There is just one hope of repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every niche on the whole earth. That hope is the organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness. In a civilization which requires most lives to be passed amid inordinate dissonance, pressure and intrusion, the chance of retiring now and then to the quietude and privacy of sylvan haunts becomes for some people a psychic necessity. The preservation of a few samples of undeveloped territory is one of the most clamant issues before us today. Just a few more years of hesitation and the only trace of that wilderness which has exerted such a fundamental influence in molding American character will lie in the musty pages of pioneer books… To avoid this catastrophe demands immediate action.
Attack on the front lawn. A not–all–that–interesting book, but on an interesting trend. My family’s house is on a double lot, roughly 80 feet wide. With front and back yards there’s very likely enough area that we could grow half of the food we eat in the summer. Being in minnesota would limit our choices a bit, but we could get over it and it’s not like there isn’t a grocer 5 minutes away by bike. But we have a reasonable green lawn instead. We have a rotary clipper—human-powered—and so don’t spew carbon into the air mowing it (1 hour of mowing your lawn is the equivalent of a 150km car trip), nor do we fertilize it with chemicals. But when you step back and think about it, the industry behing lawn care is indeed an insidious one.
We do have a decent garden, though most of it’s for show. I started an herb garden in the side yard years ago, which I quickly neglected, but it’s still going. No vegetables though. I just don’t really know what I’m doing when it comes to gardening, and I don’t want to mess up my mom’s domain. When I get a place of my own I plan on starting a garden, but then maybe that’s just my deferral instinct talking. Who knows.
In my own life, I am finding that the symbol “God” used to mean the very creativity in the universe, and membership with all of life that we all share, and the planet we share, does in fact, bring a sweet and enlarging sense of joy, responsibility, and humility. How graced we are, not by a Creator Agent God, but by the staggering emergence of the universe, life, and human civilization, so much of it, it begins to appear, partially beyond natural law. So, since we do no t and cannot kinow, we live into Mystery. We need a sense larger of ourselves and too much of our current society where we are consumers, not citizens of the world. Stuart Kauffman, On Reinventing the Sacred
Here’s exactly my stance on “religion/spirituality/belief/faith/whatever.” This is the stuff I think about in the shower. The other day I decided that the next time someone asks me about god, I’ll tell them to go out and look at a tree—honest to god look at the thing—then to come back and tell me about him/her/it.
I’ve come to empathize with the idea of faith. I can’t really say understand, or comprehend, but I do know how feels. I don’t know whether its been gleaned from things I’ve read, done, heard, seen or dreamt. But there’s a part of me that resonates when I think of whatever it is that’s bigger than the world as we know it. It lies in the complexity of it all—just to try and think about it—in that I can understand the feeling that’s led so many to postulate the existence of an immaterial soul. Certain thoughts—dealing with the arching, distilled beauty of things—well up in a particular part of my chest, giving a breathless feeling, something palpable, between my sternum and heart—usually followed by me closing my eyes and taking a deep breath, letting it out with the all joy the world causes me.
The people out there that aren’t religious don’t bother me the same as the people who are blindly religious. I find both tremendously lacking. I question following some “god” based upon what’s written about him in some 2000 year old, cobbled together work of fiction, having undergone translation and transcription millions of times. Not to say I don’t value the bible, or any other ancient and wonderful text—for that’s all it is. No different from the canon of Mythology formulated by nearly every culture, literate or no.
And for those opposed to religion—just because none of the religions (yet?) known to man haven’t failed to fuck some things up en majuscule doesn’t mean that all similar notions should be expunged from our cultural arena. Ok, science is a belief system based on testable hypotheses, which can then be vindicated and ratified by experiments designed and executed. Of course there’s value in this, but I fail to see it leading us anywhere truly meaningful, other than down a rabbit–hole of empty technological innovation.
Organized religion has given us plenty that’s beautiful, which to me is one great paradox: How can religion be deemed good or bad, glorified or villainized, when it’s done such meriting both? In some kind of revisionist tit-for-tat, would humanity as a whole give up Bach along with Christianity to prevent the crusades and the stagnation of materialistic investigation precipitated by its meteoric rise to dominion over the whole of Europe? And the same for science, would I give up the internet for the reclamation of the Dodo or the carrier pigeon?
I could of course name off differences between religion and science, but when I step back I can’t help but see both as symmetrical, mirrored structures. The gap that exists between them arises from, as much as anything, each encampment’s respective incredulous disbelief in the other. I can’t wholeheartedly believe in either, but at the same time I agree with both. And what little I’ve found from this Stuart Kauffman incites that wonderful feeling when someone expressed something you swear you’d have said yourself if you possessed the equivalent amount of literacy; when the ideas that bounce around in one’s head at odd moments—never quite manifesting themselves into anything expressible, but supporting and reassuring other thoughts… Kauffman incites that wonderful feeling when these ideas are formulated and codified in the thoughts of somebody else, solidifying and rewarding my own beliefs.
Alan Weisman
A treatise on the environment, looking towards what it would become if humans suddenly vanished. With all kinds of interesting material, most of it damning our society’s penchant for unforeseen destruction, but elegies where they’re due to what good we have done, followed by how things might change with us out of the equation.
Recorded history from civilization’s Fertile Crescent beginnings to the present day has taken barely more than 1/100th of the time that our ancestors lived in this one spot [northern africa], grubbing plants and heaving sharpened stones at animals. There must have been a lot of prey to feed a growing predator population with awakening technological skill. Olorgesailie is cluttered with femurs and tibia, many smashed for their marrow. The quentities of stone tools surrounding the impressive remains of an elephant, a hippo, and an entire flock of baboons, suggest that the entire hominid community teamed up to kill, dismember, and devour their quarry. 69
Varosha) is a city on the island of Cyprus, uninhabited since the mid seventies. I really want to go there. It was a big tourist town until Turkey invaded Cyprus and stirred up a whole bunch of shit. It’s to be reopened for tourism by Turkey (in the view of the UN, stil illegitimate invaders) in 2010; but where’s the fun in that. I want to jump a fence and go there now. I’d probably get shot by the Turkish military, who’ve cordoned the area and seriously restricted access. 96
In the Turkish capital of Ankara, the subway system’s central nerve core broadens into an extensive underground shipping district with mosaic walls, acoustic ceilings, electronic billboard screens, and arcades of stores – an orderly underworld compared to the cacophony of the streets above. 105
no one knows how many underground cities lie beneath Cappadocia. Eight have been discovered, and many smaller villages, but there are doubtless more. The biggest, Derinkuyu, wasn’t discovered until 1965, when a resident cleaning a back room of his cave house broke through a wall and discovered behind it a room that he’d never seen, which led to still another, and another. Eventually spelunking archaeologists found a maze of connecting chambers that descended at least 18 stories and 280 feet beneath the surface, ample enough to hold 30,000 people — and much remains to be excavated. One tunnel, wide enough to walk three abreast, connects to another underground city six miles away. 108
Nobody [knew how much plastic was in the ocean], because plastics haven’t been around long enough for us to know how long they’ll last or what happens to them. [Richard Thompson’s] team had identified nine different kinds in the sea so far, varieties of acrylic, nylon, polyester, polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyvinyl chloride. All he knew was that soon everything alive would be eating them. 116
“Think of it this way. Suppose all human activity ceased tomorrow, and suddenly there’s no one to produce plastic anymore. Just from what’s already present, given how we see it fragmenting, organisms will be dealing with this stuff indefinitely. THousands of years, possibly. Or more.” 118
So a million years from now, some organism will evolve the ability to gorge on plastic. Most of it will have settled somewhere, from tides or wind currents, so there will be large collections of the stuff. It’ll propel whatever organism to great things for a hundred or so years, until they realize that pretty soon the plastic is running out, and they start worrying and fighting each other for control of what’s left. Kind of like us with oil. Hopefully these organisms can at least break the plastic into something organic, and not leave piles of all kinds of waste shit covering the earth, swirling in the oceans, and clogging up the air.
In this age of deepening drought and rising temperatures, ski lift operators who, the Indians claim, defile sacred ground with their clanking machines and lucre, are being sued anew. Their latest desecration is making artificial snow for their ski runs from wastewater, which the Indians liken to bathing the face of God in shit. 120
In 1998, Moore returned with a trawling device, such as Sir Alistair Hardy had employed to sample krill, and found, incredibly, more plastic by weight than plankton on the ocean’s surface. In fact, it wasn’t even close: six times as much. 123
By 2005, Moore was referring to the gyrating Pacific dump as 10 million square miles – nearly the size of Africa. […] Plastic debris, Moore believed, was now the most common surface feature of the world’s oceans. How long would it last? Were there any benign, less-immortal substitutes that civilization coudl convert to, lest the world be plastic-wrapped evermore? 125
“Except for a small amount that’s been incinerated,” says Tony Andrady the oracle, “every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or so still remains. It’s somewhere in the environment.” 126
(Municipal sludge, since 1990 deemed too toxic to dump into the North Sea, is instead spread as fertilizer on European farmlands—except in Holland. Since the 1990s, the Netherlands has not only offered incentives that practically equate organic farming with patriotism, bit has also struggled to convince its EU partners that everything applied to the land ends up in the sea anyway.) 156
Mount Rushmore, carved into fine-grained pre-cambrian granite, rock formed 1.5 billion years ago, is gonna be around for awhile. 7.2 million years without an asteroid hitting it or something incredibly catastrophic. 181
The DMZ, as it is called even in Kore, is 151 miles long and 2.5 miles wide, and has been a world essentially without people since September 6, 1953. 185
When the Korean war ended and the two countries split. Nobody lives there, or even goes there. An ecological dreamland.
The Passanger Pigeon, like the Chestnut tree, speaks to humanity’s tremendous power to wipe shit off the face of the earth. “It’s flocks, 300 miles long and numbering in the billions, spanned horizons fore and aft, actually darkening the sky. Hours could go by, and it was as though they hadn’t passed at all, because they kept coming. (192)”
They only lived in north america, and they were all killed by modern americans. Gone by 1914.
By studying its [the Bobolink’s] eyes and brains, bird physiologist RObery Beason has detected evolutionary traits that unfortunately turned lethal in the age of electronic communications. Bobolinks and other migrants carry built-in compasses – particles of magnetite in their heads, with which they orient to the Earth’s magnetic field. The mechanism to switch them on involves their optics. The short end of the spectrum – purples, blues, and greens, – apparently triggers their navigational cues. If only longer red waves are present, they grow disoriented. 194
Which gives us millions of birds lured towards large electrical and phone towers, marked with red lights by law to keep airplanes from flying into them, and killed. In north america and europe since 1975, the numbers of some migratory bird species have fallen by 2/3. 196 This isn’t the only way birds die. Hundreds of millions die yearly.
If everyone on earth disappeared, 441 nuclear plants, several with multiple reactors, would briefly run on autopilot until, one by one, they overheated. 213
That is unfortunate [that the nuclear meltdown wouldn’t burn straight into the core of the earth], because deep self-internment would be a blessing to whatever life remained on the surface. Instead, what briefly was an exquisitely machined technological array would have congealed into a deadly, dull, metallic blob: a tombstone to the intellect that created it – and, for thousands of years thereafter, to innocent nonhuman victims that approach too closely. 214
After Chernobyl, “an entire pine forest died within days of the blast, and couldn’t be burned because its smoke would have been lethal (215)”.
…at Dos Pilas [a Mayan city], one victim was tightly rolled and bound, and then used for a game on the ceremonial ball court until his back was broken. 226
If we all bought into the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement: “The last humans could enjoy their final sunsets peacefully, knowing they have returned the planed as close as possible to the garden of Eden (243).”
Bronze, a metal that doesn’t decay, makes a damn good statue. There are longs of ancient bronze statues for us to look back at.
Unfortunately, that happens, and tragically most of history’s bronze statues are also gone, melted down for waeapons. “nintey-five percent of all artwork ever made doesn’t exist anymore,” says Himmelstein, a knuckle stroking his gray goatee. 247
Yet the biggest elephant o all is a figurative one in the planet-sized room that is ever harder to ignore, although we keep trying. Worldwide, every four days the human population rises by 1 million. Since we can’t really grasp such numbers, they’ll wax out of control until they crash, as has happened to every other species that got too big for this box. […] The intelligent solution would require the courage and the wisdom to put our knowledge to the test. It would be poignant and distressing in ways, but not fatal. It would henceforth limit every human female on eEarth capable of bearing children to one.
If this somehow began tomorrow, our current 6.5 billion human population would drop by 1 billion by the middle of this century. (If we continue as projected, we’ll reach 9 billion.)
By 2075 we’d be half, and by 2100 we’d be down to 1.6 billion. back to levels last seen in the 19th century, just before quantum advances in energy, medicine, and food production doubled our numbers and then doubled us again. At the time, those discoveries seemed like miracles. Today, like too much of any good thing, we indulge in more only at our peril.
272
Just one benchmark for how drastically the world has changed in the past 100 years:
until Marconi’s wireless and Edison’s phonograph, all the music ever heard on Earth was live. Today, a tiny fraction of 1 percent is. The rest is electronically reproduced or broadcast, along with a trillion words and images each day. 274
I watched two recently, both stunning and amazing and a little bit unnerving, even disturbing. Both in the same style, mostly mute but with completely stunning and sometimes frightening visuals (frighteningly beautiful as well).
Manufactured Landscapes follows around Edward Burtynsky, photographer of massive human altered environment. From quarries to unfathomably large chinese factories to tankers washed ashore in Bangladesh being slowly disassembled by wiry barefoot peasants to large towns being wholesale destroyed because in a few months the reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam will rend them 100 feet underwater, Burtynsky has photographed some cool stuff. The documentary puts things in scale a bit for someone who’s never know anything but a pleasant and warm home, wanton mobility, and abundant food.
Food is the second one, namely Our Daily Bread. The only dialog is that of various food workers talking to each other during their lunch breaks, none in english, and none subtitled. The idea is to take a look at where our food really comes from now that multinational agricorporations have hijacked our food supply. Giant greenhouses of veggies growing on 12’ trellises, with robot pesticide dispensers riding the long rows hissing whatever substances which, deemed by whatever governing bodies as only toxic to insects and pests – somehow not to the food itself nor the humans all to ready to eat it. Chickens in barns the size of a football field, beak to beak, being sucked up by an elaborate cross between a crane and a tractor and spit out into cartons for shipping off to the factory where some poor old lady sits in a chair under a line of upside down gliding carcasses slitting the heads off those where the machine couldn’t quite manage. It’s really brutal how all this works, but some stark beauty shines through, the grime of blood running on the floor contrasted with smooth dark chrome walls and apparatus.
These two really show that however advanced and scientific the world gets, man, is it still fucked up. You can’t have one without the other, and you have to be impressed by both.
Bernard Rudofsky
I’m on a bit of an architecture tear.
A wonderful black and white photo filled book detailing that which really isn’t considered (but sure should be) in the modern world to be architecture at all: traditional, ‘old world’ buildings. Here I go quoting stuff.
Vernacular architecture does not go through fashion cycles. It is nearly immutable, indeed, unimprovable, since it serves its purpose to perfection. As a rule, the origin of indigenous building forms and construction methods is lost in the distant past. 1
The tendency to build on sites of difficult access can be traced no doubt to a desire for security, but perhaps even more so to the need of defining a community’s borders. In the old world, many towns are still solidly enclosed by moats, lagoons, glacis, or walls that have long lost their defensive value. Although the walls present no hurdles to invaders, they help to thwart undesirable expansion. The very word urbanity is linked to them, the Latin urbs meaning walled town. Hence, a town that aspires to being a work of art must be as finite as a painting, a book, or a piece of music. 4
Above all, it is the humaneness of this architecture that ought to bring forth some response in us. For instance, it simply never occurs to us to make streets into oases rather than deserts. In countries where their function has not yet deteriorated into highways and parking lots, a number of arrangements make streets fit for humans: pergole and awnings (that is, awnings spread across a street, tentlike structures, or permanent roofs). 4
People who have not yet been reduced to appendages to automobiles find in them Italian hill towns a fountain of youth. 37
Niether the word arcade nor its many synonyms translate satisfactorily into the American language, perhaps because we have no arcades. Arcades are altruism turned architecture — private property given to an entire community. 67
The disappearance of age-old pleasures and privileges is the first unmistakable sign of progress. Whereas less than a century ago every Spanish town and village boasted miles of covered ways along its streets, today they are disappearing fast. 71
Pictures of a particular town in Pakistan show 2-walled towers popping out of every building with a diamond shaped ceiling at some angle greater than 45º – they’re all wind catchers, natural air conditioning, giant fans that funnel the air down a tunnel to the basement and then back up. 113
“Give a mason bricks and mortar,” writes Jamshid Kooros, an MIT educated Persian architect, “and tell him to cover a space and let in light, and the results are astounding. The mason, within his limitations, finds unending possibilities, there is variety and harmony; while the modern architect with all the materials and structural systems available to him produces monotony and dissonance, and that in great abundance.” 151
Malcolm Wells
The best-known architects of the day create stunning forms and impressive details, but there is little substance behind them. It’s not that the architects don’t know better. They do. We all do, by now. Modern architecture is empty because we still lack the courage to face its consequences. 5
Life without the courage to face consequences is cowardice, and life teems with it today. 6
Wells asks where the act of paving over 100 acres of prime wilderness should be put amidst this list:
I do know that we’re wrecking this country with out failure to face the consequences of our acts. 7
Pretending that there are no consequences rages through modern society. We are encouraged from all sides not to look beyond immediate gratification. And nowhere, it seems, is this attitude more common or more heavily cloaked in hypocrisy than it is in architecture. […] But we someitmes forget that each line we draw can actually destroy life. 8
“abstraction is what dehumanizes us” Robert Finch, 10
Take away all governments and armies, take away all businesses and industries, take away all communications; take away cars, houses, cities, hospitals, schools, and libraries; take away electricity, clothes, medicine, and police; take away everything, in fact, but the green plants, and most of us would survive. But take away the plants and we would all die. That’s how important they are. 19
That’s why our cities and suburbs have failed. We’ve created so much convenience and ease we’ve turned ourselves into an artificial people, with artificial values, who live precariously far from the roots of life. If you don’t believe it, just listen to what most people are talking about. Look at what most of us are buying at the supermarket. 20
“the only treasure we’ll ever have is this incredible ball beneath our feet.” 33
It isn’t possible for us to clean up skies and rivers once they get dirty. They can do that only by themselves. Our job is to manage wastes and conserve resources. It doesn’t involve skies and rivers at all. Once we do our part we’ll find that the skies and the waters have somehow miraculously cleaned themselves. That’s when we’ll know we’ve been doing something right. 57
Every creature except man builds unobtrusive or hidden buildings. Every creature except man has solar energy as its sole energy source. Every creature except man recycles all its wastes, not just some of them. […] Imagine having to burn electric lights in the daytime! Imagine having to air-condition! Imagine having to heat a building artificially! Imagine dropping human wastes into drinking water! 58
But is that all we want, just to get by? Isn’t that exactly the kind of standard that’s caused so much of today’s mess? We’ve produced a whole civilization based on mediocrity, on throwaway automobiles, on honky-tonk highway business, and on nonrenewable resources. If someone doesn’t stop us, we’ll go right on producing it. 60
As a species we have an almost criminal record of land destruction on this planet, and I feel at times as if the best solution to the environmental mess would be some kind of catastrophe great enough to eliminate all human life. But in my saner moments I know there is catastrophe enough already.
The 26 acres of buildings and blacktop that make up that shopping center pour 600,000 gallons into the pipe every time an inch of rain falls. 67
[Our cities] drink diluted sewage and throw away their rainwater. 68
We look with admiration at the soaring glass walls and never smell all the sewage, never feel all the hear losses, never see all the paper being consumed behind those sheer facades. Our capacity for self-delusion seems unbounded, and the crises always catch us unawares. 87
Emphasis mine.
A paving moratorium doesn’t sound like a bad idea… 90
It’s hard to imagine a future society that might treat land as shabbily as we treat it. We’ve got to change in order to survive, not by setting aside areas to be spared from our shortsightedness, but by making all land destruction a crime. 95
We feel obliged to fill time. If there is nothing at hand to fill it with, then we manufacture filler. (Just look how we spend our days.) Menwhile, the most beautiful world we’ll ever know slides deeper into trouble. Four billion of us, simply by living here, are greasing its skids — four billion of us, all serving ourselves first. Statistically there seems to be no hope at all. No government, no religion, certainly no new architecture, is going to set things right. Even a sudden switch to the most enlightened, the gentlest, of architectures would make only a small dent in the overall problem.
Joe Bageant
Wonderful bit of writing on the ignored population of America – poor whites. Living in small towns, working paycheck to paycheck, being born again and again into christianity, voting defacto republican, etc. They’re where Bush can draw enough of the electorate to have ever managed to b e our president, despite his utter incompetence. People for which it comes to pills or heating oil. I’ve met precious few of these.
Bageant can take a look at these people with better perspective than most, having grown up in the small town spotlighted in the book, where he lives for a second time. But between he’s been places, moving west, getting college educated, moving through hippy circles, living on the Coeur d’Alene indian reservation, and in big librul towns. He can love and understand these people, while wanting to smack them for the idiocy they’ve been raised into.
Bageant himself describes the book: “one part cultural anthropology and part splash of cold water into the face of those liberals wondering why their working-class brothers and sisters seem to have turned against them.”
Backed by the faithful support of hardworking American Christians who seldom fully comprehend their leadership’s agenda, zealous evangelical leaders will have no less than the “inevitable victory God has promised his new chosen people,” according to the founding masters of the covert kingdom. Screw the Jews, they blew their chance. The 2008 elections, regardless of the outcome, will not change the fact that millions of americans are under the spell of an extraordinarily dangerous mass psychosis. Maybe the philosopher Nietzche was right “one is not ‘converted’ to Christianity — one must first be sick enough for it.” 190
Over the past twenty-five years a boatload of America’s for-profit hospitals migrated to nonprofit status because it is more profitable. 231
Liberal or Conservative, the average American spends about one-third of his or her waking life watching television. THe neurological effects are profound. For example, researcher Herbert Krugman famously demonstrated that television viewing makes the right brain hemisphere twice as active as the left, releasing a surge in the body’s natural opiates—endorphins, including beta-endorphins and enkephalin, all of which act on the same brain receptors as opiates. Other research shows suspension of critical-thinking skills. Meanwhile, we watch television pleasurably, believing we understand what we have watched, believing we are always in control of the experience and are not unduly influenced by it. 256
Our culture is based on two things: television and petroleum. Whether you are Pootie [an actual person from Winchester] or the president, your world depends on an unbroken supply of both. So it is small wonder that we all watch a televised global war for oil as brain-wave entertainment. As a consequence, we revive the conditioning required to sustain out acceptance of the state brutality occurring at the edges of the empire in the quest for oil. How much of this convenient symbiosis linking corporate television, war as a corporate profit center, and corporate oil was consciously planned we can never know until we are redeemed from the blinding effects og the corporate sponsored hologram. 262
John Lane
We have come to talk of music and drama and art and architecture as if they were technical words for remote abstractions or exceptional luxuries, but what is civilization for, if it is not to produce poetry, music, beauty and courtesy? These things are nothing in themselves unless they have a use for life… William Richard Lethaby, 15
Keats: Negative Capability 24
Speech is not of the tongue, but of the heart. The tongue is merely the instrument with which one speaks. He who is dumb is dumb in the heart, not in his tongue… As you speak so is your heart. Paracelsus, 44
The greatest thing that a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and to tell what it saw in a plain way. Hindreds of people can talk for one who cna thing, and thousands can think for the one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, philosophy, and religion – all in one. John Ruskin, 48
Although human ingenuity makes various inventions, corresponding by various machines to the same end, it will never discover any inventions more beautiful, more appropriate or more direct than nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous. Leonardo Da Vinci, 55
On the novelty of landscape, John Ruskin, 56
For the Native Americans, art and religion, art and life, were not separate; nor were the beautiful and the functional. Art, beauty, and spirituality were so firmly intertwined that words neither existed nor were needed to separate them. This wholeness was a function of the fact that everything in their universe worked together: poetry didn’t exist apart from ritual, and ritual didn’t exist apart from vision and meditation and even healing. This philosophy of relating all life and all materials permeated even the simplest of objects, a Pawnee drum, a pair of slippers or a Crow medicine bag. 73
The earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with god. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 102
Fritz Lang: Metropolis 139
We must draw our standards from the natural world. We must honor with the humility of the wise the bounds of that natural world and the mystery which lies beyond them, admitting that there is something in the order of being which evidently exceeds all our competence. Vaclav Havel, 143
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wander, not longer marvel, is as good as dead. Albert Einstein, 155
Walt Whitman on religion, 158:
Heaven was here on Earth and the physical and the spiritual could not be divided; they were, are, and always will be the same. [...] The future would see a spirituality of meditation and the contemplation of beauty.
Christopher Assendorf
A look at early technology and the changes coming from it through the history of art and literature. Stuff that turned my head enough for me to get up and put it into the computer:
“Advertisement on the Firmament” 101
the clock… a compensation for the failure of our activities to follow each other any longer in a natural way. Musil, 140
The Metropolis and Mental Life
Paul Valéry, “The Conquest of Ubiquity” 176
A nice set of ecological/economical/environmental lectures on how we ought to deal with the disaster that has befallen the earth. I think these are all posted to the internet in case you might want a closer look.
I agree with most of the ideas here, but don’t really see being able to jump from mainstream american life into bioreigonally/sustainably/old-fashioned homstead culturing my own patch of earth for the rest of my life. I really like the idea of breaking down the gigantic structures of society into locally comprehensible bits, but then how the hell would I be able to order shit off amazon.com?
For there is no longer room to doubt that now, five hundred years later, the subcontinent of Europe – and all the continents it has peopled and all the cultures it has touched – represents a society in crisis, a crisis, like the previous one, of spirit as much as of substance. The industrial world, the European-culture world, of which this nation is a preeminent example, is sickly, miserable, melancholic, anguished, without a faith to believe in, institutions to trust, or values to rely on, victim of the disease I have called “affluenza,” the frenzied amassment of packages and products to the point where not only is the survival of the human animal in real question but the survival of all oxygen-dependent species and indeed the living earth itself. We have as a culture subscribed to the theory of progress – it is time to cancel that subscription. 17
Affluenza is a token way to frame the West today. I’m not convinced that more is better – but surely what we have today is impressive! But is it worth the tremendous distress we’ve put upon the earth to obtain it.
Industrial language has changed things from being animate, alive, and having spirit to being inanimate, mere objects and commodities of society. When things are inanimate, “man” can view them as his God-given right. He can take them, commodify them, and manipulate them in society. 28
If you look at the legal system in this country, you will find that it is based on the idea that Christians have a God-given right to dispossess heathens of their land. This attitude goes back to a palpal bull of the fifteenth or sixteenth century declaring that Christians have a superior right to land over heathens. 32
Merely going to the polls every two years or four years to cast a ballot for one or another television personality who happens to be running for office is a pretty cheap version of citizenship. Voting on a state referendum question, as Californians are famous for, is also a fairly insubstantial form of citizenship.
By citizenship we mean active participation in public affairs at a level such as the town or neighborhood where the individual’s contribution can be appreciated and can count for something. The small human community, celebrated by Aristotle and Lao Tzu, the place where you belong and where you recognize those who belong and those who are strangers, where the good of everyone is tied together in an interconnected web that is ruptured only at the peril of everyone in the community – that is where citizenship resides.
By contrast, in a society that is planned to be “specific in requirements, uniform in standards, and tough on delinquents1,” you are no longer a citizen but rather the subject of a central power. Once we become subjects, we lose those sparks of humanity and democracy and freedom that have made this country such a great country in world history. 137
Ah, wouldn’t it be nice.
1 Declaration of some governor of Vermont:
Our governor, a rather liberal and well-meaning woman who wants good things for everyone, gave a speech last January in which she called for “a new era of planning” for our state. Her words in describing the new era were that it will be “specific in requirements, uniform in standards, and tough on delinquents.” It could have been Benito Mussolini in Milan in 1922.
To know nothing, after all, is no more possible than to know enough. I am only proposing that knowledge, like everything else, has its place, and that we need urgently now to put it in its place. If we want to know and cannot help knowing, then let us learn as fully and accurately as we decently can. But let us at the same time abandon our superstitious beliefs about knowledge: that it is ever sufficient; that it can of itself solve problems; that it is intrinsically good; that it can be used objectively or disinterestedly. Let us acknowledge that the objective or disinterested researcher is always on the side that pays best. And let us give up our forlorn pursuit of the “informed decision.” 144
What works poorly in agriculture – monoculture, for instance, or annual accounting – can be pretty fully explained, because what works poorly is invariably some oversimplifying thought that subjugates nature, people, and culture. What works well ultimately defies explanation because it involves an order which in both magnitude and complexity is ultimately incomprehensible. 150
...in a certain sense all we have to do is figure out a way to stay amused while we live out our lives as inexpensively as possible within the life support system. It’s what I call “the Mill-Around theory of Civilization”: if we can simply mill around and not expend too many resources, then we won’t do much harm to ourselves r the planet. The problem is, how do we learn to quit doing in a manner that uses up all the earth’s capital? Or stated otherwise, how do we make our vessel so small that it doesn’t take much to fill it? Should not this be our journey? 155
I don’t know if I can agree with this – it seems a very depressed way of stating that we should harmonize with the land. The idea is the right one no doubt, but I can imagine no lack of ways to frame it better.
While we seem to be achieving magnificent things at the microphase level of our functioning, we are devastating the entire range of living beings at the macrophase level. The natural world is more sensitive than we have realized. Unaware of what we have done or its order of magnitude, we have thought our achievements to be of enormous benefit for the human process, but we now find that by disturbing the biosystems of the planet at the most basic level of their functioning, we have endangered all that makes the planet Earth a suitable place for the integral development of human life itself. 193
Point number one in my cynical worldview: “Man we’re fucking this place up. Hey! TV shows!”
The first condition is to understand that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. Every being has its own inner form, its own spontaneity, its own voice, its ability to declare itself and to be present to other components of the universe in a subject-to-subject relationship. 196
Descartes, we might say, killed the Earth and all its living beings. For him, the natural world was mechanism. There was no possibility of entering into a communion relationship. Western humans became autistic in relation to the surrounding world. There could be no communion with te birds or animals or plants, because these were all mechanical contrivances. The real value of things was reduced to their economic value. A destructive anthropocentrism came into being. 197
...the Earth is primary and humans are derivative. The present distorted view is that humans are primary and the Earth and its integral functioning only a secondary consideration – thus the pathology manifest in our various human institutions. The only acceptable way for humans to function effectively is by giving first consideration to the Earth community and then dealing with humans as integral members of that community. The Earth must become the primary concern of every human institution, profession, program, and activity (including economics). 198
The entire pattern of Earth’s functioning is being altered in this transition from the Cenozoic to the Ecozoic. We did not even exist until the major developments of the Cenozoic were complete. In the Ecozoic, however, the human will have a pervasive influence on almost everything that happens. We are approaching a critical watershed in the entire modality of Earth’s functioning. Our positive power of creativity in the natural life systems is minimal; our power of negating is immense. Whereas we cannot make a blade of grass, there is liable not to be one blade of grass unless it is accepted, fostered, and protected by the human. Protected mainly from ourselves so that the Earth can function from within its own dynamism. 202
It was not until the development of European science, from about the sixteenth century on, that this animistic conception of the earth finally gave way, to be replaced by one supported by the new insights of physics, chemistry, mechanics, astronomy, and mathematics. The new perception held – in fact it proved – that the earth, the universe, and all within it operated by certain clear and calculable laws and not by the whims of any living, thinking being; that far from being divine and omnipotent, these laws were capable of scientific prediction and manipulation; and that objects, from the smallest stone to the earth itself and the planets beyond, were not animate with souls and wills and purposes but were nothing more than the combination of certain chemical and mechanical properties. [...]
...[This particular world-view’s] ultimate governing principle – that humans should not merely understand but be capable of manipulation nature, and indeed, as Descartes put it for all of European science, be “masters and possessors of Nature” – became ingrained into not only the scientific but also all scholarly and most popular thinking in the Western world and now shapes the perceptions of our senses and the patterns of our psyches.
And if at the end of the twentieth century we see the earth as a static and neutral arena that is alterable by our chemicals and controllable by our technologies; if we see ourselves as a superior species, to whom is given the right to kill off as many hundreds of others as we wish and “have dominion over” the rest; if we believe we have the power to reorder earth’s atoms and reassemble its genes, to contrive weapons and machines fueled by our own invented elements and capable of plundering its resources, befouling its systems, poisoning its air (perhaps irretrievably), and altering its eons-old processes to suit our wishes… if this is our condition, it is so because, far from calling into question the scientific view of the universe in these past four centuries, we have accepted it virtually in its entirety. It has become the foundation and sustenance not only of our various social systems – education, agriculture, medicine, religion, energy, communication, transportation – but of our most basic economic and political institutions as well.
To be sure, the scientific world-view is not without its values, its uses, its triumphs even, and I think we may want to call the world a better place for our knowledge of hygiene, say or radiotelegraphy or immunology or electricity. But its shortcomings, its failures, its calamitous dangers have by now become obvious, and it is surely sage to say that the path of sanity, perhaps survival, is to regain the spirit of the ancient Greeks, to once again comprehend the earth as a living creature. We need to recover the sense, as Schumacher puts it in Good Work, “that man is the servant of this world, or at least a trustee,” a concept that has been “organized out of our thinking,” as he puts it, “by the modern world,” and we must listen to the two great teachers, one “the marvelous system of living nature” and the other “the traditional wisdom of mankind,” teachers we have “rejected and replaced by some extraordinary structure we call objective science.” And we must re-envision humans as participants and not masters in the biotic community, as only one among many species, special perhaps in having certain skills of information-gathering and communication but not for that reason superior to those with other skills – for the human being, a Mark Twain might have said, is different from other animals only in that it is able to blush. Or needs to. 218-220, phew
Finally, had Bok so chosen, he would have been led to question how we define intelligence and what that might imply for our definition of an “educated” person. From an ecological perspective it is clear that we have often confused cleverness and intelligence. Cleverness, as I understand it, tents to fragment things and focus on the short term. The epitome of cleverness is the specialist whose intellect and person have been shaped by the demands of a single function. Ecological intelligence, on the other hand, requires a broader view of the world and a long-term perspective. Cleverness can be adequately measured by SAT and GRE tests, but intelligence is not so clearly computed. In time, I think we will come to see that true intelligence tends to be integrative and often works slowly while mulling things over. Further, intelligence can be inferred, according to Wendell Berry in Standing by Words, from the “good order or harmoniousness of [one’s] surroundings.” In other words, the consequences of our actions are a measure of our intelligence, and the plea of ignorance is no good defense. Because some consequences cannot be predicted, the exercise of intelligence requires forbearance and a sense of limits. Ecological intelligence, in contrast to mere cleverness, does not presume to act beyond a certain scale at which effects can be known and unpredictable consequences would not be catastrophic. 241
Shakespeare: there are sermons in stones, books in the running brooks, and good in everything
. 268
Earth Manual – How to Work on Wild Land Without Taming it 286
We do not have a democracy in the United States. Any country where only half of the eligible voters are registered and where only half of those who are registered vote and where only half of those who vote like their choice is not a democracy. Any country that isn’t ruled by its government, that is ruled instead by the Fortune 500, isn’t a democracy. And any world government that is ruled by transnational corporations isn’t a democracy. yet such is the state of our national and global governments. According to my definition, a corporation is, right now, by law, a lawyer’s attempt to create something that can act like a person without a conscience. If you are a CEO or a member of the Board of Directors of a corporation that bypasses an opportunity for profit, you can be sued by the stockholders! There should at least be something written into law that says you can bypass it for sound social or ecological reasons. 290
He makes a good allegory squeezing the 4.5 billion years of scientific history into the 6 days of biblical creation history. Humans didn’t come about until 1.5 seconds before midnight on the sixth day.
Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand (one cool guy) on the idea of the Big Here and Long Now. How we need to look at things with a 10,000 year perspective as opposed to the me, me, me; now, now, now that we’ve gotten used to. Thinking about the world not just as we’ll leave it to our children or their children, but 100 generations from now might just make us think twice about burning up a beautiful woodland for suburban tract housing, etc. The Long Now Foundation.
The rates, scales, kinds, and combinations of changes occurring now are fundamentally different from those at any other time in history; we are changing the Earth more rapidly than we are understanding it. 9, Human Domination of Earth’s Ecosystems
So who burned the Library of Alexandria? War did three times, inadvertently. Religious bigotry did twice, on purpose. We are right to grieve. Only one in ten of the major Greek classics survived. Nothing like Alexandria’s library was seen again for a thousand years. 73
The accumulated past is life’s best resource for innovation. 75
Bill Cosby says that in college he ran into the question, “Is the glass half empty, or half full?” He took the question home, and his father told him, “It depends if you’re pouring or if you’re drinking.” 109
Governance itself is being rethought. “The proper role of government in capitalistic societies in an era of man-made brain power industries,” writes the economist Lester Thurow, “is to represent the interest of the future to the present.” Commerce has too short a time horizon to take the larger future seriously, therefore governance must do it. 122
E.F. Schumaker
EF Schumacher was a british economist, here he goes off into philosophy. He has a bone to pick with scientific dogma, calling for a more holistic view of the world than the materialstic Scientism that goes on in modern western society today
In short, the whole base of our society is deteriorating under what our prevalent beliefs have become and we need a new way to look at things, which is of course, provided. Good stuff to think about – I’m not sure what I think of it yet – but it’s nice to have some controversy of idea.
Thus Cartesian evidence goes straight to mechanism. It mechanizes nature; it does violence to it; it annihilates everything which causes things to symbolize with the spirit, to partake of the genius of the Creator, to speak to us. The universe becomes dumb. 9, Jacques Maritain
Levels of being, m being matter, x life, y consciousness, and z self-awareness. 18:
A person, for instance, entirely fixed in the philosophy of materialistic Scientism, denying the reality of “invisibles” and confining his attention solely to what can be counted, measured, and weighed, lives in a very poor world, so poor that he will experience it as a meaningless wasteland unfit for human habitation. Equally, if he sees it as nothing but an accidental collocation of atoms, he must needs agree with Bertrand Russell that the only rational attitude is one of “unyielding despair.” 35
I’m pretty sure I’m with his views on religion. I don’t know what god is, and can’t claim to be christian or of any other religion. To me religion is a way of explaining things and dealing with the world just the same as science.
Knowledge comes about insofar as the object known is within the knower.
39, St. Thomas Aquinas
As a materialistic scientist, he believes that life, consciousness, and self-awareness are nothing but manifestations of complex arrangements of inanimate particles – a “faith” which makes it perfectly rational for him to place exclusive reliance on the bodily senses, to “stay in the head,” and to reject any interference from the “powers” situated in the heart. For him in other words, higher levels of Reality simply do not exist, because his faith excludes the possibility of their existence. 45
Faith chooses the grade of significance at which the search for knowledge and understanding is to aim. 45
We must shut the eyes of sense, and open that brighter eye of our understandings, that other eye of the soul, as the philosopher calls our intellectual faculty, ‘which indeed all have, but few make use of.’ 47, John Smith
These two quotes say the exact same thing, the first is from the book and the second is from my memory. Just a fun thing to notice.
For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone sees the invisible. 47, Richard of Saint-Victor (d. 1173)
on ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. (One can only see well with the heart, the essential is invisible to the eyes.) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, d.1944
The change of Western man’s interest from “the slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things” (Thomas Aquinas) to mathematically precise knowledge of lesser things – “there being nothing in the world the knowledge of which would be more desirable or more useful” (Christian Huygens) – marks a shift from what we might call “science for understanding” to “science for manipulation.” The purpose of the former was the enlightenment of the person and his “liberation”; the purpose of the latter is power. “Knowledge itself is power,” said Francis Bacon, and Descartes promised men they would become “masters and possessors of nature.” In it’s more sophisticated development, “science for manipulation” tends almost inevitable to advance from the manipulation of nature to that of people. 53
The old science looked upon nature as God’s handiwork and man’s mother; the new science tends to look upon nature as an adversary to be conquered or a resource to be quarried and exploited. 54
Ishmael anyone?
The progressive elimination of “science for understanding” – or “wisdom” – from Western civilization turns the rapid and ever-accelerating accumulation of “knowledge for manipulation” into a most serious threat. As I have said in another context, “We are now far too clever to be able to survive without wisdom,” and further expansion of our cleverness can be of no benefit whatever. 55
It is however important for us to realize that mankind is doomed to live more and more under the spell of a new scientific, social, and political mythology, unless we resolutely exorcise these befuddled notions whose influence on modern life is becoming appalling… For when gods fight amongst themselves, men have to die. 59, Etienne Gilson
Religion is the reconnection (re-legio) of man with reality, whether this Reality be called God, Truth, Allah, Sat-Chit-Ananda, or Nirvana.
I’d even add science into the above mix. But:
Reality, Truth, God, Nirvana cannot be found by thought, because thought belongs to the level of being established by consciousness and not to that higher level which is established by self-awareness. 71
The term “heart” is of particular significance in the Orthodox doctrine of man. When people in the west today speak of the heart, they usually mean the emotions and affections. But in the Bible, as in most ascetic texts of the Orthodox Church, the heart has a far wider connotation. It is the primary organ of man’s being, whether physical or spiritual; it is the center of life, the determining principle of all our activities and aspirations. As such, the heart obviously includes the addictions and emotions, but it also includes much else besides: it embraces in effect everything that goes to compromise what we call a “person.” 73
This one of my ideas about God, something within everything roughly analogous to spirit. Also evocative of Chris Alexander’s Wholeness.
Mathematics, after all, is far removed from life: At its heights it certainly manifests a severe kind of beauty and also a captivating elegance, which may even be taken as a sign of Truth; but equally certainly, it has no warmth, none of life’s messiness of growth and decay, hope and despair, joy and suffering. This must never be overlooked or forgotten: Physics and the other instructional sciences limit themselves to the lifeless aspect of reality, and this is necessarily so if the aim and purpose of science is to produce predictable results. Life, and even more so, consciousness and self-awareness, cannot be ordered about; they have, we might say, a will of their own. 105
I can’t say that I agree with this, but it’s nice to think about.
And lo! there is the cell, and once the cell has been born there is nothing to stop the emergence of Shakespeare, although it will obviously take a bit of time. There is therefore nor need to speak of miracles or to admit any lack of knowledge. It is one of the great paradoxes of our age that people claiming the proud title of “scientist” dare to offer such undisciplined and reckless speculations as contributions to scientific knowledge, and that they get away with it. 113
Evolutionism is not science; it is science fiction even a kind of hoax. It is a hoax that has succeeded too well and has imprisoned modern man in what looks like an irreconcilable conflict between “science” and “religion.” It has destroyed all faiths that pull mankind up and has substituted a faith that pulls mankind down. [...] Evolutionism… is the most extreme product of the materialistic utilitarianism of the nineteenth century. The inability of twentieth-century though to rid itself of this imposture is a failure which may well cause the collapse of Western civilization. For it is impossible for any civilization to survive without a faith in meanings and values transcending the utilitarianism of comfort and survival. 115
...descriptive science becomes unscientific and illegitimate when it indulges in comprehensive explanatory theories which can be neither verified nor disproved by experiment. Such theories are not “science” but “faith.” 115
It has been said, only too truly, that Plato was the inventor of both our secondary schools and our universities. I do not know a better argument for an optimistic view of mankind, no better proof of their indestructible love for truth and decency, of their originality and stubbornness and health, than the fact that this devastating system of education has not utterly ruined them. In spite of the treachery of so many of their leaders, there are quite a number, old as well as young, who are decent, and intelligent, and devoted to their task. ‘I sometimes wonder how it was that the mischief done was not more clearly perceptible,’ says Samuel Butler, ‘and that the young men and women grew up as sensible and as goodly as they did, in spite of the attempts almost deliberately made to warp and stunt their growth. Some doubtless received damage, from which they suffered to their life’s end; but many seemed little or none the worse, and some almost the better. The reason would seem to be that the natural instinct of the lads in most cases so absolutely rebelled against their training, that do what their teachers might they could never get them to pay serious heed to it.’
Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies
William S. Burroughs
Quirky novel by William S. Burroughs. Good in some chapters, a bit lewd in most. There could have been more wild imaginative absurd scenes, and a lot fewer adolescent boy sex scenes. But I feel bad putting a book down without finishing it, and this one wasn’t sick enough to make me quit.
Piece on Garry Trudeau, the guy behind Doonesbury. I’m not entirely sure why I clicked onto it, or why I started reading it, or why I kept reading it; but it did a good job of pulling me in.
It turns out he’s not afraid of publicity so much as he’s horrified at being perceived as the kind of person who wants publicity.
I can empathize with that. I’ve never been one to attract attention to myself. But one of the things I wonder all the time is whether I’m just fake timid1. I mean I have a fricking public journal up on the internet for anyone to read2. I go out and play soccer on a field in front of fans, and although I hate to death the thought that people are watching me, I do sort of like it.
So do I maybe try not to attract attention just because I’ve never been paid tremendous amounts of attention? Or do I tend to deflect whatever attention I do get, thereby discouraging it from coming? The chicken or the egg.
There’s a difference between reputation and image, Trudeau explains. “These get confused in people’s minds,” he says, but one involves character, the other public relations.
“I just refused to get entangled by issues of image maintenance that fame implied. I made a deliberate retreat from a publicly visible life.”
It’s the stem cells. I hear their cries.
1 Here meaning that I don’t want too much publicity/attention focused upon me.
2 People can read it if they wish, but I haven’t ever told anyone about my site, it’s linked from a few other places. But I don’t at the moment have a link to it on facebook, where of my friends would likely find it.
If you google for me it comes up, and if you see my station11.net email address (I mostly use my umn.edu addy for stuff relating to school) you might be inclined to see what site that is. But otherwise, the only reason someone would come here is because google led them, and there’s ostensible something I’ve put down in which they have interest.
have we become so bored by life that we’ve inadvertently become inured to death?
I love it when someone else comes along and writes my thoughts down for me. Dare I say that celebrity obsession causes the crumbling of civilization. 120 million americans read at or below 5th grade level?! Good enough for people magazine.
Jeer if you want, but I am ashamed to inhabit the same city as these women and their ilk1—the simple-minded rabble who breathlessly await photos of Tom and Katie’s baby as if the child were the Messiah. That goes double for those who squander their precious time and resources playing celebrity games while Western civilization crumbles from within. Syl Jones
David Winner
A look into the synthesis of Dutch culture, football, and design. A few months ago one of the guys at work mentioned it, and when I saw it again mentioned here there was no stopping me telling the friendly librarians to send it my way. Centered around the freestyle, elegant, beautiful style of Netherlands football from the glory days, Winer looks at how that philosophy merges with the rest of the Dutch world. Lots of talk about Soccer and Design, two good hooks for me.
Pieter Jansz Saenredam (59), post renaissance dutch painter. Wow, find Interior of the Church of St Bavo in Haarlem and take a look at it..
Hollandse Velden (62), Hans Van der Meer on photography:
Football is a game of space So why should you leave the space out? Every Monday in the newspapers you see the same stupid, boring close-ups taken from behind the goals with long telephoto lenses which distort the space. Those pictures show you football situations but you have no idea what they mean. Two players fight for the ball. So what? Where on the pitch are they? IN the 1950s, we had different pictures, more interesting photographs of the crowd, wide-angle pictures of the game. The close-ups tell you so little. When the sports photography archives are opened in a hundred years, there will be a whole part of the history of the game missing because all the interesting little things around the pitch were simply not photographed. 64
You can’t rationalize it. It’s like driving a car. That is also about being part of a system larger then you… the car becomes you. You can only drive it when you don’t know the rules any more, when you forget everything they taught you. Every time you turn a corner, you don’t get out of the car to measure the curves and then get back into the car. You do everything blind because of the system, the road and the other cars, which are part of the system too… And that’s the moment when you are ‘in form’ in both senses. It feels good and there’s this whole hectic feeling of extension into the world this is being “informed.” Lars Spuybroek (architect), 71
We played with anything as long as it was round – rolled up papers tied with string, anything. Some people’s parents had money and could get hold of a proper ball, but mostly it was tennis balls. You develop great technique like that. The ground was hard, so you didn’t want to fall because it hurt; so you have good balance. And the game was very quick because the hard ground makes the game quicker. No one ever told us how to play. It was all natural. Arnold Muhren, 119
I’ve always wanted to con kids into playing soccer with a tennis ball, I kick them around my house and play keep away with the dogs using only my feet, and it’s good fun. But something about having fields and goals makes it hard to use tennis balls, and I’ve never even played soccer in the street. Goddamn privilege.
Brazil, sadly, is no longer swinging and flaming. I see defenders boot the ball away shamelessly. Holland must never play like that. If we did, people would murder me, and they would be right to do so. Guus Hiddink, 149
Holland v. Italy, Argentia ‘78: Arie Haan 163 (Whenever a specific goal came under discussion, I checked for it on youtube or google video, and it would be there.)
I think it is very Dutch to look for a simple solution. And the biggest thrill in our work is to find an even simpler solution. That is what we like. In the end the most satisifying solution is the one where you have cleared everything away and there is no solution at all any more but, at the same time, the problem has been solved. That’s the nicest way of doing it. Benthem, 237-8
Ridiculous party that everyone graduating from high school in Norway undergoes, here’s the site for the bus my friend was on.
In short: outfit an old bus with a bar, a soundsystem, and 30 kids and cruise around for a month. Everyone does this. America does not know how to party.
Enough said.
Film on suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge:
It happens all the time. Highway Patrol Officer
Common wisdom to bourgeois french written by Gustave Flaubert, in and around the 19th century. (Translations are mine, excuse any errors.)
Chat: Les chats sont traîtres. Les appeler tigres de salon. Leur couper la queue pour empècher le vertigo. (Cat: Cats are traitors. Call them the tigers of the living room. Cut their tail to prevent vertigo.)
Lion: Est gêreux. Joue toujours avec une boule. (Lion: is generous. Always playing with a ball.)
Clarinette: En jouer rend aveugle. Ex.: Tous les aveugles jouent de la clarinette. (CLARINET: Playing it blinds. Ex.: All blind people play the clarinet.)
Dieu: Voltaire lui-même l’a dit: “Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.” (God: Voltaire said it himself: “If god didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him.)
égoisme: Se plaindre de celui des autres et ne pas s’apercevoir du sien. (Egoism: To complain about that of others, and not perceive your own.)
Républicains: Les républicains ne sont pas tous voleurs, mais les voleurs sont tous républicains. (Republicans: Republicans aren’t all thieves, but thieves are all republicans.)
It all sounds a bit tongue in cheek, but it isn’t.
Lawrence Lessig
A real interesting book. Lessig is crusading against those who look to impede our development as a society (the book is quite US centric) by locking up all almost everything produced within our culture in the past 80 years by means of outrageous and unconstitutional copyright law.
Lessig has a lot of resentment towards the American legal system, and rightly so. On many occasions he deprecates it. He’s not happy about the current state of congress either, openly indicting it of rampant corruption and being disconnected from american society.
He systematically shows how completely wrongheaded the laws governing copyright have become in america. Works that should have lapsed into the public domain thirty years ago are still protected because those holding the rights to those work mercilessly lobby and provide large sums of dollars to congressmen and women.
He proposes a solution to the problem in the epilogue, but for the most part the entire book is used to further his (entirely righteous) tirade against what copyright has become. It’s hurting our creativity. We’ve reached a turning point in culture at which we can either cut copyright law back to a much more reasonable set of statutes or live in a society in which creative expression is forbidden to draw upon any previous form of expression.
I’ve pirated music for quite awhile, and don’t see myself stopping any time soon. I make the kind gesture of buying a CD when I really love it, but every time the RIAA decides to sue another kid, I’m less likely to fiscally support them.
So like most every other part of our government now, copyright policy has degenerated into a corporate driven engine to assure big media a windfall share in profits. Never before in any free society has the right to expression been so severely limited.
So Lessig has a radical argument. He points out that this is one of the biggest deals of our time. A few years ago he argued his case, that the Sonny Bono act was blatantly unconstitutional, before the supreme court. he failed, and feels it was his fault.
He brings up the fact that under the current law, 43% of americans are felons. And this was in 2002, I can’t imagine it’s having shrank. Something is clearly wrong when not only does the current law flout the constitution, which calls for a limited term of copyright, but it entirely flouts common sense.
The internet is big and scary to entrenched interests, for all the good it does for the average person, it sure fucks up their business model. And we can’t let that happen now, can we?
No doubt extremists would call these ideas “radical.” (After all, I call them “extremists.”)
Lawrence Lessig
Intellectual property rights are the equivalent of “kicking away the ladder.” Alexander Hamilton
First you use state power and violence to develop, then you kick away those procedures so that other people can’t do it. Noam Chomsky
Here’s a good rant on how colleges are devolving into northern outposts of Club Med.
What they will not generally do, though, is indict the current system. They won’t talk about how the exigencies of capitalism lead to a reserve army of the unemployed and nearly inevitable misery. That would be getting too loud, too brash. For the pervading view is the cool consumer perspective, where passion and strong admiration are forbidden.
But such improvements shouldn’t be surprising. Universities need to attract the best (that is, the smartest and the richest) students in order to survive in an ever more competitive market. Schools want students whose parents can pay the full freight, not the ones who need scholarships or want to bargain down the tuition costs. If the marketing surveys say that the kids require sports centers, then, trustees willing, they shall have them. In fact, as I began looking around, I came to see that more and more of what’s going on in the university is customer driven. The consumer pressures that beset me on evaluation day are only a part of an overall trend.
Colleges no longer have admissions departments, they have marketing divisions.
How did we reach this point? In part the answer is a matter of demographics and (surprise) of money. Aided by the G.I. bill, the college-going population in America dramatically increased after the Second World War. Then came the baby boomers, and to accommodate them, schools continued to grow. Universities expand easily enough, but with tenure locking faculty in for lifetime jobs, and with the general reluctance of administrators to eliminate their own slots, it’s not easy for a university to contract. So after the baby boomers had passed through—like a fat meal digested by a boa constrictor—the colleges turned to energetic promotional strategies to fill the empty chairs. And suddenly college became a buyer’s market. What students and their parents wanted had to be taken more and more into account. That usually meant creating more comfortable, less challenging environments, places where almost no one failed, everything was enjoyable, and everyone was nice.
In 1968, more than 21 percent of all the bachelor’s degrees conferred in America were in the humanities; by 1993, that number had fallen to 13 percent.
Universities have come to serve, and not challenge, their students.
It’s not that a left-wing professorial coup has taken over the university. It’s that at American universities, left-liberal politics have collided with the ethos of consumerism. The consumer ethos is winning.
The charter tale of how military research with computing machines collided with the 60’s counterculture movements (anti-war, anti-establishment, psychedelics) in southern california and wove the fabric from which todays enormously popular personal computing industry grew.
A real good read, pulling a whole lot of stuff into more or less one coherent thread.
Quick note: This is a very general recollection of the book I wanted to put down before forgetting everything. I wrote if after reading the last page, and might have a name wrong somewhere. If you find any glaring errors, leave a comment.
It starts in the late forties with the establishment of two research institutes by Stanford, SAIL (Stanford AI Labs) and SRI (Stanford Research Institute). Computing is done within glass rooms, with colossal mainframes and time-sharing terminals.
Doug Engelbart comes up with the grandiose vision of augmenting human abilities instead of replacing them with artificial intelligence, which over a period of twenty years grows into NLS, an ultimately failed computer system which rivaled in scope that of today’s internet. NLS failed due to its extreme complexity, but did advanced word processing, email, remote access, hypertext, and was generally way before its time.
Englebart had been influenced by such subversives as Ken Kesey (and his merry pranksters), LSD, and other recreational drugs. He headed his own lab within SRI (ARC), which was funded by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), but regarded by the other groups at SRI as a bunch of hippies.
As ARC grew it fragmented, and Englebart failed in keeping the lab together and moving it further toward his goals of augmentation for each and every individual. Many of his engineers moved onto the next big deal in what was to become Silicon Valley, Xerox PARC.
PARC was split into two groups, one still focusing on the development of a timesharing system, and one developing the personal computer as Englebart saw it. Headed by Alan Kay, PARC pioneered computing as we know it today, although their computers were much too expensive to be commercially viable.
Kay’s group negotiated an agreement with ARC (Englebart’s lab) to further the development of NLS, which never came to fruition. Englebart was a staunch proponent of complexity, he once decided that his finished system would have 55,000 commands to be learned by the layman. Ultimately PARC moved toward simplicity, coming up with a GUI for a word processing application that took no more then an hour to master, and ran on a machine with it’s own display, keyboard, and mouse.
The west coast attitude of PARC ultimately clashed with that of Xerox, an east coast corporation. Although PARC pioneered the computers that ten years later finally became cheap enough to sell to the people, the focus of the personal computer revolution moved to individuals building their own machines as independents.
They were never much, and couldn’t compare to the prohibitively expensive and powerful machines with large corporate/military backers, but they finally brought the computer into a situation where it was infinitely valuable.
The people’s computer company was a storefront in which people could cheaply rent computing time by the hour. Text based games began to catch on. A subset of the BASIC programming language was conceived, Tiny BASIC, to run on the puny PC’s that were obtained.
Tiny started it’s own movement, and the PCC started a magazine to send out to it’s developers. Text based games were becoming all the rage, and visionaries started teaching how to program text based adventure games to all comers.
The Homebrew Computer Club was started, which ultimately sparked companies like Apple and Osborne to go into business. Fred Moore, an itinerant engineer, programmer, and radical who, because he though money was the root of all evil, ended up being given $15,000 by Stewart Brand at an epic Demise Party for the Whole Earth Catalog, had finally found something to do with the money: promoting free and easy access to information. Personal computing. Moore tried to start teaching a class on Hardware for PCC, but it wouldn’t happen. He ran sent out a notice as to when and where the first meeting would be held, and people turned up.
The meetings grew, fostering open discussion and presentation of information about computers. People would bring the machines they’d built to show off. Programs would be exchanged.
Moore eventually left the club, his idea of freeing information having been realized but also having sprouted all kinds of entrepreneurial enterprises, eventually coalescing into the single largest accumulation of dollars – the personal computer revolution. How ironic.
Stewart Brand (The Whole Earth Catalog, 155)
Information wants to be free, and information also wants to be very expensive. Stewart Brand
Ren���?⬨�� Daumal 177
Fred Moore (on money, 193-8)
Ivan Illich
Daniel Quinn
You ought to go and read this book right now. There’s a summary on Wikipedia, I’d recommend it. But I have a few snips to make you read through.
The sense that something is very wrong with a certain style of living 11, or that something big is being kept from you. where, coming from the guy, 45 I get it all the time, I’ve also always wanted to find a teacher like Ishmael.
If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual. Ishmael, 25
having impure thoughts about saving the world... Narrator, 28
Takers thought that the world needed someone to come in and straighten it out. Someone to put it in order. 71
In order to become fully human, man had to pull himself out of the slime. And all this is the result. As the Takers see it, the gods gave man the same choice they gave Achilles: a brief life of glory or a long uneventful life in obscurity. And the Takers chose a brief life of glory. Narrator, 75
The world was given to man to turn into a paradise, but he’s always screwed it up, because he’s fundamentally flawed. He might be able to do something about this if he knew how he ought to live, but he doesn’t – and he never will, because no knowledge about that is obtainable. So, however hard man might labor to turn the world into a paradise, he’s probably just going to go on screwing it up. Ishmael, 89
Takers explanation for why things are going badly in the world: something is fundamentally wrong with people. Yet Leavers lived in concert with nature for three million years before the Takers branched off ten thousand years ago. 118
The agricultural revolution sparked by the first Takers, is the manifesto on which the entire Taker society is based, as it was then, and as it will be until the Takers die off. 153
I need to read the Bible.
Quinn posits that parts of of the old testament are Leaver mythology, concerning the Takers.
Adam and Eve (Adam meaning Earth or Man; Eve meaning Life or Woman) in The Fall of Man, god casts the Takers from his kingdom with a vengeance. The Takers, having eaten from the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, now are able to decide who lives (themselves) and who dies (anything preventing them from living). Adam said yes to Life, and began to grow without limit. 180-81
Cain and Abel represent the Takers and Leavers, Abel a shepherd, Cain a farmer. God favors Abel, yet Cain killed Abel. God then curses Cain to have to wander the earth the rest of his life. Having eaten the forbidden fruit, they rapidly proliferate, moving south, and killing herders and gathers. 173
Even though the story of Adam and Eve made so little sense to us Takers (because it is Leaver mythology, demonizing the Takers), it’s a big deal because we directly identify with Adam: he is us. 184
There’s nothing in the past for [Leavers]. The past is dreck. The past is something to escape from, something to be escaped from. Narrator, 210
Whereas the Leavers infallibly have a rich connection back to the beginning of the earth – their method of living has evolved through thousands of generations stretching back millions of years. None of the Leavers just invented their cultures, the Takers did.
And now the Takers have all but abolished that Leaver wisdom. 205-7
Taker culture sees Leavers leading an incredibly grim life, but they actually really don’t. 220
Yes. Far and away the most futile admonition Christ ever offered was when he said, “Have no care for tomorrow. Don’t worry about whether or not you’re going to have something to eat. Look at the birds in the air, They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, but God takes perfect care of them. Don’t you think he’ll do the same for you?” In [Taker] culture, the overwhelming answer to that is, Hell no! Even the most dedicated monastics saw to their sowing and reaping and gathering in barns. Narrator, 228
The Takers are those who know good and evil, and the Leavers those who live in the hands of the Gods. 229
Takers assume that they are the pinnacle of the world, the best that it gets. It’s inherent in their culture – the earth was made by the gods in their name.
The Takers jumped out of the hand of the gods – they’ve eschewed the evolution that ruled all species and ushered the Takers to the point at which they jumped off the wagon.
They’ve removed the need for natural selection by deciding they knew what was right and what was wrong. They don’t need to adapt to their surroundings, they force their surroundings to adapt to their needs. 239
Takers: the world belongs to man; Leavers: man belongs to the world. 239
Yet the world does not belong to man, the takers have always been right.
[Man’s] destiny is to be the first to learn that creatures like man have a choice: They can try to thwart the gods and perish in the attempt – or they can stand aside and make room for all the rest. But it’s more then that. His destiny is to be the father of them all – I don’t mean by direct descent. By giving all the rest their change – the whales and the dolphins and the chimps and the raccoons – he becomes in some sense their progenitor… Oddly enough, it’s even grander than the destiny the Takers dreamed up for us. Narrator, 242
With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?
With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?
I don
This is no game.
What is the response in Washington? They guess otherwise. What good is an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge—the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard or Yale educations, to become guessers. If they didn’t do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on.
Please, don’t you do that. But let me warn you, if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you—and now I have to guess—about ten to one.
The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.
We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. we must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.
Excerpted from The Germans, 1933-45 (pg. 166-73), by Milton Mayer.
Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about
When you drive, society becomes an obstacle. Pedestrians, bicycles, traffic calming, speed limits, the law: all become a nuisance to be wished away. The more you drive, the more bloody-minded and individualistic you become. The car is slowly turning us, like the Americans and the Australians, into a nation which recognises only the freedom to act, and not the freedom from the consequences of other people
One of the best sites on the web. Manifesto’s are publishes intermittently, in batches, and consistently rock.
For within this simple
Ruby book sales up 1552% since beginning of year (according to O’Reilly). I got the pickaxe 2 last december. I’m so ahead of the crowd.
The consequence of treating ideas and thoughts as if they are tangible property are the very destruction of science and education and the elimination of individual rights and freedoms.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. ...A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
Fundies beat University of Kansas professor for trying to offer class debunking the myths of intelligent design and creationism.
The structure, the complexity, the diversity of our lives, everything we know, everything that we have taken for granted, that looked solid and non-negotiable, suddenly looks contingent. All this is a great tottering pile balanced on a ball, a ball that is about to start rolling downhill.
And we find ourselves in an extraordinary position. This is the first mass political movement to demand less, not more. The first to take to the streets in pursuit of austerity. The first to demand that our luxuries, even our comforts, are curtailed.
I hope you didn’t get tired of this earlier this year, becuase it’s just that good. I’m really not that much of an OutKast fan, nor have I ever loved Charlie Brown.
But who can’t smile while watching this movie?
Please, dear god, don’t let my generation be dubbed thusly.
But real interesting article about how the internet works socially for kids these days.