Forever Becoming: Norberg-Hodge

Showing posts with label Norberg-Hodge. Show all posts

Deep / Shallow

Deep               -                  Shallow
Vertical -                   Horizontal
Professional          -                  Amateur
Engineer -                   Artist
Diligent                -                   Dilettante
Specific                -                   General
Defined                -                   Undefined
Narrow             -                   Wide
Mono                -                   Poly
Tied             -                   Untied
Closed                   -                   Open
Perfect                   -                   Flawed
Solid             -                   Liquid
Apollo                   -                  Hermes

There is nothing as conservative as a deep expert!

[Dave Snowden]
'Managing for Serendipity or why we should lay off "best practice" in KM'

We summarize these two 'zones' of characteristic as the diligent and the dilettante.

Diligence refers to the focused, assiduous character of the entrepreneur, driven by a single-minded passion and purpose. Dilettante refers to the impulsive, intuitive and opportunistic aspects of entrepreneurship. Importantly, it is the transition from dilettante to diligent which converts innovative ideas into entrepreneurial applications.

It follows that the effective entrepreneur or entrepreneurial enterprise must be at once flighty, amateurish, naive, flitting from idea to project without fixing for too long and drifting on free of commitment; until, when they happen upon and recognize something of particular interest, they become attentive, assiduous and persevering.

The contrast between breadth of references and depth of attention recalls Edward De Bono's distinction between 'lateral' and 'vertical' thinking, and the contrast between 'divergent' and convergent' creative processes [...] Hence, the diligent-dilettante dichotomy is rooted in creativity theory.

Arthur Koestler emphasized that creativity requires 'mental cross-fertilisation.' Howard Gruber describes creativity operating across a 'network of enterprises', while Sawyer notes a creative capacity to switch between fields or domains. Through these multiple contacts, creative connections can be made and new ideas emerge. Creative 'field-switching' fits with our description of the 'dilettante' above.

At the same time, creativity theory also emphasizes the importance of domain-specific expertise, a laboriously acquired repertoire of craft, experience and knowledge which allows creative impulses to take root and allows creative people to polish and refine their ideas into a completed form.

[...] The dilettante must also be diligent - and creative connections between fields must be channelled into expertise and knowledge within a designated field.

[...] work within a domain, but also think outside of it.

[...] becoming too diligent or too dilettante [...] can lead to limiting characteristics: turning recognizers into dreamers, developers into tinkerers, and so on.

[Chris Bilton & Stephen Cummings]
Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation, p. 121-23

The dilettante is adept at taking everything out of context. This can be productive certainly, when the contexts are false. But it is impossible for the dilettante to form new concepts from mere fragments.

[Florian Havemann, as quoted by Karl Heinz Bohrer]
'The Three Cultures' in Observations on "the Spiritual Situation of the Age", p. 149

To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages.

[...] the way the loss of opportunities for self-realization plays out is not through a paucity of options but a surfeit of them, all of which we feel capable of pursuing only to a shallow degree before we get frustrated or bored.

[Things that encourage a shallow level of participation may be] a symptom of some larger social refusal to embrace difficulty.

Consumerism [...] keeps us well supplied with stuff and seems to enrich our identities by allowing us to become familiar with a wide range of phenomena - a process that the internet has accelerated immeasurably [...] But this comes at the expense of developing any sense of mastery of anything, eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing.

[...] Novelty trumps sustained focus, whose rewards are not immediately felt and may never come at all [...] if our focus is mistakenly fixed on something ultimately worthless. Rather than taking advantage of that "increasingly marginal utility" that comes with practicing something difficult, our will to dilettantism develops momentum.

[...] Dilettantism is a perfectly rational response to the hyperaccessibility of stuff available to us in the market, all of which imposes on us time constraints where there was once material scarcity. These time constraints become more itchy the more we recognize how much we are missing out on (thanks to ever more invasive marketing efforts, often blended in to the substance of the material we are gathering for self-realization).

We opt instead for “diversity,” and begin setting about to rationalize the preferability of novelty even further, abetted by the underlying message of much our culture of disposability.

Concentration takes on more of the qualities of work—it becomes a disutility rather than an end vis-a-vis the stuff we acquire. If something requires us to concentrate, it costs us more and forces us to sacrifice more of the stuff we might otherwise consume. In other words, consumerism makes the will and ability to concentrate seem a detriment to ourselves.

[Rob Horning]
'The alluring danger of dilettantism'

In direct opposition to the trend in mainstream culture toward greater specialization, we need to actively promote the generalist - the one who sees connections and makes links across different disciplines. In this regard, one of the most hopeful trends is the increasing respect for more feminine values and ways of thinking.

[Helena Norberg-Hodge]
Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh, p.189

The word ‘amateur’ owes its evil reputation to the arts. An artist must be a master or nothing, and must dedicate his life to his art, for the arts, of their very nature, demand perfection.

In scholarship, on the other hand, a man can only be a master in one particular field, namely as a specialist, and in some field he should be a specialist.

But if he is not to forfeit his capacity for taking a general view, or even his respect for general views, he should be an amateur at as many points as possible, privately at any rate, for the increase of his own knowledge and the enrichment of his possible standpoints.

Otherwise he will remain ignorant in any field lying outside his own specialty, and perhaps, as a man, a barbarian.

But the amateur, because he loves things, may, in the course of his life, finds points at which to dig deep.

[Jacob Burckhardt]
Reflections on History (1868)

I would say that what makes an artist rather than a dilettante or poseur is the seriousness of commitment to their work, the evolution (or deepening) of their work over time, and the quality of their work relative to accepted standards of originality, formal invention, handling of material, etc.

['bricology']
'Microproperty in Flow World' (comments section), Click Opera

For Rorty, the most pernicious idea in that intellectual atmosphere was that technical clarity in problem solving was the chief intellectual virtue.

"That's a recipe for scholasticism if I've ever heard it," he says, shaking his head disapprovingly.

"What about imaginative virtues? If you don't allow people to be unclear, intellectual progress grinds to a halt. It's the vague people who are the pioneers."

[James Ryerson]
'The Quest for Uncertainty: Richard Rorty's pragmatic pilgrimage'

It is in the nature of generalisation that there will be many exceptions, and experts will always disagree with any generalisation, as experts should.

Fine-grained analysis is the expert's prerogative. However, the more fine-grained the expert analysis, the more difficult it may be to see an overall pattern: it cannot be other than the view from close up. This will inevitably lead some to the conclusion that no pattern exists, but I believe this to be a mistake.

One has to stand back in order to see patterns at all; there is a ‘necessary distance’ for such pattern recognition to work.

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 242

Experts are narrowly focused persons who need to “tunnel.” In situations where tunnelling is safe, because Black Swans are not consequential, the expert will do well.

You cannot ignore self-delusion. The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know. Lack of knowledge and delusion about the quality of your knowledge come together - the same process that makes you know less also makes you satisfied with your knowledge.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 147

The present danger does not really lie in the loss of universality on the part of the scientist, but rather in his pretence and claim for totality […]

What we have to deplore therefore is not so much the fact that scientists are specialising, but rather the fact that specialists are generalising.

'The true nihilism of today is reductionism […] Contemporary nihilism no longer brandishes the word nothingness; today nihilism is camouflaged as nothing-but-ness. Human phenomena are thus turned into mere epiphenomena.'

[Victor E. Frankl]
Reductionism and Nihilism

The sustained study of natural, historical or literary phenomena, doesn’t make you smarter or better at understanding the world.

As the sophistication of theory and interpretation increases, the scope of inquiry narrows, and the possibilities for self-deception and absurdity only multiply. Hence the familiar jokes, about the ridiculous ideas that only someone with a doctoral degree could propagate.

There are errors and mistaken interpretations to which low-information observers are subject, but high-information, critical thinkers also build intellectual worlds that are subject to deeper, harder errors, and these people will never be convinced they are wrong.

[eugyppius]
‘Why People Believe Wrong Things’, eugyppius: a plague chronicle

Everything is Connected

In sociology, anthropology, and linguistics, structuralism is the methodology that implies elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader, overarching system or structure.

It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.

Alternatively, as summarized by philosopher Simon Blackburn, structuralism is "the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture".

'Structuralism'

Suppose there are the phenomena A, B, and C, and each of them is itself without any self-nature, yet they are all related. Consequently, the existence of A as "A" is determined by its relation to B and C and all other phenomena.

Everything is related to everything; nothing can be considered apart from its relatedness to the whole.

Although A is without self-nature, still it is A because of its relationship to everything else. In short, the inner structure of A includes everything else in hidden or "powerless" form. And by such relationship A is A, not B or C.

The entire universe supports the existence of any single thing, and absolutely nothing exists as an individual particular by itself alone. All things continually and simultaneously manifest themselves together as a whole. The philosophy of the Hua-yen calls this ontological reality "Interdependent Origination."

As no "individual" can exist in itself alone, it exists by the support of everything other than itself.

[Hayao Kawai]
Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy, p.101-2

In his book, Bostrom considers a distant future in which trillions of digital minds merge into an enormous cognitive cyber-soup.

“Whether the set of extremely positive posthuman modes of being would include some kind of dissolved bouillon, there is some uncertainty,” he said. “If you look at religious views, there are many where merging with something greater is a form of heaven, being in the presence of this enormous beauty and goodness. In many traditions, the best possible state does not involve being a little individual pursuing goals.

'The Doomsday Invention: Will artificial intelligence bring us utopia or destruction?'

If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you.

And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.

If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of overpopulation and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite.

If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured [...] If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable in the precybernetic era, and which were especially underlined and strengthened during the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have [little time] before the logical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroys us.

The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in the new way.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.468

The notion that all these fragments separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion.

Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today.

Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who live in it.

Individually there has developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces, going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.

[David Bohm]
Wholeness and the Implicate Order

A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. ... The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self ...

We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.

[Albert Einstein]

In the traditional society, the most respected person was the lama. In the modern sector, it is the engineer.

[..] The world views of the lama and the engineer are very different. The old beliefs were based on a description of reality that emphasized the unity or dependent origination of all life, whereas the new scientific perspective emphasizes its separateness.

It seems to say that we stand apart - outside the rest of creation. And to gain a greater understanding of the way nature works, we simply have to split matter into smaller and smaller fragments and examine the various pieces in isolation.

The shift from lama to engineer represents a shift from ethical values that encourage an empathetic and compassionate relationship with all that lives toward a value-free "objectivity" that has no ethical foundation.

[Helena Norberg-Hodge]
Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh, p.108-9

What links:

A. The decline in bee numbers

B. The decline in Fernando Torres' career?

When you look in the mirror you see yourself as an object. You see your eyes, you see your nose, you see your face, you see your body. And that’s pretty much what you see when you look at other people. But that isn’t all there is to you. In fact, that’s hardly any of what there is to you.

So you could say, for example, you exist at the level of the quantum particle [...] Above that level you exist at an atomic level, and then a molecular level, and then you exist at the level of complex organs and the interactions between those organs. And then you, and then your family, and then the groups that your family belongs to. And then the ecosystems that the groups belong to and so on and so forth until what it is that you are can expand to encompass virtually anything.

Now, when you look at yourself you don’t see that. You see yourself at a certain level of resolution [...] but all those other levels are equally real and equally relevant. And we in fact have very little idea how it is that you’re only able to see what you see. Almost nothing has obvious boundaries and this has real world consequences, it’s not something that’s merely abstract.

The technical term for this problem , the problem of how to bind your perceptions to limit them, is called the frame problem. The frame problem emerges to cause all sorts of trouble for people.

So, for example, when Henry Ford invented the automobile [he presumed he was] building an efficient means of transporting people from one place to the other. There were other unintended consequences of Ford’s discovery.

[...] Ford happened to be a great supporter of Fascism. And the reason that he was a supporter of Fascism was because he regarded the Fascist political structure as a logical extension of the efficient methods that he’d used to assemble vehicles. So his mode of production was instantly manifested in a political philosophy.

Furthermore now - 2009 - a hundred years after the invention of the automobile, we’ve discovered some other things that the car was, other than a place to move people from point A to point B.

So for example, it turns out that the automobile and the internal combustion engine are among the most effective technologies ever devised to transform the nature of the atmosphere to heat up the world. Not only that, the car has completely transformed the nature of cities.

And these were all unintended consequences of the fact that the car was far more than what people thought it was.

You can say that about any technological structure. No one knew what TV would do to the news, for example. No one knew what the internet would do to the music industry. Everything that you interact with is far more complicated than you see.

[Jordan B. Peterson]
'Reality and the Sacred'

[...] in no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are immanent, not in some part, but in the system as whole.

[A] computer is only an arc of a larger circuit which always includes a man and an environment from which information is received and upon which efferent messages from the computer have effect. This total system, or ensemble, may legitimately be said to show mental characteristics. It operates by trial and error and has creative character.

Similarly, we may say that "mind" is immanent in those circuits of the brain which are complete within the brain. Or that mind is immanent in circuits which are complete within the system, brain plus body. Or, finally, that mind is immanent in the larger system - man plus environment.

In principle, if we desire to explain or understand the mental aspect of any biological event, we must take into account the system - that is, the network of closed circuits, within which that biological event is determined. But when we seek to explain the behaviour of a man or an other organism, this "system" will usually not have the same limits as the "self" - as this term is commonly (and variously) understood.

Consider a man felling a tree with an axe. Each stroke of the axe is modified or corrected, according to the shape of the cut face of the tree left by the previous stroke. This self-corrective (i.e., mental) process is brought about by a total system, tree-eyes-brain-muscles-axe-stroke-tree; and it is this total system that has the characteristics of an immanent mind.

But this is not how the average Occidental sees the event sequence of tree felling. He says, "I cut down the tree" and he even believes that there is a delimited agent, the "self" which performed a delimited "purposive" action upon a delimited object.

[...] popular parlance includes mind in its utterance by invoking the personal pronoun, and then achieves a mixture of mentalism and physicalism by restricting mind within the man and reifying the tree.

The total self-corrective unit which processes information, or, as I say, "thinks" and "acts" and "decides," is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the "self" or "consciousness" [...]

[...] if we exclude the unconscious processes from the "self" and call them "ego alien," then these processes take on the subjective colouring of "urges" and "forces"; and this pseudodynamic quality is then extended to the conscious "self" which attempts to "resist" the "forces" of the unconscious. The "self" thereby becomes itself an organization of seeming 'forces."

The popular notion which would equate "self" with consciousness thus leads into the notion that ideas are "forces" [...]

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('The Cybernetics of "Self": A Theory of Alcoholism'), p.316-20

That’s the key of the future of macro-economics - the alignment of agency and wellbeing, and that correlates with closing the loop.

We’re closing the loop between agency of individuals/well being of others - moving from an open loop system, where I could affect things but not internalise those effects in the cost equation, to [a system where] all [affects are] internalised in the cost equation.

That corresponds to a world view where my sense of self and my sense of the rest of the universe are not fundamentally separate concepts. I wouldn’t exist without oxygen, or the plants that make the oxygen, or the bugs and fungus that makes the plants work to make the oxygen.

I am not an individual. I have a self-organising membrane that has some individuality to it but I am an emergent property of everything else.

So when you close the loop between sense of self and sense of others, then what’s in my best interest [is] whats in the best interest of others. There is loop closure between ‘advantage self at the expense of others’ or ‘sacrifice self for the well being of others’, both of which are nonsense in a radically interconnected system.

What we’re looking at is closing all the causal loops so that everything that influences decision making is being informed by everything being influenced.

[Daniel Schmachtenberger]
'36: Daniel Schmachtenberger - Phase Shifting Humanity', The Future Thinkers Podcast (29:55)

The will to power […] depends on the fact that for Nietzsche all things in the world are interconnected and that their interconnections are crucial to their very character. But from these ideas a more radical conclusion seems to follow: “No things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their ‘effect’ upon the same.”

Nietzsche’s continual stress on the interconnectedness of everything in the world constitutes his attack on the “thing-in-itself,” by which he understands the concept of an object that is distinct from, more than, beyond, or behind the totality of its effects on every other thing.

A thing, he insists, cannot be distinguished (except provisionally) from its various interrelations. Objects are conditioned by other objects through and through: “‘Things that have a constitution in themselves’ - a dogmatic idea with which one must break absolutely.”

To speak of a thing-in-itself is to speak of a thing that can be conceived to exist independently of all other things and that is to that extent unconditioned. But this implies that at least some of its features, through which it is to be conceived, apply to it quite independently of the existence of any other thing or that it can be conceived to exist without any features at all.

Nietzsche does not believe that things can have properties on their own, properties that attach to them independently of the existence of other things, because he believes that properties are nothing but a thing’s effects on other things, including ourselves as perceivers:

“That things possess a constitution on themselves quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity, is quite ideal hypothesis; it presupposes that interpretation and subjectivity are not essential, that a thing freed from all relationships would still be a thing […] The properties of a thing are effects on other ‘things’: if one removes other ‘things,’ then a thing has no properties, i.e. there is no thing without other things, i.e., there is no ‘thing-in-itself’.”

[…] what there is is always determined from a specific point of view that embodies its particular interests, needs, and values, its own will to power. “‘Essence’, ‘the essential nature,’ is something perspectival and already presupposes a multiplicity. At the bottom of it there always lies ‘what is it for me?’ (for us, for all that lives, etc.)”

[Alexander Nehamas]
Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 79-81

[…] in Structuralism, all signifiers are directly connected to an extra-linguistic signified, the invariable ones.

To 'mean' anything, a signifier must presuppose a signified already-always outside it. This is what Derrida terms as the "transcendental signified": as a signified, it belongs to the realm of language, but by being invariable, and by refusing any movement, it remains outside it

A word, if immovable, can mean nothing, or even exist. Only when an endless chain of other signifiers, other words, hints, get associated with it, it finally acquires meaning ('Camel' is understandable only when it is thinly associated with many related words, such as 'animal', 'desert', 'cigarette', 'long neck', etc.).

In other words, language is this movement.

‘Trace (deconstruction)’, Wikipedia

If both positive and negative consequences of an action fell on its author, our learning would be fast.

But often an action’s positive consequences benefit only its author, since they are visible, while the negative consequences, being invisible, apply to others, with net cost to society.

Consider job-protection measures: you notice those whose jobs are made safe and ascribe social benefits to such protections. You do not notice the effect on those who cannot find a job as a result, since the measure will reduce job openings. In some cases […] the positive consequences of an action will immediately benefit the politicians and phony humanitarians, while the negative ones take a long time to appear - they may never become noticeable.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 111

An organism’s primary properties are, according to evolutionary theory, both a record of past environments and a conjecture about the current one.

The overall species-niche super system determines the traits that individual organisms will exhibit. It is known that two animals with the same genotype can be phenotypically different depending on the environment in which they develop. Is this not a form of self-cause whereby the distributed whole influences its components?

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, p.107

Dynamical systems theory tells us that because they are embedded in history as well as in a structured environment, people are not independent, isolated atoms just plunked into a completely alien environment that affects them through mechanical forces.

As we saw earlier, by means of second-order context-dependencies established by persistent interaction with the environment, agents effectively import the environment into their internal dynamics by recalibrating these to incoming signals.

Over time, that is, both phylogenetically and developmentally, people establish interdependencies between the environment and their internal dynamics such that the former becomes part of their external structure: their boundary conditions.

Context-sensitive constraints established by positive feedback weave both the environment and history into the agent's cognitive and conative states, thereby achieving the embeddedness in space and time that characterizes those complex systems. The way adaptive systems function therefore strongly suggests that, as dynamical structures, intentions "ain't just in the head" either.

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, 197

Feedback processes […] embody the context-sensitive constraints of history.

By embodying context-sensitive constraints, mutualist feedback renders a system sensitive to (constrained by) its own past experiences. This makes nonlinear dynamical systems historical, not just temporal the way near-equilibrium thermodynamical systems are.

Once the system's subsequent behavior depends on both the spatial and temporal conditions under which it was created and the contingent experiences it has undergone, the system is historically and contextually embedded in a way that near-equilibrium systems of traditional thermodynamics are not.

The very structure of a snowflake, for example, embodies the conditions under which it was created. Because dissipative structures are not just dropped into either time or space the way Newtonian atoms with only primary qualities are, their evolutionary trajectory is therefore not predictable in detail.

Mutualism thus makes a dynamical system's current and future properties, states, and behaviors dependent on the context in which the system is currently embedded as well as on its prior experiences. As a result, unlike the near-equilibrium processes of traditional thermodynamics, complex systems do not forget their initial conditions: they "carry their history on their backs"

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, p.140

This 'whole person' of whom we have been talking is not, then, a solitary, self-sufficient unit. It belongs essentially within a larger whole, indeed within an interlocking pattern formed by a great range of such wholes.

These wider systems are not an alien interference with its identity. They are its home, its native climate, the soil from which it grows, the atmosphere which it needs in order to breathe. Their unimaginable richness is what makes up the meaning of our lives.

The self's wholeness is not, then, the wholeness of a billiard-ball but that of an organism, a transient, struggling creature which has, of course, its own distinct shape but which still belongs in its own context and background.

[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.20

Saussure's 'structural' model of language remains a landmark in the study of complex systems. His primary insight - that meaning is generated through a system of differences - remains an excellent way of conceptualising the relationships in a complex system.

To think in terms of relationships, rather than in terms of deterministic rules, is not a novelty for science, but it has always been seen as part of qualitative descriptions and not as part of the quantitative descriptions and calculations deemed necessary ever since Kepler's insistence that 'to measure is to know'.

Many phenomena, especially in the life-sciences, but also in physics and mathematics, simply cannot be understood properly in terms of deterministic, rule-based or statistical processes. Quantum-mechanical descriptions of sub-atomic processes are essentially relational, and even on a more macroscopic level, relations determine the nature of matter.

The carbon atoms in my body can all be interchanged with carbon atoms from the wood of my desktop, and there will be no noticeable difference (Penrose 1989: 32).

The significance of each atom is therefore not determined by its basic nature, but is a result of a large number of relationships between itself and other atoms.

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.35, 37

[…] the relationality of the world is operationalised via an understanding of agency that no longer privileges human action.

Rather, all matter is ‘affective’ – it possesses a ‘capacity to affect and be affected’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 127–8), whether it is human or non-human, animate or inanimate (DeLanda, 2006: 4; Mulcahy, 2012: 10; Youdell and Armstrong, 2011: 145).

Replacing (human) agency with ‘affect’ serves as an ethical and political counter to the humanism of the social sciences, supplying the basis both for an anti-humanist critique of the destructive capacities of humans in the Anthropocene (Lovelock, 2007: 141) and to reintegrate humans within ‘the environment’ (Fox and Alldred, 2016), thus underpinning a more positive posthumanism (Braidotti, 2006: 37).

The latter, according to Braidotti, can be a basis for an eco-philosophy that establishes a continuum between human and non-human matter (Braidotti, 2006: 41, 2013: 104).

When applied to sociology, these aspects of contemporary materialism’s monism (van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2010: 155) or ‘flat ontology’ (DeLanda, 2005: 51) collapse or cut across a range of conventional social theory dualisms – including agency/structure, nature/culture, animate/inanimate, micro/macro, reason/emotion, surface/depth, word/ world and mind/matter (Braidotti, 2013: 4–5; Coole and Frost, 2010: 26–7; Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 23; van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2010: 157).

[Nick J. Fox & Pam Alldred]
‘Social structures, power and resistance in monist sociology: (New) materialist insights’

Urbanization has done many things, but the important things that it has done from an ecological point of view is to separate people psychologically from the ecosphere and separate them physically from the ecosystems that actually sustain them.

Many people can live all their lives, and most of our young people in school, in cities with no psychological or physical sense of connectivity to anything outside of themselves.

In some sense, it replicates the economist notion that we're disconnected from all things, when the reality is that every city on the planet would curl up and die, were we cut off from […] the huge arterial network needed to supply cities. But in the process [of supplying cities] we're depleting the resources of the land base all over the planet.

[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube

Unintended consequences

Nested in Tradition

Narrow Contexts

Border and Flow

Touching Base

Artificial - Real
Simulacrum - Original
Concept - Percept
Abstract - Concrete
Observe - Participate
Distanced - Close
Detached - Attached
Horizontal - Vertical
Playful - Serious
Ironic - Earnest
Empty - Full

Partial - Whole
Light - Heavy
Conscious - Unconscious
Unlimited - Limited
Infinite - Finite

[...] the celebrant's or devotee's intention is not that of understanding, and, in the ordinary routine of the cult of the work of art, the play of the academic or urbane references has no other function than to bring the work into an interminable circuit of inter-legitimation,

so that a reference to Jan Breughel's Bouquet of Flowers lends dignity to Jean-Michel Picart's Bouquet of Flowers with Parrot, just as, in another context, reference to the latter can, being less common, serve to enhance the former.

This play of cultured allusions and analogies endlessly pointing to other analogies, which, like the cardinal oppositions in mythical or ritual systems, never have to justify themselves by stating the basis of the relating which they perform, weaves around the works a complex web of factitious experiences, each answering and reinforcing all the others, which creates the enchantment of artistic contemplation.

It is the source of the 'idolatry' to which Proust refers, which leads one to find 'an actress's robe or a society woman's dress beautiful ... not because the cloth is beautiful but because it is the cloth painted by Moreau or described by Balzac.

Analogy, functioning as a circular mode of thought, makes it possible to tour the whole area of art and luxury without ever leaving it.

Thus Chateau Margaux wine can be described with the same words as are used to describe the chateau, just as others will evoke Proust apropos of Monet or César Franck, which is a good way of talking about neither [...]

[Pierre Bourdieu]
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, p.53

Since the "world of origins" is closed to us, we must accept the fact that we are dependent -- doomed, if you like, to being forever meta. There is no shame in this. We are all contingent, all referring to things which, themselves, refer to other things (parents descended from parents, phrases from phrases).

Humperson did, however, see the possibility of originality via errors, mishearings and misunderstandings. He enjoyed playing Chinese Whispers, especially in later life, when he grew rather deaf.

[Momus]
'Proposal for a Wikipedia page about Humperson, father of the "laws of meta"'

Philosopher Jacques Derrida played on Saussure’s idea that meaning lies in difference, by adding the idea that meaning is also defered endlessly down [a] chain.

Language never points to a concrete signified outside the chain, that would anchor it in an external reality. Instead, language only ever points at additional layers of language further down the chain.

Derrida famously declared that, “There is nothing outside of the text.” […] Realising that there is nothing outside of the text means recognising that […] we can never get to the end of [the] chain - because there is no meaning or referent that cannot, in turn, be reinterpreted to mean something else.

'Animating Poststructuralism'

It is necessary, [Derrida] says, to interrogate those various naive or pre-critical ideas of reference that envisage a straightforward matching-up between language and the world 'outside'.

Deconstruction must work to problematize such habits of thought by showing how strictly impossible it is to draw a firm line between reality and representation.

[Christopher Norris]
Derrida, p. 142

In the West, we tend to live our lives at one remove from reality, relying on images and concepts.

As Tashi Rabgyas said after spending a few months in England,

"It's amazing how indirect everything is here. They write about the beauty of nature, they talk about it, and everywhere there are potted plants and plastic plants, and pictures of trees on the wall.

And all the time television programs about nature. But they don't ever seem to have contact with the real thing."

[Helena Norberg-Hodge]
Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh, p.190

In the eyes of Indians, white Americans became interested only in the shadows of things and strove to ignore and even deny the realities behind them.

[Doug Boyd]
Rolling Thunder, p.59

Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation

"All that was once directly lived has become mere representation."

Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing."

This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life."

With the term spectacle, Debord defines the system that is a confluence of advanced capitalism, the mass media, and the types of governments who favor those phenomena.

The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which "passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity". "

The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord writes. "rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images."

'Society of the Spectacle', Wikipedia

It has been shown that concepts borrow their material from knowledge of perception, and that therefore the whole structure of our world of thought rests on the world of perceptions.

It must therefore be possible for us to go back from every concept, even if through intermediate stages, to the perceptions from which it has itself been directly drawn, or from which have been drawn the concepts of which it is in turn an abstraction.

In other words, it must be possible for us to verify the concept with perceptions that stand to abstractions in the relation of examples.

Therefore these perceptions furnish us with the real content of all our thinking, and wherever they are missing we have had in our heads not concepts but mere words.

[...] Actually all truth and all wisdom ultimately lie in perception; but unfortunately perception cannot be either retained or communicated.

[...] Therefore, as a rule, the man of the world cannot impart his accumulated truth and wisdom, but only practice it.

That books do not take the place of experience, and that learning is no substitute for genius, are two kindred phenomena; their common ground is that the abstract can never take the place of the perceptive. Therefore books do not take the place of experience, because concepts always remain universal, and so do not reach down to the particular; yet it is precisely the particular that has to be dealt with in life.

In addition to this is the fact that all concepts are abstracted from the particular and perceptive of experience [...]

Wisdom proper is something intuitive, not something abstract. It does not consist in principles and ideas which a person carries round ready in his head, as results of his own or others' investigation; it is the whole way in which the world presents itself in his head.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p.71, 74-5

Rolling Thunder had explained at Council Grove that his training was experiential.

In his first conversation with me he said that truth cannot be expressed verbally, that it can only be experienced [...]

"[...] You can't just sit down and talk about the truth. It doesn't work that way. You have to live it and be part of it and you might get to know it. I say you might. And it's slow and gradual and it don't come easy [...]"

[Doug Boyd]
Rolling Thunder, p.37, 71

Wow, so interesting to read this about Lady Gaga.

I see her as the exact opposite of Ammachi, as the epitome of Kali Yuga, the dark mother, a post-modern Madonna accelerating Time Wave Zero with her cut up pastiche videos that flash image, image, image towards the breaking point of narrative and meaning.

I see her as the goddess of Hubbert’s Peak, epitomizing pop culture morphed into its final-last-gasp-stage attempt at meaning making before the entire material culture we live in collapses. I see an emaciated woman that mistakes fashion for femininity as she dwindles away.

I see spectacle without substance, a consumable product of the Kali Yuga age.

[Poeting]
Comment on article 'Lada Gaga: The Visionary Rebirth of the Divine Mother Monster'

Perhaps we don't know what's real any more.

Consumerism, after all, specialises in creating a fake world, in which new 'needs' are created every day by fashionistas and marketing gurus, who will then meet them - at a price.

In this fake world, age, pain, misery, insecurity, loneliness - all can be fended off or overcome with purchases. Animals die out of sight, and their meat comes to us shrink-wrapped and washed clean of blood. Apples fall from the trees twelve months of the year. Plastic landscapes, designed in distant office suites, come between us and the reality of place.

We are cut off from the land, from seasons, from geography, from the dirt and hard work and complications of the world outside the bubble. Enough of this, and the bubble itself becomes the reality.

[Paul Kingsnorth]
Real England, p.272

For the primitive, thought is visionary and auditory, hence it also has the character of revelation. Thus the sorcerer, the visionary, is always the thinker of the tribe, who brings about the manifestation of the spirits or gods.

This also explains the magical effect of thought; it is as good as the deed, just because it is real. In the same way the word, the outer covering of thought, has a "real" effect because it calls up "real" memory-images.

Primitive superstition surprises us only because we have largely succeeded in de-sensualizing the psychic image; we have learnt to think abstractly [...]

[C. G. Jung]
Psychological Types, p. 30

Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself.

It is what links language to life.

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 115

In the opening of Book VIII of his long autobiographical poem The Prelude, Wordsworth depicts a country fair taking place in the valley below him as he sits on the side of Helvellyn, the voices of the country folk, laughing and talking, coming up to him in snatches.

Again his elevated view is an image of self-consciousness, a level of self-awareness that he cannot now lose, forever separated from the simple pleasures of rusticity by his awareness that true pleasure belongs only to those who are not self-aware.

The evocation of their voices carrying echoingly up to his seat above conveys perfectly the combination of closeness and distance, of something recaptured, but also forever lost.

How to be unself-reflectingly simple down there, and yet in a position to appreciate the simplicity at the same time?

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 362

The mind does not derive cause and effect from observations, but already experiences its observations in a context in which cause and effect are presupposed realities: causality in human cognition is not derived from experience but is brought to experience.

As with cause and effect, so too with other categories of the understanding such as substance, quantity, and relation. Without such fundamental frames of reference, such a priori interpretive principles, the human mind would be incapable of comprehending its world.

Human experience would be an impossible chaos, an utterly formless and miscellaneous manifold, except that the human sensibility and understanding by their very nature transfigure that manifold into a unified perception, place it in a framework of time and space, and subject it to the ordering principles of causality, substance, and the other categories.

Experience is a construction of the mind imposed on sensation.

[Richard Tarnas]

The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 344

[Don Quixote] often approximates a subjectivistic occasionalism.

He declares his idea of Dulcinea to be more important than her real aspect. This is because who Dulcinea is does not matter. What matters is only that, for him, she remains the object of the ideal devotion that inspires him to great deeds.

[Carl Schmitt]
Political Romanticism, p. 148

Subjective occasionalism - the object is important only as an occasion, a conduit, for subjectivity, rather than for what it is in itself; its essence. The thing-in-itself is unimportant, and remains untouched. Objective reality is irrelevant, it matters only as a launching pad for subjective flights of fancy.

Not only literature but every form of expression, knowledge, and work has surrounded itself with commentary and criticism; the creative impulse, smothered by "metaphysical" speculation, runs out of breath. "Never since the beginning of Time was there... so intensely self-conscious a society." Everything is "probed into" - "anatomically studied, that it may be medically aided."

When thought becomes too conscious of itself, it loses contact with "vital action" and drifts off into airy, increasingly self-referential abstractions.

German idealism and British utilitarianism, the latter with its "cunning mechanising of self-interests, and all conceivable adjustments of checking and balancing," exemplify the split between action and inquiry. The "whole man, heaven-inspired," recedes from view, and partial men stand in his place, incapacitated alike for intelligent action and for original thought.

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.237

Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguist, has proposed that there are deep linguistic structures within the brain that are common to human beings irrespective of the language they happen to speak […] Within Chomsky's picture, the world's languages are surface structures, vehicles for expressing what is being generated at a much deeper level within the brain.

Indigenous people do not, I think, see things in the same way as Noam Chomsky.

Within Indigenous science, thoughts are inseparable from language. The language that is spoken is not simply a medium, or a vehicle for communication, rather it is a living thing, an actual physical power within the universe. The vibrations of its words are energies that act within the transforming processes we call reality.

Moreover, each language is a link with the particular landscape in which a people live.

Within Indigenous science the word itself has power. Conventional linguistics holds that the connection between a word and its referent is purely arbitrary. Thus, one of the fathers of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, distinguished between what he called signifiant ("the thing that signifies," or "the sound image") and signifié (the concept or thing that is being signified).

This question of the arbitrary nature of words goes back to the disputes of the Greek philosophers. Aristotle, for example, felt that names had no intrinsic existence and were no more than symbols for objects and concepts. On the other hand, Plato suggested that a certain intrinsic relationship existed between the name and the thing signified. This echoes the tradition that comes from several of the world's esoteric and mystical practices that certain names in themselves have power and significance.

There are also traditions of sacred languages - the languages in which the gods spoke to humans - in which each word has a perfect correspondence to the inner nature of the universe.

Within Indigenous science, to say something is to create an objective event and release a process of energetic vibrations that enter into relationships with the other powers and energies of nature. Thus, since every sound is an event of significance, a person must take responsibility for whatever he or she says.

Language was created by the Ancestors as a direct connection to nature. Words link man to the inner meaning of things.

Sa'ke'j Henderson has explained how in Mic Mag the names of trees are the sound that the wind makes as it moves through their leaves in the fall. The name of a tree is therefore far from arbitrary. It is based upon the direct experience of listening to a specific sound that refers to a particular tree for each of the different species of trees makes a different sound. It is, moreover, a sound made at that time of the year when the leaves begin to dry, a sound specific to a particular area of Turtle Island as the salt-laden wind blows in from the Atlantic Ocean.

Trees process, the manifestations of animating energies in a particular environment. Move to a different part of the world and the tree, in its deeper sense, is no longer the same. While the word dog changes in a purely arbitrary fashion as we drive across the frontier between the United States and Mexico, the sound vibration of the word for tree and the material manifestation of the process are all tied to the changing context of an actual landscape.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.223-4, 226-7

Those who support a post-structural understanding of language are often confronted with the following question: if language is constituted by a set of relationships among signifiers, how do you account for the relationship between language and the world?

The concern here is that if meaning is ascribed to the play of signs only, language will become free-floating to the extent that no empirical truth claims can be made anymore. Although this objection is usually motivated by a nostalgia for a coherent metanarrative capable of regulating the production of meaning, it does pose a question that deserves a careful answer.

[…] information from the environment has a direct, though non-determinate, influence on the system: it causes certain changes in the system, but it does not fully determine the nature of these changes.

Information from the environment interacts in a nonlinear way with information already stored in the system. (Bear in mind that the memory of the system is distributed, not iconic.) Incoming signals are mediated by the history of the system in such a way that it incorporates important new aspects, but resists unnecessary fluctuations.

The state of the system at any given time is thus the result of conditions in the environment, the history of the system and the effects that the system must have on its environment in order to perform its functions.

How does language in fact interact with the environment (the ‘world out there’)? Primarily through the users of language who have to interact with the environment in order to survive and operate in it. As a matter of fact, language is one of the most important tools we use to cope with the task. We try to make sense of our experiences, and in the process create and expand our language. This is not the result of an act by an abstract mind, nor a mere reflection of circumstances.

Meaningful language evolves in time through a self-organising process, suspended between active and passive, in which useful or effective forms of language survive, and obsolete forms decay.

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.125-6

If language can be described as a self-organising system, the problem of the relationship between language and the world is solved in a fairly sophisticated way.

The world has a direct causal influence on the meaning of words, but it does not determine the exact meaning of words. Meaning flows from a complex process of interaction between information from the world, on the one hand, and a web of already existing relationships, built up through previous interactions, on the other hand. This makes language a vital, evolving system, capable of coping with great complexity.

If certain aspects of the environment are of great importance, the system will organise itself towards a robust, accurate interpretation of these aspects. It will not waste its resources by allocating too much of it to terms that are used infrequently or are of little interest.

This kind of interpretation of language allows us to find an important place for the dynamics of trace and différance; it also leads us to acknowledge that the linguistic system will organise itself to a point of criticality where the maximum amount of meaning can be generated without becoming unanchored from the world.

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.126

Living Things and Dead Things

Mind Your Language

State / Process

Know Your Place

"Yes, my friend, there is something about Orders; one prefers living in their bosom rather than out on the periphery, let alone in exile [...]"

[Hermann Hesse]
The Glass Bead Game, p. 201

Decentralization is a prerequisite for the rekindling of community in Western society.

Mobility erodes community, but as we put down roots and feel attachment to a place, our human relationships deepen, become more secure, and - as they continue over time - more reliable.

The broader sense of self in traditional Ladakhi society contrasts with the individualism of Western culture. A Ladakhi's identity is to a great extent molded by close bonds with other people, and is reinforced by the Buddhist emphasis on interconnectedness.

People are supported in a network of relationships that spread in concentric circles around them - family, farm, neighbourhood, village. In the West we pride ourselves on our individualism, but sometimes individualism is a euphemism for isolation. We tend to believe that a person should be completely self-sufficient, that he or she should not need anybody else.

The closely knit relationships in Ladakh seem liberating rather than oppressive, and have forced me to reconsider the whole concept of freedom. This is not as surprising as it might appear. Psychological research is verifying the importance of intimate, reliable, and lasting relations with others in creating a positive self-image. We are beginning to recognize how this in turn is the foundation for healthy development.

Ladakhis score very highly in terms of self-image. It is not something conscious; it is perhaps closer to a total absence of self-doubt, a profound sense of security. This inner security breeds tolerance and an acceptance of others with all their differences.

[Helena Norberg-Hodge]
Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh, p.186-7

The process of social ordering [of Amish society] is embodied in the Ordnung. These regulations represent the consensus of the leaders and the endorsement of the members [...]

The Ordnung clarifies what is to be considered worldly and sinful, for to be worldly is to be lost.

Some of the rules have direct biblical support; others do not. Regulations that cannot be directly supported by biblical references are justified by reasoning that to do other would be worldly.

The old way is the better way.

A father who tried living in a newly formed Amish settlement "without the rigid traditions, where everything was figured out according to the Bible (or the understanding of the Bible)," found that "it didn't work." Following this experience he said, "I have a healthy respect for the traditions in the larger communities."

"[...] In spite of an outsider's view that Ordnung is a law, a bondage of suppression, the person who has learned to live within a respectful church Ordnung appreciates its value. It gives freedom of heart, peace of mind, and a clear conscience.

Such a person has actually more freedom, more liberty, and more privilege than those who would be bound to the outside."

[John A. Hostetler]
Amish Society, p. 82-4

I was with about fifteen Ladakhis and two students from Calcutta on the back of a truck taking us along the bumpy and dusty road from Zanskar.

As the journey went on, the students became restless and uncomfortable and began pushing at a middle-aged Ladakhi who had made a seat for himself out of a sack of vegetables.

Before long, the older man stood up so that the students - who were about twenty years younger than him - could sit down. When, after about two hours, we stopped for a rest, the students indicated to the Ladakhi that they wanted him to fetch water for them; he fetched the water. They then more or less ordered him to make a fire and boil tea for them.

He was effectively being treated as a servant - almost certainly for the first time in his life. Yet there was nothing remotely servile in his behaviour; he merely did what was asked of him as he might for a friend - without obsequiousness and with no loss of dignity. I was fuming, but he and the other Ladakhis, far from being angered or embarrassed by the way he was being treated, found it all amusing and nothing more.

The old man was so relaxed about who he was that he had no need to prove himself.

I have never met people who seem so healthy emotionally, so secure, as the Ladakhis. The reasons are, of course, complex and spring from a whole way of life and world view. But I am sure that the most important factor is the sense that you are part of something much larger than yourself, that you are inextricably connected to others and to your surroundings.

[Helena Norberg-Hodge]
Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh, p.84-5

It is clear that the rule of being oneself implies that one can speak of a “proper nature” for everyone, whatever it may be, as something well defined and recognisable. But this is problematic, especially at the present time.

It may have been less difficult in societies that did not know individualism, in traditional societies organised along groups and castes where the factors of heredity, birth, and environment favoured a high degree of internal unity and the differentiation of types, and where the natural articulations were reinforced and nurtured by customs, ethics, laws, and sometimes even by no less differentiated religious forms.

All this has long ceased to exist for modern Western man, and has long been “superseded” along the road of “liberty”; thus the average modern man is changeable, unstable, devoid of any real form. The Pauline and Faustian lament, “two souls, alas, live in my breast," is already an optimistic assumption; all too many have to admit, like a typical character in Hesse, that they have a multitude of souls!

One can see now how problematic is the very point that has hitherto seemed fixed: fidelity to oneself, the absolute, autonomous law based on one's own “being,” when it is formulated in general and abstract terms.

Everything is subject to debate—a situation accurately exemplified by characters in Dostoyevsky, like Raskolnikov or Stavrogin. At the moment when they are thrown back on their own naked will, trying to prove it to themselves with an absolute action, they collapse; they collapse precisely because they are divided beings, because they are deluded concerning their true nature and their real strength.

Their freedom is turned against them and destroys them; they fail at the very point at which they should have reaffirmed themselves in their depths they find nothing to sustain them and carry them forward.

[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p. 44-5

The important point is that against every form of ressentiment and social antagonism everyone should recognise and love his own station, one that fits his own nature, also recognising in this way the limits within which he can develop his own possibilities and achieve his own perfection, because an artisan that acquits himself perfectly in his function is without doubt superior to a king that rejects and does not live up to his dignity.

[Julius Evola]
‘Orientations’, VI

Critics of transactionalism argue that value lies in the expression of relations within the structure of a social totality. In this view, hierarchy is an integral part of value and may be by instigated not by struggle and competition for scarce resources but by different roles in the larger whole.

This interpretation of social value seems more relevant to the ethos of Pintupi hierarchy, which carries a tone of support rather than of coercion. Pintupi exhibit little interest in domination; the most prominent quality of their hierarchy is, rather, its contrast to the free, unrestrained, almost anarchic quality of daily life.

My analysis of Pintupi "politics," by which I mean the processes involved in the regulation and allocation of social value, starts with their conception of hierarchy as 'looking after” (kanyininpa). This cultural construct is basic to politics as locally understood. The view - and legitimation - of male hierarchy as nurturant depends on the capacity of older men to transmit valued ritual knowledge to younger men.

[Fred R. Myers]
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p.220

In a sense the use of English on the university level of education did not lead to its spread in Indian society but removed those who acquired it from that society, leaving them in a kind of barren ground which was neither Indian nor Western but hovered uncomfortably between the two.

The fact that knowledge of English and possession of a university degree could free one from the physical drudgery of Indian life by opening the door to public service or the professions created a veritable passion to obtain these keys (but only in a minority).

[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Buffer Fringe,’ p.101

Walk a Straight Line

Mono / Poly

Order / Chaos

Dependent / Independent

Nested in Tradition

Status Quo

Deep / Shallow

Everything is Connected

Touching Base

Know Your Place

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