Radical! at Smashwords is a reader-sets-price book.
Radical! begins with a play, If the poor are on the moon.., about Mother Teresa (currrently freely available on the web). Monologs follow on artistic and scientific radicals (Berlioz, Sibelius, Sigmund Freud, JS Mill, Conan Doyle, Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, George Orwell, JB Priestley), as well as shorter features. Environmental verse and an essay on a statistical relativity conclude. Less
Radical! is chiefly about world changers, religious, artistic, political, social, environmental and scientific, among a few who are not. Some have offered the radical remedies that radical ills require.
Radicalism is not by itself any more a virtue than conservatism. It is a tonic in societies, so conservative that they turn their back on new ideas, however good, that disturb their moral or mental slumbers.
This complacency provoked a radical tradition (John Stuart Mill, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, H G Wells, George Orwell, J B Priestley) treated in the title verse narration, Radical!
The success of scientific investigation is a harmonising of radical principles with conservative testing how far they apply.
Humanitys sickness is that this harmony has eluded politics.
That is the intellectual part of the problem to be solved for the health, wealth and happiness of mankind. Scientific method of radical theory and conservative method balances the needs of stability and adaptation for humanity to securely progress.
Besides intellectual solutions, there are practical and emotional solutions. The three are inseparable but people will approach them according to how much they are thinkers, doers or feelers.
This book 5 collection opens with a play about Mother Teresa, obviously a feeling-led radical. A friend and colleague noted that she did not organise. Yet, the way her Mission of Charity gradually extended its organisation was impressive.
And when she was asked about her reading, she said she only had time to read the gospels.
Not an intellectual, then.
Yet, her practise showed Jesuses idealistic teachings to be practical and indeed a coherent body of doctrine for a way of life, that must have been thought by a real person, thus confirming not only the teachings but the teacher.
Those teachings broke away from social exclusion or tribalism. Likewise, Mother Teresa showed that religion doesnt have to be sectarian but can work with other religions of prayer and service.
As befits any-one being over-taken by age, this Collected Verse series has moved from the personal to the impersonal, from the individual to the universal, as if from the five year old toddler to the sun above his head, in his self-portrait on the cover of book one, The Valesman.
The other books in my verse series are: Dates and Dorothy; He’s a good dog (He just doesn’t like you to laf; In the meadow of night.
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