“Of all imaginary organisms – dragons, protomollusca, missing links, gods, demons, sea monsters, and so on – economic man is the dullest. He is dull because his mental processes are all quantitative and his preferences transitive. His evolution can best be comprehended by considering the communicational problems of human cultural contact.
Always at the interface between two civilizations, some degree of mutual understanding must be achieved. In the case of two strongly contrasting systems, sharing a minimum of premises, the establishment of a common ground of communication is not easy and will be the more difficult inasmuch as people, in all cultures, are prone to believe that their values and preconceptions are "true" and "natural". Indeed, this preference for one‘s own cultural system is probably necessary and universal. However, one preconception which is cross–culturally widespread and perhaps universal is the notion that more is more that not-so-much and that bigger is bigger (and probably better) than not-so-big.
Thus it is that the dilemmas produced by culture contact are often resolved by focusing on that common premise on which it is easiest to agree, so that the meeting of civilizations is turned into a matter of commerce and an occasion for profit or a jockeying for "power", in which it is assumed that domination of one by the there is the necessary outcome. If we look at the tragedies that occur at the interfaces between two human cultures, it is not surprising that similar tragedies occur at the interface between human societies and ecosystems, leading to gross reduction or slow deterioration. The premises of such encounters have tended to be simplistic, permeating the interpretation of messages, shaping observation, and gradually expressed in the unfolding of events. The premises that led to conflict between settlers and American Indians were the same as those that led to the destruction of the tall grass prairie and that today threaten the rain forests of South America and their inhabitants.
The alternative would be a shift of our ways of seeing that would affirm the complexities and mutual integration of both sides of any interface. We reduce ourselves to such caricatures as "economic man", and we have reduced other societies and the woods and lakes that we encounter to potential assets, ultimately reducing them in still another sense as the prairie was reduced to desert, ,members of other groups to servitude, or the schizophrenic to the less than human by psychosurgery.
What will it take to react to interfaces in more complex ways?
At the very least, it requires ways of seeing that affirm our won complexity and the systemic complexity of other and that propose the possibility that they might together constitute an inclusive system, which a common network of mind and elements of the necessarily mysterious. Such a perception of both self and other is the affirmation of the sacred.
Always at the interface between two civilizations, some degree of mutual understanding must be achieved. In the case of two strongly contrasting systems, sharing a minimum of premises, the establishment of a common ground of communication is not easy and will be the more difficult inasmuch as people, in all cultures, are prone to believe that their values and preconceptions are "true" and "natural". Indeed, this preference for one‘s own cultural system is probably necessary and universal. However, one preconception which is cross–culturally widespread and perhaps universal is the notion that more is more that not-so-much and that bigger is bigger (and probably better) than not-so-big.
Thus it is that the dilemmas produced by culture contact are often resolved by focusing on that common premise on which it is easiest to agree, so that the meeting of civilizations is turned into a matter of commerce and an occasion for profit or a jockeying for "power", in which it is assumed that domination of one by the there is the necessary outcome. If we look at the tragedies that occur at the interfaces between two human cultures, it is not surprising that similar tragedies occur at the interface between human societies and ecosystems, leading to gross reduction or slow deterioration. The premises of such encounters have tended to be simplistic, permeating the interpretation of messages, shaping observation, and gradually expressed in the unfolding of events. The premises that led to conflict between settlers and American Indians were the same as those that led to the destruction of the tall grass prairie and that today threaten the rain forests of South America and their inhabitants.
The alternative would be a shift of our ways of seeing that would affirm the complexities and mutual integration of both sides of any interface. We reduce ourselves to such caricatures as "economic man", and we have reduced other societies and the woods and lakes that we encounter to potential assets, ultimately reducing them in still another sense as the prairie was reduced to desert, ,members of other groups to servitude, or the schizophrenic to the less than human by psychosurgery.
What will it take to react to interfaces in more complex ways?
At the very least, it requires ways of seeing that affirm our won complexity and the systemic complexity of other and that propose the possibility that they might together constitute an inclusive system, which a common network of mind and elements of the necessarily mysterious. Such a perception of both self and other is the affirmation of the sacred.
[…]
What do we think a man is? What is it to be human? What are these other systems that we encounter and how are they related?
Side by side with the riddle I want to offer you an ideal – not perhaps ultimately achievable but at least a dream we may try to approximate. The ideal is that our technologies our medical and agricultural procedures, our social arrangements should somehow fit with the best answers that we can give to the Riddle of the Sphinx. I do not think, you see, that an action or a word is its own sufficient definition. I believe that an action or the label put on an experience must always be seen, as we say, in context. And the context of every action is the whole network of epistemology and the state of all the systems involved, with the history that leads up to that state. What we believe ourselves to be should be compatible with what we believe of the world around us.
Notice that the ideal I offer you comes close to being a religious hope or ideal. We are not going to get far unless we acknowledge that the whole of science and technology, like medicine from Hippocrates downward, springs out of and impinges on religion. In two ways all heath practitioners are religious – necessarily accepting some system of ethics and necessarily subscribing to some the theory of body-mind-relations, a mythology, for better or worse. [This should perhaps also be true of all those who act on living systems.] To achieve the ideal I have offered, all we have to do is to be consistent. Alas, to be consistent is excessively difficult and perhaps impossible.
Side by side with the riddle I want to offer you an ideal – not perhaps ultimately achievable but at least a dream we may try to approximate. The ideal is that our technologies our medical and agricultural procedures, our social arrangements should somehow fit with the best answers that we can give to the Riddle of the Sphinx. I do not think, you see, that an action or a word is its own sufficient definition. I believe that an action or the label put on an experience must always be seen, as we say, in context. And the context of every action is the whole network of epistemology and the state of all the systems involved, with the history that leads up to that state. What we believe ourselves to be should be compatible with what we believe of the world around us.
Notice that the ideal I offer you comes close to being a religious hope or ideal. We are not going to get far unless we acknowledge that the whole of science and technology, like medicine from Hippocrates downward, springs out of and impinges on religion. In two ways all heath practitioners are religious – necessarily accepting some system of ethics and necessarily subscribing to some the theory of body-mind-relations, a mythology, for better or worse. [This should perhaps also be true of all those who act on living systems.] To achieve the ideal I have offered, all we have to do is to be consistent. Alas, to be consistent is excessively difficult and perhaps impossible.
[…]
Finally – and here‘s the rub – the disciplines of the new ways of thought are still to be defined. To believe and act in the belief that there is no mind distinct from the body and (of course) no body distinct from the mind is not to become free of all limits. It is to accept a new discipline, probably more stringent than the old.
This brings me back to the notion of responsibility. It‘s a word which I don‘t commonly use, but let me use it here in all seriousness. How shall we interpret the responsibility of all those who deal with living systems? The whole tatterdemalion rout of the dedicated and the cynical, the saintly and the greedy, have a responsibility – individually and collectively – to a dream. The dream is about what sort of a thing man is that he may know and act on living systems – and what sort of things such systems are that they may be known. The answers to that forked riddle must be woven from mathematics and natural history and aesthetics and also the joy of life and loving – all of these contribute to shape that dream.”
This brings me back to the notion of responsibility. It‘s a word which I don‘t commonly use, but let me use it here in all seriousness. How shall we interpret the responsibility of all those who deal with living systems? The whole tatterdemalion rout of the dedicated and the cynical, the saintly and the greedy, have a responsibility – individually and collectively – to a dream. The dream is about what sort of a thing man is that he may know and act on living systems – and what sort of things such systems are that they may be known. The answers to that forked riddle must be woven from mathematics and natural history and aesthetics and also the joy of life and loving – all of these contribute to shape that dream.”
Innocence and Experience
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