vexing.............................

 

Most of the issues that vex humanity daily—ethnic conflict, arms escalation, overpopulation, abortion, environment, endemic poverty, to cite several most persistently before us—cannot be solved without integrating knowledge from the natural sciences with that of the social sciences and humanities.  Only fluency across the boundaries will provide a clear view of the world as it really is, not as seen through the lens of ideologies and religious dogmas or commanded by myopic response to immediate need.

-Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

Cohesion..................

"The true gravitation-hold of liberalism in the United States will be a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort, a vast intertwining reticulation of wealth.  As the human frame, or, indeed any object in this manifold universe, is best kept together by the simple miracle of its own cohesion and the necessity, exercise, and profit thereof, so a great and varied nationality, occupying millions of square miles, were firmest held and knit by the principle of safety and endurance of the aggregate of its middling property owners."
-Walt Whitman

Ed note:  Confessing here to the need of looking up the meaning of "reticulation."  Mr. Webster believes it means "network."