The U.K. Daily Mail reports: “Cancer is a man-made disease fueled by the excesses of modern life, a study of ancient remains has found. Tumors were rare until recent times when pollution and poor diet became issues, the review of mummies, fossils and classical literature found. A greater understanding of its origins could lead to treatments for the disease, which claims more than 150,000 lives a year in the UK.

Michael Zimmerman, a visiting professor at Manchester University, said: ‘In an ancient society lacking surgical intervention, evidence of cancer should remain in all cases. The virtual absence of malignancies in mummies must be interpreted as indicating their rarity in antiquity, indicating that cancer-causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialization.’ …Despite slivers of tissue from hundreds of Egyptian mummies being rehydrated and placed under the microscope, only one case of cancer has been confirmed. This is despite experiments showing that tumors should be even better preserved by mummification than healthy tissues.”

Now, you can breeze in from the Hamptons late, land on a helipad with a lap top dangling like a well-oiled Uzi, toting a black ballistic nylon backpack, wearing jeans and a short black raincoat, well-wired head bobbing to an iPod, while also barking a pizza order into a Bluetooth enabled smart phone, and scowl at the boss on your way in — and be proud to call it multitasking. 

For some, this is the image of the so-called knowledge worker of today, perhaps more aptly called a data worker. Like a herd of wildebeest crossing the plains of Africa, they migrate from train station to office and back, talking into their devices — thinking they are doing us a favor by sharing their mundane conversations.

Modern society searches for a new paradigm that is both ideologically forward-looking, and pragmatic. China may get there first:

The assumption of liberalism is that we needed a justification for throwing out the kings and idea of God, so we created a new notion: equality. In it we’re all the same, or at least should be, so we’ll act that way. In order to assume equality, we have to assume that we’re all good, intelligent, and capable of making the right decision if only we’re given the right opportunities, education, and information.

We’ve been working on this assumption since the pompously titled “The Enlightenment,” which was essentially a scam. People wanted to get rid of kings and the assumption that there was a divine right, or even single right way, to do anything — even if it was based on reality and the gods were a symbol for how reality worked, much like science is a symbolic representation of reality.

Adorno attacked something that he called the “regression of listening,” which he believed had infected the entire culture of modern America. He saw the culture of listening as a deep spiritual resource of Western civilization. For Adorno the habit of listening to long-range musical thought, in which themes are subjected to extended melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic development, is connected to the ability to live beyond the moment, to transcend the search for instant gratification, to set aside the routines of the consumer society, with its constant pursuit of the “fetish,” and to put real values in the place of fleeting desires.

One of the worst effects of haste, or of the fear engendered by it, is the apparent inability of modern man to spend even the shortest time alone. He anxiously avoids every possibility of self-communion or meditation, as though he feared that reflection might present him with a ghastly self-portrait, such as that Dorian Gray. The only explanation for the widespread addiction to noise – paradoxical considering how neurasthenic people are today – is that something has to be suppressed. One day, when my wife and i were walking in the woods, we were surprised to hear the rapidly approaching, metallic sounds of the transistor radio. as its owner, alone, sixteen-year old cyclist, came into view, my wife remarked,”He’s afraid of hearing the birds sing.” I think he was on afraid of meeting himself. Why, otherwise, do perfectly intelligent people prefer the inane advertisements on television to their own company? I am sure it’s because it helps to dispel reflection.

—Konrad Lorenz, excerpt from: Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins – Man’s Race Against Himself p-28-29.

Unabomber’s writings raise uneasy ethical questions for Stanford scholar, French Professor Jean-Marie Apostolidès:

The most obvious ambiguity may be centered within Apostolidès himself. He admits he has a longstanding interest in avant-garde ideas – but he writes about radical thoughts from the safe perch of a university professorship and his comfortable home on the Stanford campus. In short, as a part of the petite bourgeoisie Kaczynski despises.

Kaczynski’s manifesto argues that the leftist liberals who present themselves as rebels are, in fact, obedient servants of the dominant society – a symptom of “oversocialization.” He singles out “university intellectuals” as prime examples.

Apostolidès, who says he wouldn’t kill a fly, finds the criticism “absolutely appropriate.”

Were societies to be ranked on the basis of technological prowess, the Western scientific experiment, radiant and brilliants, would no doubt come out on top. But if the criteria of excellence shifted, for example to the capacity to thrive in a truly sustainable manner, with a true reverence and appreciation for the earth, the Western paradigm would fail… 

When we project modernity, as we define it, as the inevitable destiny of all human societies, we are being disingenuous in the extreme. Indeed, the Western model of development has failed in so many places in good measure because it has been based on the false promise that people who follow its prescriptive dictates will in time achieve the material prosperity enjoyed by a handful of nations of the West. Even were this possible, it is not at all clear that it would be desirable. To raise consumption of energy and materials througout the world to Western levels, given current population projections, would require the resources of four planet Earths by the year 2100.

The older Spain did not aspire to wall itself off from the rest of Europe, despite the saying—usually by foreigners—that “Europe stops at the Pyrenees.” It considered itself part of a larger civilisation, with profoundly Catholic foundations. Even Franco, for all his authoritarian heavyhandedness and suppression of the regions, never doubted that the nation was anchored within and answerable to a higher ethical imperative. This older sense of universalism meant that the battle lines drawn in Spain, say in the 1930s, were seen as part of a larger human story beyond the narrow interests of the actors on both sides. Centuries earlier, during the Reconquest, the peninsula had a competing universalism oriented eastward to the Islamic world, with some intriguing enmeshing of the two. Whatever the form it took in different eras, such self-confidence was lost once Spain rushed to modernise on the terms of others.

Instead of going to either of the extremes — “I’ll do it their way” or “I’ll do it my way” at the expense of all else — just do it the reality way. That is the ultimate heresy. Idiots are idiots. Marketing does not improve products. Fast food restaurants, nail salons, record stores, head shops, convenience stores, cell phone places and charities are blight. So is producing nothing but repackaging the mediocre and numbing everyone’s brain by saturating them with marketing-speak. Do you want blight? No? Then exclude these from your life. Even if they tell you you’re a heretic. That’s just a sign you’re succeeding.

Bone-bending rickets can now be added to the list of ills linked to children spending uncounted hours before a computer screen… Youngsters with rickets, caused primarily by a chronic lack of vitamin D, develop painful and deformed bow-legs that do not grow properly.

Modern Ireland has swapped peat bogs and hot stews for motorways and double lattes, a newly-updated guidebook claimed today….

Dublin’s Temple Bar, with its lively pub and club scene, is re-christened “Temple Barf”. “By 3am, the only culture on display is in the pools of vomit and urine that give the whole area the aroma of a sewer,” the book says.