate, who is not the Marxist proletarian, who is not the behaviorists’ organism available to being molded by a regime of positive and negative experience.
To acknowledge an element of truth in each of these models is to reject the claims of descriptive sufficiency made by all of them. What they do have in common, beside the claim to sufficiency, is an exclusion of the testimonies of culture and history.”
Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind
(I also make paintings. This one is Polymath, from 2007 I think.)