New Culture Library

the rich accomplishments of China, the West and Islam are not in conflict, but are rather “on the same side in a clash between cultivated intelligence and barbarism. The irony is that such barbarism too often goes under the name of loyalty to a civilization.” In fact, true civilization is “the life-support system for high-quality relationships to people, ideas and objects.” (Love, Armstrong explains, is the one-word version of the phrase “high quality of relationship.”) Civilization, then, seeks “to find and protect the good things with which — potentially — we can form high-quality relationships.” It also “fosters and protects the qualities in us that allow us to love such things for the right reasons. The qualities that inspire love are: goodness, beauty and truth. And when we love these qualities, we come to possess the corresponding capacities of wisdom, kindness and taste.”

our tragic sense of life is “founded on the fact that not all good things are compatible: it may be (for most people) impossible to have a happy marriage and a raucous erotic life; or to have a well-paid job and follow your own vocation; it may be that you cannot live in the place where you most want to live; responsibility is tedious and frightening; yet taking responsibility is important.” In the face of such inner conflicts, as well as life’s normal vicissitudes, civilization should help “strengthen us to face inevitable disappointment and suffering,” largely by instilling the stoic virtues: “the capacity to do without, to postpone pleasure, to make ourselves do things we do not want to do (when there is good reason to do them); to put up with minor irritations, to avoid complaint and useless criticism.”

When I was younger, like many, I dreamed of flying.  In my mind, I would start to run.  As my legs stretched, more ground started passing beneath my leaps until I was running upon nothing at all, just sweeping my legs back and forth, tiptoeing over the treetops at the speed of sound.  In waking life, the sensation is replicated as I turn my bicycle onto Bay Street every day during my morning commute.

I have ridden a bicycle through the streets of Manhattan for three years, commuting from Staten Island to Midtown since 2009 (and previously, from Brooklyn).  I began my two-wheeled ways in Kirksville, a rural community in northeast Missouri, where some back roads were not even gravel but dirt.  It wasn't always necessary to look both ways for traffic; traffic was almost too sparse for precaution.  I found my chipped, rusty yellow Schwinn abandoned in the backyard of a deserted house, overgrown with brush and wildflowers, and pedaled it to class to avoid an astronomically pricey campus parking pass. 

We humans are living out an epic morality play. For millennia humanity’s most celebrated spiritual teachers have taught that society works best and we all enjoy our greatest joy and fulfillment when we share, cooperate, and are honest in our dealings with one another.

But for the past few decades, this truth has been aggressively challenged by a faith called market fundamentalism—an immoral and counter-factual economic ideology that has assumed the status of a modern state religion. Its believers worship the God of money. Stock exchanges and global banks are their temples. They proclaim that everyone does best when we each seek to maximize our individual financial gain without regard to the

consequences for others. In the eyes of a market fundamentalist, to sacrifice profit for some presumed social or environmen