Get your own Free Home Pageby Eldon New (with responses by Deric Morris)
Fri 11/9/01
Our civilization has become stronger since World War 1 due to
more diversity, absorbing ideas from other cultures, etc.
__________________________________________________
From "The Awakening of the West, The Encounter of Buddhism
and Western Culture" by Stephen Batchelor, 1994
"[WW1]...a war that, in the words of the historian Alan Bullock,
'was so shattering in its impact, so far-reaching in its
consequences, that itis profoundly difficult to recapture
what preceded it.' The 20th-century break with tradition in
the arts (Picasso, Matise, Kandinsky), literature (Proust,
Mann, Kafka, Joyce), [music ( Stravinski, etc.)], psychology
(Freud, Adler, Jung) and physics (Plank, Rutherford, Einstein,
Bohr) was already underway before the outbreak of the Great War,
but it took the brutal shock of millions dead and wounded in the
heart of civilized Europe to force an awareness of the fragmented,
uncertain, and anxious world of today. The War sealed a rupture
with the past every bit as irrevocable as that of the Rennaisance,
the Reformation, the Enlightenment,...Henceforth, the vacuous but
pregnant term 'Modernism' came into its own."
"For the German historian Oswald Spengler this was more than just a
bloody break with the past...It was compelling evidence for the
'Decline of the West' the title of Spengler's 'magnum opus'
published in 1918. Despite the fact that civilizations fall as well as
rise, Europe clung stubbornly to the idea of inevitable progress,
a belief W. B.Yeats called the 'last great Western heresy.'
For Spengler, the soul of the west was doomed. 'A conversion to
Theosophy or Freethinking', he wrote, is merely 'an alteration
of words and notions, or the religious and intellectual surface,
no more. None of our 'movements' have changed man.' And if, in our
desperation we 'go back to' Buddhism or paganism or Roman Catholicism',
we will still 'feel the same'.
Such echoes of disintegration are as evident in the unsettling stories
of Franz kafka as in the grimly evocative 'Waste Land' (1922) of
T.S. Eliot, where the Buddha's "Fire Sermon (blended with St. Augustine)
helps suggest a world consumed with despair. James Joyce's
'Ullyses' was published in Paris the same year. The book employs images of
cycles of time and reincarnation drawn from Theosophy -'vegetable
philisophy' as Joyce puts it. The Irishman nonetheless kept his
copy of Olcott's 'Buddhist Catechism'.
Such condemnations of European tradition provoked a counter-reaction,
a striking example being an essay by the French writer Henri Massis
entitled 'Defence of the West' (1925). Massis argued that Wester
Civilization was in imminent danger of destruction at the hands of
the East. 'It is the soul of the West', he wrote, "that the East
wishes to attack'.
______________
However, our civilization has become stronger since World War 1 due to
more diversity, absorbing ideas from other cultures, etc.
Dr. Martin Luther King was influenced by Gandhi, who was influenced
by the Theosophists in England, and by Thoreau, who was influenced
by the Bhagvad Gita.
The system was designed by Franklin and Jefferson to be flexible,
and to be able to learn. The feedback mechanisms necessary to
accomplish this were put in place over two hundred years ago, though
it was not untill the fifties that Von Neumann and Turing developed
the mathematical treatment of the subject to the point that
computers could be programmed to learn.
Fuller wrote about some of this, also.
The System Learns
Hobbes' "Leviathan" anticipates some of modern information theory.
Leviathan was the first systematic description of the social
organization of a country as an organism that can adapt.
They system operating on the North American continent has
elements of feedback built into it by the Founding Physicists.
(they called themselves Natural Philosophers.)
In previous attacks on the system it has demonstrated the abillity
to learn rapidly from the attacking system.
In my perception, it acts as an amplifier. From Ft. Sumter to Pearl
Harbor the model holds up.
A few years after the attack on Ft. Sumter Sherman's march to the
sea was considerable greater destruction.
After the Confederates spent 11 months refitting the Merrimac with
iron cladding, the Monitor was designed, built, and floated in 90
days.
AS early as 1860 the "system" was already the most flexible and
adaptive on hte planet.
Before Parl Harbor the Japanese had full employment, but we had
massive unemployment. The system learned very rapidly from the
Japanes how to have full employment. Vella reminds me that they
went beyond "full employment" when they actively sought female workers
in the factories. (She remembers living in Baltimore at the time.)
Before WWII most of the physicists and engineers lived in German speaking
countries. (It was still considered necessary to learn German to
study physics when I was in college.) After it was learned that Heisenber
was working on a bomb for the Nazi's, the system in North America
began building one, with help from dozens of refugees from Hitler.
The system learned nuclear physics from the Germans and delivered the
end product to the Japanese.
After the buildup in reaction to Pearl Harbor, the Allies delivered
thousands of bombing raids on Europe.
In all of these cases the feedback system (checks and balances,
voting, spending habits, etc.) acts as an amplifier.
Recent events are harder to understand with this model. A preliminay
hypothesis I have is that the decades of interference in the politics
of South and Central America has had an interesting side effect.
____________________________________________
references:
"Darwin Among the Machines", Dyson
"Cognitive Psychology", Gardner
"The Awakening of the West, The Encounter of Buddhism
and Western Culture" by Stephen Batchelor, 1994
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Deric Morris [bdericm@centurytel.net]
Fri 11/9/01 3:48 AM
I think it's hard for westerners to realize that, in most of the world for
most of history - and still today - "human rights" is an oxymoron. Take
China as one, very old yet current, example. The majority reflex view of
both the elite and hoi polloi is that one's "rights" are no more or less
than what one gets - by inheritance, labor, fortune, or force. Thus the
emperor's rights are to rule as emperor over the middle kingdom; the
peasant's rights are to weed rice, the warrior's rights are to live or die
by the sword, etc. Obviously, the strong have more rights than the weak;
thus what they have (in either case) is exactly what they deserve to have.
It's a sort of karmic social darwinism; and easily seen as the basis, in
susceptible cultures, of the lenin-stalin-mao mindset. By comparison,
reflect that while the USA is blamed for many of the ills of the world, such
as meddling in second and third world countries, it's indisputable that US
machinations have Not been imperialism. It's fashionable to parrot the cant
of US imperialism, true enough. But let us consider what real imperialism
is! I submit that British overthrow of China, India, Egypt, etc. and ouster
of the indigenous elite (and subsequent colonial rule and exploitation) is
the true imperialism. The Belgian Congo under Leopold is another excellent
case in point. Welcome to Heart of Darkness. But - although America could
have very easily done the same all over the world, the actual goal was
influence, not conquest; trade, not expropriation. So clearly what Ghandi
was up against was another "system" in fact as well as in intention.
-bdm
Deric Morris [bdericm@centurytel.net]
Fri 11/9/01 9:16 PM
Shannonıs bequest, like Newtonıs and Einsteinıs before him, was the engine
of a paradigm shift. The definition of information as a quantifiable element
of logistics opened unsuspected vistas for science to explore. Iıd surmise
that the concepts of digital data transmission, signal-to-noise ratio, error
trapping, etc. transformed our entire worldview. In fact itıs fair to say
that without Shannon the world we know would be vastly different; digital
satellite communications, wireless transmission, computer chips and GPS
would not be available.
infoverse - perspective shift - definite not infinite - bounded by event
horizons - percept/info - DNA/turing/binary/quarks on up. Genotype
elicits phenotype through stochastic process - multifurcative heuristics
bring particular (unique individual) from specific (gene pool) by
algorithmic data manipulation to solution set - *computation*...
Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Hawking; each *breakthrough* marked
a paradigm shift; each time the cause was reinterpretation of existing data.
In other words, it was not so much new information as a different
perspective. Likewise Shannon and Goedel meant old wine in new bottles.
When Goedelıs Theorem shot down Whitehead and Russell, the result was not
just a mathematical metatrope, but a reconsidered worldview.
Physics/cosmology paradox: singularities of, not in, U! Parameters not
perimeters - U! bounded by event horizons (info limits) (Goedel again!) -
Bellıs Theorem implies pure info as hidden org. principle -
hence Desktop metatrope!
"--it's ALL Information!" - bdm
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