Some Wisdom For Troubled Times

“Reason, of course, is weak, when measured against its never-ending task. Weak, indeed, compared with the follies and passions of mankind, which, we must admit, almost entirely control our human destinies, in great things and small. Yet the works of the understanding outlast the noisy bustling generations and spread light and warmth across the centuries.” Albert Einstein

“The understanding” is a concept that comes from from Spinoza and is roughly the idea of an interaction between nature and the human mind’s efforts to understand nature (which Spinoza defined as literally everything in the real world). Thus, as some have pointed out, we are nature’s latest experiment in self-awareness.

“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance to keep pace with the times.” Thomas Jefferson

Those who resist change to ideas that are centuries old would do well to consider these words from a Founding Father of the American Experiment, who wrote the Declaration of Independence.