I believe that none can "save" his fellow man by making a choice for him. To help him, he can indicate the possible alternatives, with sincerity and love, without being sentimental and without illusion. The knowledge and awareness of the freeing alternatives can reawaken in an individual all his hidden energies and put him on the path to choosing respect for "life" instead of for "death."
The problems of the heart and conscience are infinitely more perplexing than those of the intellect. Has love no future? Has right no triumph? Is the unfinished self to remain unfinished? The alternatives are two, Christianity or Pessimism. But when we ascend the further height of the religious nature, the crisis comes. There, without Environment, the darkness is unutterable. So maddening now becomes the mystery that men are compelled to construct an Environment for themselves. No Environment here is unthinkable. An altar of some sort men must have-- God, or Nature, or Law. But the anguish of Atheism is only a negative proof of man's incompleteness. Natural Law, p. 279.
This organic conception of society, the only vital conception, combines a noble humanism with the genuine Christian spirit, and it bears the inscription from Holy Writ which St. Thomas has explained: “The work of justice shall be peace”; a text applicable to the life of a people whether it be considered in itself or in its relations with other nations. In this view love and justice are not contrasted as alternatives; they are united in a fruitful synthesis. Both radiate from the spirit of God, both have their place in the programme which defends the dignity of man; they complement, help, support, and animate each other: while justice prepares the way for love, love softens the rigour of justice and ennobles it: both raise up human life to an atmosphere in which, despite the failings, the obstacles, and the harshness which earthly life presents, a brotherly intercourse becomes possible. [Christmas Broadcast, “The Rights of Man, 1942.]
What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing. [ A Declaration of Freedom .]
Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.
The alternatives of the intellectual life are Christianity or Agnosticism. The Agnostic is right when he trumpets his incompleteness. He who is not complete in Him must be for ever incomplete. Natural Law, p. 278.
A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It's also a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it.
In our lives and in our careers, whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly navigating a path by deciding between our deliberate strategies and the unanticipated alternatives that emerge.
I didn't learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativism is defensible and attractive. It's also a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it.
There is a conspicuous void in the arguments and the programs of the counter-culture groups of this country, in that they have produced no well-formulated economic theories…. Unfortunately and ironically, Lou Kelso, who has some very imaginative economic proposals, has been offering them for many years to the establishment, the dinosaur culture….”Two-Factor” economics or “universal capitalism” recognizes the emerging importance of technology, and accepts the diminishing necessity of human labor; it is an economic theory that is beautifully tailored to the values and beliefs of most Catalog readers and those seeking alternatives to dinosaur existence…. These proposals have been laid on presidential candidates, congressmen, newspaper publishers, leading economists, and nearly all key decision makers of the establishment over and over again…. My advice to Lou is: “Come on, Lou, grow long hair, drop all that establishment costumery, immerse yourself in the now generation, and start to work with a constituency that wants you and needs you. [ The Whole Earth Catalog , Spring 1970.]
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
Two-Factor economics recognizes the importance of technology, and accepts the diminishing necessity of human labor. It is an economic theory that is beautifully tailored to the values of beliefs of most Whole Earth Catalog readers and those seeking alternatives to dinosaur existence. [ Whole Earth Catalogue , Spring, 1970.]
Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives. -- Maya Angelou, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"
FORTUNE EXPLAINS WHAT JOB REVIEW CATCH PHRASES MEAN: #4 consistent: Reviewee hasn't gotten anything right yet, and it is anticipated that this pattern will continue throughout the coming year. an excellent sounding board: Present reviewee with any number of alternatives, and implement them in the order precisely opposite of his/her specification. a planner and organizer: Usually manages to put on socks before shoes. Can match the animal tags on his clothing.
There are always alternatives. -- Spock, "The Galileo Seven", stardate 2822.3
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. There are many examples of outsiders who eventually overthrew entrenched scientific orthodoxies, but they prevailed with irrefutable data. More often, egregious findings that contradict well-established research turn out to be artifacts. I have argued that accepting psychic powers, reincarnation, "cosmic conciousness," and the like, would entail fundamental revisions of the foundations of neuroscience. Before abandoning materialist theories of mind that have paid handsome dividends, we should insist on better evidence for psi phenomena than presently exists, especially when neurology and psychology themselves offer more plausible alternatives. -- Barry L. Beyerstein, "The Brain and Conciousness: Implications for Psi Phenomena".
Top scientists agree that with the present rate of consumption, the earth's supply of gravity will be exhausted before the 24th century. As man struggles to discover cheaper alternatives, we need your help. Please... CONSERVE GRAVITY Follow these simple suggestions: (1) Walk with a light step. Carry helium balloons if possible. (2) Use tape, magnets, or glue instead of paperweights. (3) Give up skiing and skydiving for more horizontal sports like curling. (4) Avoid showers .. take baths instead. (5) Don't hang all your clothes in the closet ... Keep them in one big pile. (6) Stop flipping pancakes
Growing old isn't bad when you consider the alternatives. -- Maurice Chevalier
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. There are many examples of outsiders who eventually overthrew entrenched scientific orthodoxies, but they prevailed with irrefutable data. More often, egregious findings that contradict well-established research turn out to be artifacts. I have argued that accepting psychic powers, reincarnation, "cosmic consciousness," and the like, would entail fundamental revisions of the foundations of neuroscience. Before abandoning materialist theories of mind that have paid handsome dividends, we should insist on better evidence for psi phenomena than presently exists, especially when neurology and psychology themselves offer more plausible alternatives. - Barry L. Beyerstein, "The Brain and Consciousness: Implications for Psi Phenomena", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 163-171
William Safire's Rules for Writers: Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Verbs have to agree with their subjects. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. A writer must not shift your point of view. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.) Don't overuse exclamation marks!! Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing. Always pick on the correct idiom. The adverb always follows the verb. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.
Katz' Law: Men and nations will act rationally when all other possibilities have been exhausted. History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. -- Abba Eban
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. -- Abba Eban
Every soldier, every worker, every real Socialist, every honest democrat realises that there are only two alternatives to the present situation.
“There are only two alternatives; either the Russian Revolution will create a revolutionary movement in Europe, or the European powers will destroy the Russian Revolution!”
He weighed, he reflected, he considered the alternatives, the mysterious balance of light and darkness.
"Or taken it out of my pocket--two alternatives."
To a less extent, similar problems and alternatives arise in regard to the church:--Catholicism a compromise between Jewish Christianity and Pauline or Gentile Christianity (F.C. Baur, &c.); Catholicism the Hellenizing of Christianity (A. Ritschl, A. Harnack); the Catholic church for good and evil the creation of St Paul (P. Wernle, H. Weinel); the church supernaturally guided (R.C. apologetic; in a modified degree High Church apologetic); essential--not necessarily exclusive--truth of Paulinism, essential error in first principles of Catholicism (Protestant apologetic). Entry: 3
In developing our conception we must discard from consideration the complexities that arise from the organization of the higher living bodies, the differences between one living animal and another, or between plant and animal. Such differentiations and integrations of living bodies are the subject-matter of discussions on evolution; some will see in the play of circumambient media, natural or supernatural, on the simplest forms of living matter, sufficient explanation of the development of such matter into the highest forms of living organisms; others will regard the potency of such living matter so to develop as a mysterious and peculiar quality that must be added to the conception of life. Choice amongst these alternatives need not complicate investigation of the nature of life. The explanation that serves for the evolution of living matter, the vehicle of life, will serve for the evolution of life. What we have to deal with here is life in its simplest form. Entry: LIFE
DETERMINISM (Lat. _determinare_, to prescribe or limit), in ethics, the name given to the theory that all moral choice, so called, is the determined or necessary result of psychological and other conditions. It is opposed to the various doctrines of Free-Will, known as voluntarism, libertarianism, indeterminism, and is from the ethical standpoint more or less akin to necessitarianism and fatalism. There are various degrees of determinism. It may be held that every action is causally connected not only externally with the sum of the agent's environment, but also internally with his motives and impulses. In other words, if we could know exactly all these conditions, we should be able to forecast with mathematical certainty the course which the agent would pursue. In this theory the agent cannot be held responsible for his action in any sense. It is the extreme antithesis of Indeterminism or Indifferentism, the doctrine that a man is absolutely free to choose between alternative courses (the _liberum arbitrium indifferentiae_). Since, however, the evidence of ordinary consciousness almost always goes to prove that the individual, especially in relation to future acts, regards himself as being free within certain limitations to make his own choice of alternatives, many determinists go so far as to admit that there may be in any action which is neither reflex nor determined by external causes solely an element of freedom. This view is corroborated by the phenomenon of remorse, in which the agent feels that he ought to, and could, have chosen a different course of action. These two kinds of determinism are sometimes distinguished as "hard" and "soft" determinism. The controversy between determinism and libertarianism hinges largely on the significance of the word "motive"; indeed in no other philosophical controversy has so much difficulty been caused by purely verbal disputation and ambiguity of expression. How far, and in what sense, can action which is determined by motives be said to be free? For a long time the advocates of free-will, in their eagerness to preserve moral responsibility, went so far as to deny all motives as influencing moral action. Such a contention, however, clearly defeats its own object by reducing all action to chance. On the other hand, the scientific doctrine of evolution has gone far towards obliterating the distinction between external and internal compulsion, e.g. motives, character and the like. In so far as man can be shown to be the product of, and a link in, a long chain of causal development, so far does it become impossible to regard him as self-determined. Even in his motives and his impulses, in his mental attitude towards outward surroundings, in his appetites and aversions, inherited tendency and environment have been found to play a very large part; indeed many thinkers hold that the whole of a man's development, mental as well as physical, is determined by external conditions. Entry: DETERMINISM
But these possibilities are not mutually exclusive alternatives. A man may live on in the world by his teaching and example as a power for good, a factor of human progress, and he may also be continuing and completing his course under conditions still more favourable to all most worthy in him. Consciously to participate as a person in the progress of the race is surely a worthier hope than unconsciously to contribute to it as an influence; ultimately to share the triumph as well as the struggle is a more inspiring anticipation. Entry: O
Meanwhile the war with Ulalrich continued, but after his victory at Weissensee Henry's allies began to fall away, and his cause to decline. When Frederick took the field in June 1181 the struggle was soon over. Henry sought for peace, and the conditions were settled at Erfurt in November 1181, when he was granted the counties of Lüneburg and Brunswick, but was banished under oath not to return without the emperor's permission. In July 1182 he went to his father-in-law's court in Normandy, and afterwards to England, returning to Germany with Frederick's permission in 1185. He was soon regarded once more as a menace to the peace of Germany, and of the three alternatives presented to him by the emperor in 1188 he rejected the idea of making a formal renunciation of his claim, or of participating in the crusade, and chose exile, going again to England in 1189. In October of the same year, however, he returned to Saxony, excusing himself by asserting that his lands had not been defended according to the emperor's promise. He found many allies, took Lübeck, and soon almost the whole of Saxony was in his power. King Henry VI. was obliged to take the field against him, after which the duke's cause declined, and in July 1190 a peace was arranged at Fulda, by which he retained Brunswick and Lüneburg, received half the revenues of Lübeck, and gave two of his sons as hostages. Still hoping to regain his former position, he took advantage of a league against Henry VI. in 1193 to engage in a further revolt; but the captivity of his brother-in-law Richard I., king of England, led to a reconciliation. Henry passed his later years mainly at his castle of Brunswick, where he died on the 6th of August 1195, and was buried in the church of St Blasius which he had founded in the town. He had by his first wife a son and a daughter, and by his second wife five sons and a daughter. One of his sons was Otto, afterwards the emperor Otto IV., and another was Henry (d. 1227) count palatine of the Rhine. Entry: A
The laws of social life are thus duty to one's guest and duty to one's family; and chastity has its true place in that relation, as the later Greeks, who so often quote Hesiod (cf. the so-called _Economics_ of Aristotle), fully realized. Also the family charities due to the orphan, whose lot is deplored in the _Iliad_ (xxii. 490), and to the aged are now clearly enunciated. But there is also in Hesiod the duty to one's neighbour, not according to the "perfection" of "Cristes lore," but according to a law of honourable reciprocity in act and intent. "Love him who loves thee, and cleave to him who cleaveth to thee: to him who would have given, give; to him who would not have given, give not." The groundwork of Hesiod's charity outside the family is neighbourly help (such as formed no small part of old Scottish charity in the country districts); and he put his argument thus: Competition, which is a kind of strife, "lies in the roots of the world and in men." It is good, and rouses the idle "handless" man to work. On one side are social duty ([Greek: dikê]) and work, done briskly at the right season of the year, which brings a full barn. On the other side are unthrift and hunger, and relief with the disgrace of begging; and the relief, when the family can do no more, must come from neighbours, to whose house the beggar has to go with his wife and children to ask for victual. Once they may be helped, or twice, and then they will be refused. It is better, Hesiod tells his brother, to work and so pay off his debts and avoid hunger (see _Erga_, 391, &c., and elsewhere). Here indeed is a problem of to-day as it appeared to an early Greek. The alternatives before the idler--so far as his own community is concerned--are labour with neighbourly help to a limited extent, or hunger. Entry: PART
The free-state men ignored the alternatives set by the Lecompton Convention; but they participated nevertheless in the provisional election for officers under the Lecompton government, capturing all offices, and then, the same day, voted overwhelmingly against the constitution (Jan. 4, 1858). Entry: KANSAS
A similar criticism might fairly be passed upon the majority of philosophers who approach ethics from the standpoint of evolution. Sir Leslie Stephen, for instance, wishes to substitute the conception of "social health" for that of universal happiness, and considers that the conditions of social health are to be discovered by an examination of the "social organism" or of "social tissue," the laws of which can be studied apart from those laws by which the individuals composing society regulate their conduct. "The social evolution means the evolution of a strong social tissue; the best type is the type implied by the strongest tissue." But on the important question as to what constitutes the strongest social tissue, or to what extent the analogy between society as at present constituted and organic life is really applicable, we are left without certain guidance. The fact is that with few exceptions evolutionary moral philosophers evade the choice between alternatives which is always presented to them. They begin, for the most part, with a belief that in ethics as in other departments of human knowledge "the more developed must be interpreted by the less developed"--though frequently in the sequel complexity or posteriority of development is erected as a standard by means of which to judge the process of development itself. They are not content to write a _history_ of moral development, applying to it the principles by which Darwinians seek to explain the development of animal life. But the search of origins frequently leads them into theories of the nature of that moral conduct whose origin they are anxious to find quite at variance with current and accepted beliefs concerning its nature. The discovery of the so-called evolution of morality out of non-moral conditions is very frequently an unconscious subterfuge by which the evolutionist hides the fact that he is making a priori judgments upon the value of the moral concepts held to be evolved. To accept such theories of the origin of morality would carry with it the conviction that what we took for "moral" conduct was in reality something very different, and has been so throughout its history. The legitimate inference which should follow would be the denial of the validity of those moral laws which have hitherto been regarded as absolute in character, and the substitution for all customary moral terms of an entirely new set based upon biological considerations. But it is precisely this, the only logical inference, which most evolutionary philosophers are unwilling to draw. They cannot give up their belief in customary morality. Professor Huxley maintained, for example, in a famous lecture that "the ethical progress of society depends not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it" (_Romanes Lecture, ad fin_.). And very frequently arguments are adduced by evolutionists to prove that men's belief in the absolute character of moral precepts is one of the necessary means adopted by nature to carry out her designs for the social welfare of mankind. Yet the other alternative, to which such reasoning points, they are reluctant to accept. For the belief that moral obligation is absolute in character, that it is alike impossible to explain its origin and transcend its laws, would make the search for a scientific criterion of conduct to be deduced from the laws of life and conditions of existence meaningless, if not absurd. Entry: A
In June 1857 delegates were elected to a constitutional convention. The election Act did not provide for any popular vote upon the constitution they should form, and was passed over Governor John W. Geary's veto. A census, miserably deficient (largely owing to free-state abstention and obstruction), was the basis of apportionment of delegates. The free-state party demanded a popular vote on the constitution. On the justice of this Governor Robert J. Walker and President Buchanan were at first unequivocally agreed, and the governor promised fairplay. Nevertheless only pro-slavery men voted, and the convention was thus pro-slavery. The document it framed is known as the Lecompton Constitution. Before the convention met, the free-state party, abandoning its policy of political inaction, captured the Territorial legislature. On the constitutional convention rested, then, all hope of saving Kansas for slavery; and that would be impossible if they should submit their handiwork to the people. The convention declared slave property to be "before and higher than any constitutional sanction" and forbade amendments affecting it; but it provided for a popular vote on the alternatives, the "constitution with slavery" or the "constitution with no slavery." If the latter should be adopted, slavery should cease "except" that the right to property in slaves in the Territory should not be interfered with. The free-state men regarded this as including the right to property in offspring of slaves, and therefore as pure fraud. Governor Walker stood firmly against this iniquitous scheme; he saw that slavery was, otherwise, doomed, but he thought Kansas could be saved to the Democratic party though lost to slavery. But President Buchanan, under Southern influence, repudiated his former assurances. There is reason to believe that the whole scheme was originated at Washington, and though Buchanan was not privy to it before the event, yet he adopted it. He abandoned Walker, who left Kansas; and he dismissed Acting-Governor Frederick P. Stanton for convoking the (now free-state) legislature. This body promptly ordered a vote on the third alternative, "Against the Constitution." Entry: KANSAS