This millipede moves on political, economic, cultural, biological, and countless other legs, each of which has a different tempo and rhythm.

From Progress and possibility by Christopher Hobson.  The subheading is Musil's millipede.

I have never heard of Robert Musil before and am not an especially huge fan of German academics or literary fiction but I appreciate the introduction from Hobson.  Musil appears to be wrestling with comprehending and expressing the same phenomenon with which I am mulling - the necessarily integrated world of both empirical realism and emotional wisdom.  Or something like that.  I stumble on the mere expression of the issue.

This sense of progress is not pleasant. It reminds you, in the most extreme way, of a dream in which you are seated on a horse and cannot get off, because the horse never stands still. You would gladly take pleasure in progress, if only it took a pause. If only we could stop for a moment on our high horse, look back, and say to the past: Look where I am now! But already the uncanny process continues, and after experiencing it several times, you begin to feel queasy in the stomach with those four strange legs trotting beneath you, constantly carrying you forward.

'Art Anniversary'

Progress itself is not something that unfolds in a single line. Every present period is simultaneously now and yet millennia old. This millipede moves on political, economic, cultural, biological, and countless other legs, each of which has a different tempo and rhythm.

'Mind and Experience: Notes for Readers Who Have Eluded the Decline of the West'

These are two attempts by Musil to describe an idea the Great War had left in tatters. Both evoke similar themes - a creature moving, doing so largely of its own volition and at its own pace - but each emphasises slightly different features. The imagery of the horse captures that feeling of being carried by a force outside one's control; jerky, uneven, uncomfortable. The mild sense of vertigo that one gets when facing a world relentlessly moving forward, combined with the unreality that exists in a dream. With the millipede, he pointed to the difficulties of providing clear explanations:

One simply explains the World War or our collapse first by this, then by that cluster of causes; but this is deceptive. Just as fraudulent as explaining a simple physical event by a chain of causes. In reality, even in the first links of the chain of causality the causes have already flowed and dissolved beyond the scope of our vision.

Musil was not denying the presence of causes, but doubting our capacity to comprehend all of what was present and determinative. Indeed, he questioned those who presented the Great War as a decisive break, and suggested that, ‘everything that has appeared in the War and after the War was already there.’ It is not just elephants that blind men struggle with, we feel different parts of a millipede, and then guess.

Throughout his work, Musil searched for what can be sensed but not fully grasped, what exists at the edge of our comprehension. In The Man Without Qualities he wrote, 'however understandable and self-contained everything seems, that is accompanied by an obscure feeling that it is only half the story.' Awareness without full understanding, appreciating enough to know something is missing, but not being able to precisely locate what that is.  

I am in love with the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment and Classical Liberalism but also see aspects of those beliefs which are self-undermining.  

Specifically, I have an abiding suspicion that much of the success of Age of Enlightenment world view and its attendant Classical Liberalism involves a necessary dependency between empirical realism and the scientific method and some amorphous and indistinct amalgam of religion and family and culture.  

Empirical realism with Classical Liberalism, left unconstrained, can lead to forays into despotism, authoritarianism and genocide.  They are constrained by fundamental Christian beliefs in combination with particular cultural elements, principally beliefs in human universalism and consent of the governed.  

Neither of the latter two attributes are logically derived, they are simply observed in place as necessary constraints on the otherwise munificent outcomes of empirical realism and scientific method.  

One of our challenges these days, it seems to me, is that the mean time to greater connectivity, technological revolution and universal engagement now exceeds the mean time for cultural and religious accommodation and evolution.

More specifically, it feels as if religious and spiritual perceptiveness are being bludgeoned in to ever more circumscribed bounds such that they no longer serve as the counterweight to untrammeled empirical logic.  

Seems like these are perhaps issues Musil might have been thinking about as well.