This link has been bookmarked by 4 people . It was first bookmarked on 03 Mar 2009, by Alf Hinojosa.
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05 Mar 09
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Well - it's this. Great societies, they endure. Their fabric withstands the blows of fate and fortune and there is enough in their people to carry on after. To carry on in an altered, reformed, fundamentally different state, perhaps, but to carry on.
But what gives you that capacity is not typically your technology or your wealth or your dominions - all of which are characteristically wiped out in a crash. No it is your character, your capacity not simply to carry on, but to have a reason to carry on, to rebuild what you have lost. -
the Cracked article, which suggests that each of us has a limit of about 150 people we can know and understand and relate to. The theory is based on Dunbar's number, and Cracked calls it - with more than a little alacrity - the 'monkeysphere'. The article, which was written in 2005, is making the rounds again.
In our complex society, writes Cracked, "Most of us do not have room in our Monkeysphere for our friendly neighborhood sanitation worker. So, we don't think of him as a person. We think of him as The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away." -
And what we are going through now is the logical consequence of thinking like monkeys. If we can't even get though a day without yelling at people on the road, stealing money from old ladies, or cheating on our taxes, cable bills or restaurant cheques, then any hope we have of building a modern technological society is probably doomed. They're too fragile. They require a high degree of intelligent behaviour on the parts of their citizens.
And we have spend the last few decades fostering, nay celebrating, the ethos of the monkeysphere. Believing that if each of us looked out solely and entirely for our own interests (and that it wasn't cheating unless you got caught and convicted). A nation of Conrad Blacks, looking at us smugly, derisively, snarling at our inability to understand the realities of our times. -
Our failure lies not in the fact that we cannot know and understand more than 150 people. That's just a fact of physiology. Rather, our failure lies in how we characterize the remaining 99.99 percent of humanity: as though they were automatons.
This is the fundamental error of our times. It is the error that allows us to characterize entire societies as 'ragheads', the culture that allows is to say "it's not personal, it's business" as we evict someone from their home or cheat them out of their life's savings, the ethos that allows us in the western world to build a society based on consumption and ownership of more and more even as starvation and disease wrack the remainder of the world. -
When we live our lives in the monkeysphere, we have no comprehension of any of this. We see glimpses only of the lives of the participants, and mostly, see that they do not see each other as people - as hurting, feeling beings. "Because thou art a miracle of deafness....It is not that thou art stupid. Thou art simply deaf. One who is deaf cannot hear music. Neither can he hear the radio. So he might say, never having heard them, that such things do not exist."
What we need, to survive this crisis and the next, is to get beyond the crass calculations of statistics and value, beyond the idea of "proving your worth", beyond seeing people as caricatures, as cardboads cutouts populating the backdrop of our lives, but of beings worth of consideration, nay, worthy of sacrifice. -
Ideologically, we have to get beyond the mass. We have to get beyond the idea of seeing ourselves as being nothing more than the corporate entity to which we belong, whether that entity be a business, a religion, a discipline, a nationality. We are each of us members of all of these things, and more, and yet they form only the shallowest part of ourselves.
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Conceptually, we need to begin to think and reason and act in terms of the concrete rather than the abstract. That does not entail the end of abstract reason - far from it - but rather it is to foster in ourselves a clear and precise understanding that the abstract is an artifice, an invention, that we use to facilitate thought and reasoning. -
Practically, we must immerse ourselves in our own humanity. We must talk to each other. We must communicate with each other. We must be open about our own lives, and curious about others. We must transcend the limit of the monkeysphere by constructing for ourselves concrete understandings of what it is to be human, to live, to have hopes and dreams, and to die. We must read each others' stories, listen to each others' music, to, above all, communicate.
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03 Mar 09
Dave TrussThis is the fundamental error of our times. It is the error that allows us to characterize entire societies as 'ragheads', the culture that allows is to say "it's not personal, it's business" as we evict someone from their home or cheat them out of their life's savings, the ethos that allows us in the western world to build a society based on consumption and ownership of more and more even as starvation and disease wrack the remainder of the world.
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The point is that the monkeyspehere ethos that has been informing our society over the last three decades or so is fundamentally wrong.
Our failure lies not in the fact that we cannot know and understand more than 150 people. That's just a fact of physiology. Rather, our failure lies in how we characterize the remaining 99.99 percent of humanity: as though they were automatons.
This is the fundamental error of our times. It is the error that allows us to characterize entire societies as 'ragheads', the culture that allows is to say "it's not personal, it's business" as we evict someone from their home or cheat them out of their life's savings, the ethos that allows us in the western world to build a society based on consumption and ownership of more and more even as starvation and disease wrack the remainder of the world. -
Our falure is not a failure of business, which performed as intended (at least for those who made off with the wealth). It is a failure of the humanities, a failure of humanity, the study of which has been in notable decline throughout these last few decades, having, if you will, no measurable worth, no valuation, it being nothing more than a pastime and a recreation.
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And, were a similar standard adopted in our processes of politics and business, it would be the end of government by statistics. The end of the depiction of unemployment as a rate. The end of the accounting of poverty as a percentage. The end of the idea that "it's just business" when we sacrifice a life, and the beginning of the idea that, not only is it morally and legally wrong, it is also fundamentally opposed to our idea of selves as humanity. Inhumane.
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The moment we subvert ourselves to the mass, is the moment we can see all other humans as similarly subverted.
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Our mass media idolize the famous, and in so doing, relegate the rest of us to being bit players. Props.
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Practically, we must immerse ourselves in our own humanity. We must talk to each other. We must communicate with each other. We must be open about our own lives, and curious about others. We must transcend the limit of the monkeysphere by constructing for ourselves concrete understandings of what it is to be human, to live, to have hopes and dreams, and to die. We must read each others' stories, listen to each others' music, to, above all, communicate. -
not through any sense of law or ethics, but because that's how it feels to be human.
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As Hume attempted to explain, our sense of humanity and decency is based on a sense of feeling inside us, a passion, and this passion is in turn born in us through a process of experience and education, the process of living in the world, interacting with others, and understanding them.
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And the other touchstone will be even more simple and more basic - the preservation and promotion of individual human worth and dignity, for each and every person in society - no exceptions. The understanding that our first response to the crisis will have to be to ensure that everyone remains housed and healthy, nourished and educated. The understanding that acquisition and hoarding are dysfunctional, that the chronically wealthy are, in a certain sense, disabled, and that the wealth of society is the birthright of each and every individual of which it forms a part.
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