Word: santayana
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...Reformers," says Santayana, "blame the world for being themselves ill fitted to live in it." Only the Rational Order, or life of reason, introduces intelligent pruning and brings the buds to blossom. Operating judiciously "in the light or shadow of the past and the possible," reason fosters the only kind of precarious progress there is-"perfections after our own kind in our own time and place." Says Santayana: "The circle neither envies the square nor wishes to devour it." "Live and let live" is his implied credo...
...Santayana's chief quarrel with modern societies and governments is that they lack his and Nature's opulent tolerance. They try to stamp out their subjects with the uniformity of a cookie-cutter, leveling "all civilizations to a single cheap and dreary pattern." They aspire to be "dominations" rather than "powers," and domination is power run riot like cancer cells ravaging the body...
...Long View. Today, thinks Santayana, both the U.S. and Russia "aspire to be universal; and under either of them, if absolutely dominant, mankind might become safe, law-abiding, sporting, and uniform." And under either, the individual soul attempting to follow its "native bent" might find itself in a spiritual concentration camp. Since he dreads the export of America's "commercial" culture as much as any French intellectual who winces at the sight of a Coke, Santayana feels that perhaps the "barbarians" of the East might organize the future better than the "decadent" technicians of the West. "Conviction has deserted...
...Santayana, even a momentous East-West clash would be foam in the trough of history's innumerable waves. He has no chummy predisposition to back the U.S. team. Aristocratic, contemplative, traditional, he is separated from the America he left in 1912 by a wider gulf than the Atlantic. Occasionally his biases flash...
Love & Fertilizer. More frequently sage than sniping, Santayana's mind glows like a lamp, and page after page of Dominations glitters with apt observations caught in its radiant beams...