I realized today, as I stood for about 15 minutes just watching and listening to a rushing stream, that it may have been more meaningful and true than anything I could ever say about it. It was a moment in which I felt, palpably, the development of a new and liberatory antibody. They're bringing to the surface everything I thought I knew and understood but now realize that I've never had the context for appreciating the truly precious.
That’s wonderful! I read it a million years ago but I think I’ll go pull it out of the back of the bookshelf on your recommendation! I remember it being so impactful but not much more than that! Thank you!
There is a TON of poetry today, and it's more important than ever precisely because it isn't quantifiable, because it refuses the reduction of complexity, because it is capable of holding multiple ideas in juxtaposition — and, as I always tell my poetry students, juxtaposition is not opposition.
It's true, though, that poetry today doesn't play a role in influencing the policy decisions of the corporate and corporatized entities that dominate society. We've been moving in this direction since the Enlightenment turned away from metaphor and symbol as ways of knowing the world, favoring only that which is tangible and testable. One way to look at this is to say that we have discounted truth in favor of fact, not recognizing that there is a relationship between the two that elevates both.
This has left us with a society that is deficient in critical thinking skills and does not understand the power of figurative language. As Robert Frost said in "Education by Poetry,"
"[U]nless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history.”
If you find yourself wanting to read poetry, as Wendell Berry says (In "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front") to do "every day do something / that won’t compute." go to your local library and take out Diane Seuss's book Modern Poetry; her poems are a great place to start. And if you feel like you don't understand poetry, get Glyn Maxwell's book On Poetry. It's a terrific primer for how to read (and, if you want, write) poems.
That's true. There *is* poetry. I guess I meant that we don't center poets and poetry in our society anymore. When I was a kid, Robert Frost was a major figure. Maya Angelou. Even Seamus Heany, Samuel Beckett.... and this was after the era of Eliot, Langton Hughes, Yeats, Plath... As if we don't want to contend with paradox.
We certainly don't center it — though one thing about Biden that I liked was the fact that poetry (particularly that of Seamus Heaney) was important to him.
I think you're right that we don't want to contend with paradox, or even contend with the possibility that we might not have the full picture; this is, after all, the age of data-driven decisionmaking, and there's precious little room for what Keats dubbed "Negative Capability" in a letter to his brother, where he suggests that humans are "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Absolutely. Before systems and ideologies, modernity is a mindset, where the world is a cold machine and everything can be isolated, abstracted, quantified.
A mindset we moderns have a hard time overcoming; Heidegger saw poetry as an answer, an alternative way of dwelling in the world, 70 years ago. Yet here we are...
Poetry refuses simplification and the great flattening of the world, which has pervaded even our musical scales: we've sacrificed relationship for versatility, and lost resonance.
And in the same way, we moderns have untuned ourselves from nature and each other for the sake of simplicity and convenience. We can play anything, but nothing truly sings...
One of the other aspects of poetry that we've turned away from is tension; without tension, poetry is inert. We've prioritized convenience, and in doing so we have deprived ourselves of the opportunity to discover and make meaning from our lives.
Yes! Because “solidarity is downstream of rapport” we increase future solidarity every time we regard our fellow humans with kindness, humor, patience, interest, generosity, forgiveness, etc.; our little everyday interactions make us powerful enough to move mountains.
Seems so simple and straightforward. The kind of stuff Jesus was talking about. But people eventually took his whole thing the wrong way, as some sort of exclusivity or heavenly litmus test.
I enjoy caring for other people. To consider their needs, not just my own. I feel the same toward animals. I’ve irritated many a family member by bringing home animals to rehabilitate and “save.” Nothing gives me greater joy than by just being kind. I have no regrets.
Thanks for this one! So important and basically the motivation behind most of my projects these days, as I feel the ability to hold paradox (to be with the complexity) is the skill determining our future. Also looking forward to discussing this with you of we ever get a date set. For now just let me say again THANK YOU
Computation is an ideology, we need not believe in it, or in its power. The *people* wielding it have power, and this is a human problem. We've seen this before, and we do know how to handle it. Don't fall for the computation version of what feminist epistemologists like Donna Haraway call "the god trick." Do not worship machines and algorithms.
I really wish people would hear that. It's hard, because those computations and algorithms are usually one level obscured behind the various representations they support.
I am not an expert, but I feel like that is what I am seeing with AI all around me these days. I am in the business world (most days, I wish I wasn’t), and AI is being treated as a deity, the ultimate savior without which you/ your business will die. I wish that they could not just read those words, but actually take a minute to reflect on them and understand them.
Do you think you might have done effective altruism a little dirty? I knew they were involved in AI alignment but the main thing I heard they were doing was saving thousands from malaria for pennies because it was the most cost effective thing they could do with their funds.
The paradox is that on the spiritual plane it IS digital: it’s love or it’s nothing, reality or illusion. The way that comes into the world of endlessly complex separation that we experience is, of course, analogue in its expression, but the root of every thought and every action is still either fear or love. There is nothing in between.
If we could all develop our inner awareness of that, then everything would get a lot simpler.
Respectfully, in your concept of technology as a non-specific amplifier, you may have arrived independently at one or more of the ideas Andrew Feenberg explored in _Transforming_Technology_. This is not a bad thing…
Great stuff! Reading it made me ever so grateful for my digital youth, a feeling I keep having more often as a get older. I actually tried teaching HS not too long ago and was blown away, in the worst possible way, by how much the internet has re-wired young peoples brains, to use Jon Haidt's phrase. This suggests to me that, on top of the binary atmosphere you describe, a great chunk of humanity has simply lost that ability to actually "vibrate" together as musical instruments would.
Not sure if this makes sense, but I loved "Present Shock", one of my favorite non-fictions books ever :-)
I love this explanation. I didn't know about the piano keys but it's an exquisite way to capture what you're telling us. I introduced myself and we chatted briefly at the conference you mentioned, before you spoke -- when you did, it was powerful. I do write my own poetry, as well as a weekly letter on living with compassion for yourself and for others. I often reflect on the space between, the connectivity, the interstitium. Indeed, having read your Team Human and the books of several of the other presenters is what drew me there in the first place. To be present, to listen, to absorb and learn. Keep up this work, please. The world needs this kind of exegesis. Intelligent, humble, engaging, thoughtful invitation. Thanks, Douglas.
I'm old enough to have lived through the transition from an analog to a digital society so I appreciate the subtlety you discussed. Having spent most of my career in business I feel that painting all businesses and the pursuit of profits as somehow evil or bad isn't a fair assessment. If businesses don't make a profit they can't pay their employees or even continue to provide whatever product or service they supply. Where I think things went off the rails several decades ago was when businesses switched from being for the good of all stakeholders, including employees, to focusing strictly on "Shareholder Value" the few people on top who owned the majority of the stock. This along with making stock buybacks, effectively stock price manipulation, legal, which allowed the key owners a way to artificially inflate the stock price. This practice also took away money from investing in plants, people, training, or research. It all went to lining the pockets of the few people at the top. Over my career I was laid off several times along with others to justify keeping up profits.
As for your alarm about being surrounded by fascism, yes it's scary! We are such poor students of history. This has all happened before and we keep doing it over again and again. I hope as a society that sanity prevails, though I'm terrified it won't before our country is damaged beyond repair.
I realized today, as I stood for about 15 minutes just watching and listening to a rushing stream, that it may have been more meaningful and true than anything I could ever say about it. It was a moment in which I felt, palpably, the development of a new and liberatory antibody. They're bringing to the surface everything I thought I knew and understood but now realize that I've never had the context for appreciating the truly precious.
you may enjoy reading siddhartha by herman hesse as it touches on many of those points and also involves watching a river a lot.
That’s wonderful! I read it a million years ago but I think I’ll go pull it out of the back of the bookshelf on your recommendation! I remember it being so impactful but not much more than that! Thank you!
There is a TON of poetry today, and it's more important than ever precisely because it isn't quantifiable, because it refuses the reduction of complexity, because it is capable of holding multiple ideas in juxtaposition — and, as I always tell my poetry students, juxtaposition is not opposition.
It's true, though, that poetry today doesn't play a role in influencing the policy decisions of the corporate and corporatized entities that dominate society. We've been moving in this direction since the Enlightenment turned away from metaphor and symbol as ways of knowing the world, favoring only that which is tangible and testable. One way to look at this is to say that we have discounted truth in favor of fact, not recognizing that there is a relationship between the two that elevates both.
This has left us with a society that is deficient in critical thinking skills and does not understand the power of figurative language. As Robert Frost said in "Education by Poetry,"
"[U]nless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history.”
If you find yourself wanting to read poetry, as Wendell Berry says (In "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front") to do "every day do something / that won’t compute." go to your local library and take out Diane Seuss's book Modern Poetry; her poems are a great place to start. And if you feel like you don't understand poetry, get Glyn Maxwell's book On Poetry. It's a terrific primer for how to read (and, if you want, write) poems.
That's true. There *is* poetry. I guess I meant that we don't center poets and poetry in our society anymore. When I was a kid, Robert Frost was a major figure. Maya Angelou. Even Seamus Heany, Samuel Beckett.... and this was after the era of Eliot, Langton Hughes, Yeats, Plath... As if we don't want to contend with paradox.
We certainly don't center it — though one thing about Biden that I liked was the fact that poetry (particularly that of Seamus Heaney) was important to him.
I think you're right that we don't want to contend with paradox, or even contend with the possibility that we might not have the full picture; this is, after all, the age of data-driven decisionmaking, and there's precious little room for what Keats dubbed "Negative Capability" in a letter to his brother, where he suggests that humans are "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Absolutely. Before systems and ideologies, modernity is a mindset, where the world is a cold machine and everything can be isolated, abstracted, quantified.
A mindset we moderns have a hard time overcoming; Heidegger saw poetry as an answer, an alternative way of dwelling in the world, 70 years ago. Yet here we are...
Poetry refuses simplification and the great flattening of the world, which has pervaded even our musical scales: we've sacrificed relationship for versatility, and lost resonance.
And in the same way, we moderns have untuned ourselves from nature and each other for the sake of simplicity and convenience. We can play anything, but nothing truly sings...
One of the other aspects of poetry that we've turned away from is tension; without tension, poetry is inert. We've prioritized convenience, and in doing so we have deprived ourselves of the opportunity to discover and make meaning from our lives.
Yes!
I’m buying Cobi.
Ha! I just wrote a piece arguing that the world is analog, and by seeing it as digital, nuance is squeezed out. https://philmayes.substack.com/p/is-the-world-analog-or-digital
Yes! Because “solidarity is downstream of rapport” we increase future solidarity every time we regard our fellow humans with kindness, humor, patience, interest, generosity, forgiveness, etc.; our little everyday interactions make us powerful enough to move mountains.
Seems so simple and straightforward. The kind of stuff Jesus was talking about. But people eventually took his whole thing the wrong way, as some sort of exclusivity or heavenly litmus test.
I enjoy caring for other people. To consider their needs, not just my own. I feel the same toward animals. I’ve irritated many a family member by bringing home animals to rehabilitate and “save.” Nothing gives me greater joy than by just being kind. I have no regrets.
Thanks for this one! So important and basically the motivation behind most of my projects these days, as I feel the ability to hold paradox (to be with the complexity) is the skill determining our future. Also looking forward to discussing this with you of we ever get a date set. For now just let me say again THANK YOU
Thank you !
Computation is an ideology, we need not believe in it, or in its power. The *people* wielding it have power, and this is a human problem. We've seen this before, and we do know how to handle it. Don't fall for the computation version of what feminist epistemologists like Donna Haraway call "the god trick." Do not worship machines and algorithms.
I really wish people would hear that. It's hard, because those computations and algorithms are usually one level obscured behind the various representations they support.
I am not an expert, but I feel like that is what I am seeing with AI all around me these days. I am in the business world (most days, I wish I wasn’t), and AI is being treated as a deity, the ultimate savior without which you/ your business will die. I wish that they could not just read those words, but actually take a minute to reflect on them and understand them.
Do you think you might have done effective altruism a little dirty? I knew they were involved in AI alignment but the main thing I heard they were doing was saving thousands from malaria for pennies because it was the most cost effective thing they could do with their funds.
The paradox is that on the spiritual plane it IS digital: it’s love or it’s nothing, reality or illusion. The way that comes into the world of endlessly complex separation that we experience is, of course, analogue in its expression, but the root of every thought and every action is still either fear or love. There is nothing in between.
If we could all develop our inner awareness of that, then everything would get a lot simpler.
Respectfully, in your concept of technology as a non-specific amplifier, you may have arrived independently at one or more of the ideas Andrew Feenberg explored in _Transforming_Technology_. This is not a bad thing…
Erik Davis used to refer to the 90s, and our place within it, as the time of the ‘analog sunset’..
Great stuff! Reading it made me ever so grateful for my digital youth, a feeling I keep having more often as a get older. I actually tried teaching HS not too long ago and was blown away, in the worst possible way, by how much the internet has re-wired young peoples brains, to use Jon Haidt's phrase. This suggests to me that, on top of the binary atmosphere you describe, a great chunk of humanity has simply lost that ability to actually "vibrate" together as musical instruments would.
Not sure if this makes sense, but I loved "Present Shock", one of my favorite non-fictions books ever :-)
I love this explanation. I didn't know about the piano keys but it's an exquisite way to capture what you're telling us. I introduced myself and we chatted briefly at the conference you mentioned, before you spoke -- when you did, it was powerful. I do write my own poetry, as well as a weekly letter on living with compassion for yourself and for others. I often reflect on the space between, the connectivity, the interstitium. Indeed, having read your Team Human and the books of several of the other presenters is what drew me there in the first place. To be present, to listen, to absorb and learn. Keep up this work, please. The world needs this kind of exegesis. Intelligent, humble, engaging, thoughtful invitation. Thanks, Douglas.
I'm old enough to have lived through the transition from an analog to a digital society so I appreciate the subtlety you discussed. Having spent most of my career in business I feel that painting all businesses and the pursuit of profits as somehow evil or bad isn't a fair assessment. If businesses don't make a profit they can't pay their employees or even continue to provide whatever product or service they supply. Where I think things went off the rails several decades ago was when businesses switched from being for the good of all stakeholders, including employees, to focusing strictly on "Shareholder Value" the few people on top who owned the majority of the stock. This along with making stock buybacks, effectively stock price manipulation, legal, which allowed the key owners a way to artificially inflate the stock price. This practice also took away money from investing in plants, people, training, or research. It all went to lining the pockets of the few people at the top. Over my career I was laid off several times along with others to justify keeping up profits.
As for your alarm about being surrounded by fascism, yes it's scary! We are such poor students of history. This has all happened before and we keep doing it over again and again. I hope as a society that sanity prevails, though I'm terrified it won't before our country is damaged beyond repair.
"... in the 90’s my job was explaining the digital to people from the analog era. Now, it’s explaining the analog to those in the digital era."
That's profound. Also I never quite thought about piano keys as hardcoded like that before. Lots to ponder.
I'd like to share with you the name of Mr. Thiel's next book. It's called From Right Brain to Left: Journey into the Flatlands.