I'm an engineer, working at a major corporation which is constantly looking for ways to improve its operations, cut costs, and bring more money to its investors. I know that a lot of people lately have begun criticizing corporate strategy (think Occupy Wall Street) which cares more about the bottom line than making a good product/invention/investment. The problem is, nobody knows what to do about it, since our entire economic structure revolves around the soul-sucking model of rational theory and bean-counting. We've learned that a repeatable process is safe, reliable, and economically profitable. We improve on that process now, rather than continuing to improve on the reason we wanted a repeatable process in the first place.
I recently saw that Bob Lutz, a former Vice Chairman of GM published the book "Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business". I haven't read it, but I saw his interview on the Colbert Report, and I agree with him. Although it is absolutely necessary to meet expectations as a business, one must never lose their passion for their work. Although it's important to meet emissions standards, that doesn't mean you can't find a way to fit a Corvette into your production line. I know because of this that Bob Lutz speaks the language of the stars.
Similarly, I've been absolutely amazed at how wonderful Kickstarter has been for creative projects. By bypassing big, controlling investors, people have the option of creating small products for niche markets that make them a nice profit, all while having complete creative control over their product. Most noticeably, video games that never would have come to fruition are being funded and released, bypassing big publishers by asking regular people to fund their products based on their level of interest. Some examples are Wasteland 2 (a classic from 1988 whose developers have been itching to turn into a sequel, but never got the freedom or funding to do so the way they imagined) and The Banner Saga (watch the video above). These people who didn't compromise on their dreams and found ways of funding their product also speak the language of the stars.
Time Magazine wrote about Lewis: "To him, scientists seem, most nearly to embody the Christian sin of Pride—setting up the human will against the Divine....Lewis is a bitter academic opponent of Oxford’s “progressive element” of scientists and “practical” faculty members who would lay more stress on “useful” courses than on Oxford’s traditional concern with the humanities." There's a reason Lewis wrote intellectual books as well as children's books. Lewis spoke the language of the stars.
I've lived my whole life in Silicon Valley. I was born to be an engineer, and I went to a high school where taking an Honors literature class meant getting a .5 GPA boost rather than enjoying good literature. I rejected that mindset and only took 2 AP classes my whole high school career, which, in my high school, was quite heretical. Instead, I focused on track and music, while always doing enough real work in order to make my way toward the "useful" computer science degree I eventually received in college. Little did I know, but I rejected these thoughts because I spoke the language of the stars.
Even in modern Christian thought, we've begun to fit the Bible into our modern or post-modern (I'm honestly not sure which one is worse) Enlightenment-centered worldviews. We boil the Bible down to the parts that just make sense, as well as those few we're willing to accept by faith alone, while some of the more incredible pieces are piled up in the corner and never talked about again. By some repeatable process, we've discovered that axe-heads don't float, so we don't talk about that part, even when we walk past a river and see an axe lazily floating along. Even biblical scholars have been trying to explain by natural phenomena that the Red Sea can simply part itself given the right conditions. Jesus himself has been reduced to little more than an exaggerated caricature of Alexander the Great, or worse - this guy:
If you don't understand what I mean when I say someone speaks the language of the stars, it's not worth explaining to you. You simply have lost the ability to speak it, and I'm afraid you never will again unless your heart is changed back to that of a child. Science, progress, rational thinking, all of the pillars of modern society, are not necessarily bad, but they are certainly not the point. The language of the stars is creativity and dreams. The language of the stars is what we were all designed to speak.
Eskimos have tons of words for snow, and thus can see the differences between those types of snow while the rest of us can't. Perhaps the reason we don't see the magic in the world is because we don't speak its language.
