Theodore Roszak

Quotes

• “The truth of the matter is no society, not even our severely secularized technocracy, can ever dispense with mystery and magical ritual.”
• “Ideology is not absent in the technocracy... it is simply invisible, having blended into the supposedly indisputable truth of the scientific world view. ...The most effective ideologies are always those that are congruent with the limits of consciousness, for then they work subliminally.”
• “That is what Castle's work needed: a beginner's eye—my eye, before it became too schooled and guarded, while it was still in touch with the vulgar foundations of the art, still vulnerably naive enough to receive that faint and flickering revelation of the dark god whose scriptures are the secret history of the movies.”
• “In a time when so many artists have learned to confabulate with extremes of horror and alienation, the most daring thing an artist can do is to fill a book, a gallery, or a theater with joy, hope, and beauty.”
• “Our goal should not be to borrow from elsewhere, but to search among our own cultural resources, perhaps even in modern science and industrialism, for ways to restore art to the status it has always held in traditional societies as a form of knowledge. ...art adds to what we learn from any combination of physics, biology, geology, and chemistry. It tells us the world is... deserving of reverence.”
• “In the technocracy, nothing is any longer small or simple or readily apparent to the nontechnical man. Instead, the scale of intricacy or all human activities... transcends the competence of the amateurish citizen and inexorably demands the attention of specially trained experts. ...even the most seemingly personal aspects of life. ...In the absence of expertise, the great [productive} mechanism would surely break down, leaving us in the midst of chaos and poverty.”

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Key dates

Born

15 November 1933

Died

5 July 2011

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Wikidata facts

Instance of

human

Gender

male

Citizenship

United States

Place of birth

Chicago

Place of death

Berkeley

Occupation

opinion journalist

Educated at

University of California, Los Angeles

Employer

San Francisco State University

Languages spoken

English language

Award

Tähtivaeltaja Award

Academic degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Field of work

culturology

Image

ThRoszak60s.jpg

via Wikidata · CC0