From Faith, Madness, and Spontaneous Combustion

Our immune systems, and only our immune systems, prevent us from becoming everyone else all at once.  We are who we are only because we defend ourselves every moment of every day.  And who we are is everything.  We are pieces of others.  Portraits painted somewhere between our brains and thymuses.  We are the dirt we've eaten and the songs we've sung.  We are the light of stars and darknesses old beyond imagining.  We are at once spontaneous fires and sacred water.  We are faith and forgiveness.  We are our own deaths and we are the eternal thoughts of others.

-- Gerald Callahan, Faith, Madness, and Spontaneous Combustion:  What Immunology Can Teach Us About Self-Perception (New York:  St. Martin's, 2002), p. 227

From 'Blessed Unrest'

     Technologically, Western culture dances to preeminence with an iPod plugged into both ears.  When it comes to innovation, literature, and creativity, it is dazzling.  The ability to go deep into the ocean or as far as the moon is spectacular, but as Robert Oppenheimer reminded us, being blessed with technological insight does not confer self-insight.  If we measure Western culture by how it has treated people of different ethnicity and race, it is anathema.  If we judge it by the treatment of its own people, including children, the elderly, and the poor, it is an embarrassment.  And if we try to calibrate American superiority by its treatment of the environment, the United States is one of the least intelligent civilizations in the history of the planet.  English, when scientific and technical terms are taken into account, has more than 3 million words.  "Brilliant" is hardly sufficient to describe such an achievement.  But how do you describe an American administration that will spend $1 trillion, on winning a war for  Iraqi oil while refusing to allocate any funds to reduce dependency on oil?  For $1 trillion, the United States could have catalyzed the replacement of its entire automobile fleet with plug-in hybrid-electrics getting 500 mpg (cars running on batteries 90 percent of the time), powered by renewable energy and biodiesel.  To invert Trevor-Roper's logic, indigenous cultures may show us an image of a future by which we can escape our present.  If a culture does not become like us, it may be not a failure but a gift to what is now an uncertain future.

From: Blessed Unrest
          Paul Hawken, 2007
          Page 99