Friday, October 02, 2020

Cosmography for Teachers (School of Tomorrow)



My arc in the Youtube stash as been towards integrating Synergetics into the philosophical literature. I've been announcing this as my project for some time, however announcing is not the same as doing, so inevitably, if into walking my talk, I'd have to do some walking. I hope my accounts come across as fleet footed and not overly pedestrian.

"Target acquisition" has ironic meaning if depicted as someone getting a target (e.g. "kick me") posted on his back. One may appear to purposely enter the crosshairs of others, trained to shoot at specific signs, by disguising oneself, on purpose, to get their attention.  In taking Harold Bloom on board, in my latest Youtube, has the School of Tomorrow painted itself into a corner?

My wiring diagram is pretty simple:  extend New England Transcendentalism through No More Secondhand God to Synergetics and its "geometry of nature". Technology is hers.  Automation is hers. Humans flail about in their Earthly Kindergarten, yet we see have gained traction, to the point of bearing some responsibility for the biosphere as a whole.  We are the Borgosphere already.

Back to Harold Bloom, he presages Jordan Peterson in bemoaning a turn of events within University, where ideological currents now run counter to his tastes.  Taste, like smell to Nietzsche, means a lot to opinionated scholars.  Dr. Bloom makes it clear that for him it's all about time management.  You have only so many hours to read, so why waste your time with not the best?  That's a compelling argument, unless maybe you're doing anthropology or natural language analysis.  Perhaps you're into observing, or seeking, some operational dialectic, Marxian or otherwise.  "Whence this 'taste'?" in other words.

Indeed, I've used the A where PATH crosses STEAM, to mean Anthropology, not Art, because I'm willing to subsume Art.  That's my heresy, shall we say.  Philosophy, as practiced by Wittgenstein, is in many dimensions turning the arts of Anthropology upon one's own matrix (subculture), thereby setting up some recursive vertigo in some disciples.

Back to Bucky, we need to remember one of his working assumptions was nationalism, a new kid on the block to begin with, would certainly morph in the face of jet travel and globally embracing telecommunications. He lived from the 1800s to the dawn of the internet, and was already fully into hypertext when he died.  Remember Dr. Vannevar Bush anticipated search engines in the 1940s.  Technology expresses through us, the invisible hand moving us, inclining us, by means of invisible chessboards, using pieces the ranks of which we scarcely guess.

In other words, Bucky was looking for signs of demise, among sovereignties, in the very concept of sovereignty.  When nation A carpet bombs nation B, that's an obvious sign of no sovereignty, i.e. that's not a relationship among coequal kingdoms, free to make their own alliances.  

The nations haven't really gelled, given the disrespect of sovereignty we have all witnessed.  Furthermore, the USA had proved itself incapable of passing an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) for women.  Those of us getting The Graduate Review (for esties), saw Dr. Fuller's essay foretelling the USA's demise as a likely consequence. By the 1980s, the Grunch had completed its "tunnels under Disneyworld" takeover, per Fuller's Grunch of Giants subversive narrative.