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Thought of the Week Archives
September 1999
September 6, 1998
In terms of which a man interprets this experience [enlightenment]
are naturally drawn from the religious and philosophical ideas of his
culture and their differences often conceal its basic identity. As water
seeks the course of least resistance, so the emotions clothe themselves
in the symbols that lie most readily at hand, and the association is so
swift and automatic that the symbol may appear to be the very heart of
the experience.
- Alan Watts
- This Is It (New York: Vintage Books, 1973, p. 19)
September 13
From: Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, By Neil
Postman (New York, Vintage Books, pp. 16-19.)
We can imagine that Thamus would also have pointed out to Gutenberg,
as he did to Theuth, that the new invention would create a vast population
of readers who "will receive a quantity of information without proper
instruction...[who will be filled] will the conceit of wisdom instead
of real wisdom"; that reading, in other words, will compete with older
forms of learning. This is yet another principle of technological change
we may infer from the judgment of Thamus: new technologies compete with
old
ones -- for time, for attention, for money, for prestige, but mostly
for dominance of their world-view. This competition is implicit once we
acknowledge that the medium contains an ideological bias. And it is a
fierce competition, as only ideological competitions can be. It is not
merely a matter of tool against tool -- the alphabet attacking ideographic
writing, the printing press attacking the illuminated manuscript, the
photograph attacking the art of painting, television attacking the printed
word. When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views
in collision.
In the United States, we can see such collisions everywhere -- in politics,
in religion, in commerce -- but we see them most clearly in the schools,
where two great technologies confront each other in uncompromising aspect
for the control of students' minds. On the one hand, there is the world
of the printed word with its emphasis on logic, sequence, history, exposition,
objectivity, detachment, and discipline. On the other there is the world
of television with its emphasis on imagery, narrative, presentness, simultaneity,
intimacy, immediate gratification, and quick emotional response. Children
come to school having been deeply conditioned by the biases of television.
There, they encounter the world of the printed word. A sort of psychic
battle takes place, and there are many casualties -- children who can't
learn to read or won't, children who cannot organize their thought into
logical structure even in a simple paragraph, children who cannot attend
to lectures or oral explanations for more than a few minutes at a time.
They are failures, but not because they are stupid. They are failures
because there is a media war going on, and they are on the wrong side
-- at least for the moment. Who knows what schools will be like twenty-five
years from now? Or fifty? In time, the type of student who is currently
a failure may be considered a success. They type who is now successful
may be regarded as a handicapped learner -- slow to respond, far too detached,
lacking in emotion, inadequate in
creating mental pictures of reality. Consider: what Thamus called the
"conceit of wisdom" -- the unreal knowledge acquired through the written
word -- eventually became the pre-eminent form of knowledge valued by
the schools. There is no reason to suppose that such a form of knowledge
must always remain so highly valued.
To take another example: In introducing the personal computer to the
classroom, we shall be breaking a four-hundred year-old truce between
the gregariousness and openness fostered by orality and the introspection
and isolation fostered by the printed word. Orality stresses group learning,
cooperation, and a sense of social responsibility.... Print stresses individualized
learning, competition, and personal autonomy. Over four centuries, teachers,
while emphasizing print, have allowed orality its place in the classroom,
and have therefore achieved a kind of pedagogical peace between these
two forms of learning, so that what is valuable in each can be maximized.
Now comes the computer, carrying anew the banner of private learning and
individual problem-solving. Will the widespread use of computers in the
classroom defeat once and for all the claims of communal speech? Will
the computer raise egocentrism to the status of a virtue?
These are the kinds of questions that technological change brings to
mind when one grasps ... that technological competition ignites total
war, which means it is not possible to contain the effects of a new technology
to a limited sphere of human activity....
What we need to consider about the computer has nothing to do with
its efficiency as a teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is
altering our conception of learning, and how, in conjunction with television,
it undermines the old idea of school.
September 20
...as long as the highest goal [in our culture] remains making money,
as long as we teach practically no ethics by example in home or in government,
as long as these young people are not inspired to form a philosophy of
life, and as long as television is overloaded with aggression and sex
with no mentors in learning to love--as long as these obtain, there will
continue to be among young people such frightening depression and suicide.
(p.21)
...
and later,
...
I am deeply troubled by the decline of the humanities in the United
States, for it is there that students come into contact with the best
of Western literature. A graduate professor of English literature in a
western univeristy states that in his class there are five students, while
in the graduate classes of computer science across the hall there are
three hundred. We seem to have forgotten Max Frisch's statement, "Technology
is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it."
It is the what of human existence rather than the how for
which we are famished.
- Rollo May
- The Cry for Myth
September 27
A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part
limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings,
as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical illusion of his
consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our
personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle
of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.
- Albert Einstein
- Quotes from The Enlightened Mind, edicted by Stephen Mitchell
Comment:
And this is the ultimate quest of the Journey, I believe, to widen
our circle of awareness and compassion to the point were we are "at-one-ment"
with the world, there is no "known" to journey from nor "unknown" to journey
into.
- Reg Harris
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