Dear wsn,
Someone pointed out that the comment re/ "marital arts" was related
to the misspelling... sorry... hope the irrelevant response was not
entirely useless.
10/16/96, David Wolsk wrote:
>much of the last 30 of my 66 years have been spent
>trying to reduce the negative effects of the narrow disciplinary
>indoctrinations one receives in today's universities. Some of the outcomes
>of this were represented by the supposedly cute responses to your piece.
Indeed. Narrow disciplines seem to have two ill effects. One is
that the followers develop a private vocabulary and end up speaking only to
one another. Another is that the community has its arm tied behind its
back, in the sense that it bring only a narrow part of each "self" to the
table: that which is expert in the "subject". There's a steep cliff then
-- on the plateu of the subject, discourse is at a high level; once
discussion slips from that ground, there's a rapid descent into shallow
personal opinions and lack of mutual understanding.
Bucky Fuller talks about specialization in Operating Manual for
Spaceship Earth. He claims it was introduced and propagated by the
Admiralty War College, as a way of preventing emerging technologists from
becoming a new center of political power -- by relegating them to sterile,
isolated, domains. Traditional power centers could then exploit the
results without having to include the scientists in power sharing. A
special case of the industrial revolution -- turning scientists into
assembly-line workers who only get to work with one piece of the final
product.
>It was his
>quite detailed analysis and synthesis of USA and Japan over the last 150
>years. His scenario was of approaching war between them but with a
>potential sub-scenario of what's needed to prevent that happening. Much of
>what he outlined was similar to your reading of events and their underlying
>dynamics.
Does he see such a war in the future? I see one with China, but I
though Japan was fairly well-integrated into WTO/NWO schemes...
>At any rate, my purpose was to ... ask: what do we do about it? Personally,
>I sense there is a
>growing backlash from the pace and singleminded survival-of-the-fittest
>(meaning wealthy) mentality of the Megacorps Minions. Yesterday also
>brought an email announcement of TOES 97 (The Alternative Economic Summit).
Less than a backlash, unfortunately, what I think we can see are
eddy currents -- minor reverse flows in a forward-raging river. For
example, the opposition Yeltzin faced in his re-election represented
dissatisfaction with neoliberalism, but it was easily contained by
expensive western PR consultants. The labor revolts we see in France,
Germany, and Australia are each being contained within their local contexts
(no inter-solidarity is being built), and are being defused within the
local political context.
We need, I believe, a movement based on a comprehensive
understanding of the global situtation, and with a concious sense of
international solidarity.
IMHO,
rkm