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North Whitehead, Alfred – The essential nature of Destruction as a process
Identifier
025748
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927), chapter 3,
It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur:—like unto an arrow in the hand of a child.
The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason.
Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.