Quote of the Day March 20/11

"One can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together."

Friedrich Engels



As my fellow students of Sociology will recognize immediately, this quote is the work of the brilliant Materialist Philosopher Friedrich Engels, contemporary, friend and collaborator of Karl Marx.  In this quote, Engels refers to English society in the 1840s in which the social conditions of the working class were utterly appalling.  These dire conditions were immortalized in the fictional works of Charles Dickens (and tragically romanticized in films such as Oliver), but also to the drafting, by Engels and Marx, of the Communist Manifesto - possibly the most impactful political discourse in modern history.

I'm pretty sure that this background doesn't interest many of you at all and it's not why I chose the quote.  I chose it because it aptly describes our own contemporary times.  In a world where communication is constant and where we are bombarded with news every minute of every day, life is much more complicated than it was 100 years ago when my grandmother was born in 1910.  We live in a world where "multi-tasking" is both highly touted and almost completely ineffectual; where we are driving endlessly on a metaphorical autobahn with no specific destination, at high speeds and perpetually unable to get off at an appropriate exit.

It is indeed a "wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together"...