the immobility of progress

today no one doubts that technological and economic progress, if not true social progress, is underway and will continue to occur into the forseeable future and beyond even that. but because this progress is the product of a vast social machine, it is difficult for the individual to conceive his life as an active part of its realization. his work impacts a tiny field around him and has no noticeable influence on the larger forces that structure the world and determine which ways of life are possible. of course, there may be a measurable result within a small circle, but the larger social forces and structures that make us what we are will remain monoliths too large to dent or scratch. on closer analysis, even the major historical figures of our time look more like debris on the crest of a wave than shapers and creators of the course of events. thus, what appears from a distance as a very rapid forward motion is in truth, as far as personal experience and choices are concerned, effective immobility. either one pursues work purely for personal financial gain, or else one attends to one's work with a monkish devotion that expects little or no tangible recompense. but this monkish labor, often rewarded with little more than the abstract knowledge that one has at least done something, may be the only way to remain above a ruinous barbarism, at least if it is applied to those worthy labors that are in such short supply. perhaps it is possible to rediscover a devotion which is not that of the protestant bourgeois work ethic, but rather the devotion of sade's lecherous pre-revolutionary monastery, where the intonation of prayers and hymns alternates with the enactment of shameless acts of abandon.

Blue Cliff Record Case 61

Fuketsu, giving instruction, said, 
  "If one raises a speck of dust, the house and the nation prosper. If one
   does not raise a speck of dust, they perish."