Screeding

We clearly need new ways of doing things. The old ways don’t seem to be working, and the new ways are causing us to lose faith in the way the old ways once worked. There are both too many ideas and too few. Thinking by itself does not seem to apply to the situation, whatever the situation seems to be—social, political, and the two or three other categories of essential human endeavor—where the application of thought was once thought of as a necessity. Thinking, no! Not thinking, yes! Vote yes for not thinking! Thinking, it now appears, is not a basic human need, nor, it seems, is feeling. Now, we either think with our feeling or feel with our thinking. Neither will do, neither solve the problem which is ongoing and is becoming graver day-by-day. Many otherwise intelligent people have gone dumb and many otherwise dumb people have become intelligent, just as Mr. Yeats said they would. They’re everywhere these days, they can’t be escaped, building walls that don’t need to be built, intoning the same old weary Christian pieties, guarding ballot-boxes with semi-automatic weapons, saving us from ourselves as if we could be saved. We’ve been invaded, not by foreigners but by our fellow-citizens, at one time immigrants themselves. They’ve come ashore with their thoughts and feelings, such as they are, drowning out thinking with their feelings or feelings with their thoughts, or both.