The peak mentality

Why do we need to identify certain things as peaks? Why isn't the fabric more important than peaks? It should be. Why can't the fabric of our so-called common life be the peak [of human achievement]? Why do we have to go to churches to have a peak experience, to a great temple in Greece – I am against this trivial peak-thinking, this peak-mentality in art or in architecture.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Round Table Discussion: Positions In Art' in Positions in Art (MAK, 1994) p. 148

A society of laborers without labor

Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical development had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.
However, this is so only in appearance. The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society. the fulfilment of the wish, therefor, like the fulfilment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating. It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won. Within this society, which is egalitarian because this is labor's way of making men live together, there is no class left, no aristocracy of either a political or spiritual nature from which a restoration of the other capacities of man could start anew. Even presidents, kings, and prime ministers think of their offices in terms of a job necessary for the life of society, and among the intellectuals, only solitary individuals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living. What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998) pp. 4-5

Knowledge and thought have parted company for good

But it could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do. In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998) p. 3

The geologic now of the Anthropocene

The problematic of globalization allows us to read climate change only as a crisis of capitalist management. While there is no denying that climate change has profoundly to do with the history of capital, a critique that is only a critique of capital is not sufficient for addressing questions relating to human history once the crisis of climate change has been acknowledged and the Anthropocene has begun to loom on the horizon of our present. The geologic now of the Anthropocene has become entangled with the now of human history.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'The Climate of History' in Critical Inquiry, 35, Winter 2009, p. 212