https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2019/12/art-and-technics-x.html =-=-=-=-=-=-= COMMENTS =-=-=-=-=-=-= Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media (1964) MIT Press edition (1994) "Arnold Toynbee has devoted much of his A Study of History to analyzing the kinds of challenge faced by a variety of cultures during many centuries. Highly relevant to Western man is Toynbee's explanation of how the lame and the crippled respond to their handicaps in a society of active warriors. They become specialists like Vulcan, the smith and armorer. And how do whole communities act when conquered and enslaved? The same strategy serves them as it does the lame individual in a society of warriors. They specialize and become indispensible to their masters. It is probably the long human history of enslavement, and the collapse into specialism as a counter-irritant, that have put the stigma of servitude and pusillanimity on the figure of the specialist, even in modern times. The capitulation of Western man to his technology, with its crescendo of specialized demands, has always appeared to many observers of our world as a kind of enslavement. But the resulting fragmentation has been voluntary and enthusiastic, unlike the conscious strategy of specialism on the part of the capitves of military conquest. "It is plain that fragmentation or specialism as a technique of achieving security under tyranny and oppression of any kind has an attendant danger. Perfect adaptation to any environment is achieved by a total channeling of energies and vital force that amounts to a kind of static terminus for a creature. Even slight changes in the environment of the very well adjusted find them without any resource to meet new challenge. Such is the plight of the representatives of "conventional wisdom" in any society. Their entire stake of security and status is in a single form of acquired knowledge, so that innovation is for them not novelty but annihilation." (pp. 68-69) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Hannah Arendt http://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/11/bodies-and-artifacts-second.html =-=-=-=-=-=-= Christopher Lasch The Minimal Self (1984) "The antidote to instrumental reason is practical reason, not mysticism, spirituality, or the power of "personhood."" (p. 253) (more) =-=-=-=-=-=-= Christopher Lasch The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991) Lasch: "The liberal principle that everyone is the best judge of his own interests makes it impossible to ask what people need, as opposed to what they say they want." (p. 209) Lasch/Edwards: "freedom lies in the acceptance of necessity." "It is our refusal to admit limits on our freedom that makes limits evil in the first place." (p. 264) Lasch/Emerson: "Emerson retains the moral realism of his ancestors, while discarding their anthropomorphic conception of God." (p. 265) (more) =-=-=-=-=-= Charles Josiah Galpin Rural Social Problems (1924) "The farmer is...our original naïve teleologist; and the worker in iron is our original untutored materialist." (more) =-=-=-=-=-= Paul Goodman "The Community of Scholars" (1964) in Compulsory Mis-Education and The Community of Scholars [284] "What was the "therapy" employed by Professor Whiteis? It was non-directive interpersonal contact. In his words, he gave "acceptance and understanding" rather than "cajoling, coercing, ordering,..." In this atmosphere, it seems, it was possible for the students to feel again the spontaneous interest that any young persons might take in a reasoned subject matter and to exercise what intelligence they had. It does not matter if this is called "therapy" or not; I would prefer a use of language that would call it precisely the normal state of things: the lively response of normal students to a teacher who knows something and who pays attention to them as human beings." [313, footnote] "people do not choose what "pleases" but what seems important, necessary, or exciting even though painful. I say "seems"—they are likely in error—but in such errors there is something important, if only to get rid of a conceit. Instead, Dewey says. "The educator must have a long look ahead; he must be aware of the potentialities for leading students into new fields . . . and must use this knowledge as his criterion for selection and arrangement" etc. This leads to the interminable administrative methodology of Progressive Schools. It is unnecessary. If the teacher and student stay in contact with each other and with the subject matter, in both enthusiasm and balkiness, rapidity and stupidity, the encounter will generate its own deep meaning and next attraction—or rejection." =-=-=-=-=-=-= Ernest Becker The Denial of Death (1973) [86] "How does one transcend himself; how does he open himself to new possibility? By realizing the truth of his situation, by dispelling the lie of his character, by breaking his spirit out of its conditioned prison. ... The very defenses that [the child] needs in order to move about with self-confidence and self-esteem become his life-long trap. In order to transcend himself he must break down that which he needs in order to live. ... Kierkegaard had no illusions about man's urge to freedom. He knew how comfortable people were inside the prison of their character defenses. Like many prisoners they [87] are comfortable in their limited and protected routines, and the idea of a parole into the wide world of chance, accident, and choice terrifies them. ... In the prison of one's character one can pretend and feel that he is somebody, that the world is manageable, that there is a reason for one's life, a justification for one's action. To live automatically and uncritically is to be assured of at least a minimum share of the programmed cultural heroics—what we might call "prison heroism": the smugness of insiders who "know."" (more) =-=-=-=-=-=-= =-=-=-=-=-=