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"Words of the Wise" |
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"For several reasons, the emergence of the new Pacific-Aerospace culture-ecology is related to the historical events of World War II. Hiroshima announced the beginnings of the Atomic Age, and the airplane industries of the West Coast were rather quickly transformed into aerospace technologies. With the postwar rise to greatness of Stanford and Berkeley, and with the emergence of Silicon Valley, the Pacific Shift of America from Europe to Japan and China was irresistible. "Perhaps in the next generation or two, a great artist from one of the cultures of the Pacific Rim will create the formative work of art for this new culture, and will do for the Pacific what Homer did long ago for the Mediterranean world. This imagined masterpiece may not be literary, for it is hard to deny that the rise of film, television and computer graphics have created a new sensibility that cannot be expressed in exclusively literary form. The Homeric epics were popular art forms meant to be recited at social gatherings. We should not fear that new popular art forms mean the death of literary culture. When oral culture encountered writing, literature was created. If literature encounters the video discs that have computer animation wed to music, literature will simply reincarnate into a new form; it will not die." "As catastrophe theory evolved into chao dynamics and continues to evolve into multidimensional topologies, and as film, television, and computer graphics become democratized through personal computers and VCRs, the right hemisphere of the brain is being stimulated by a new form of visual thinking that I prefer to call the return of 'hieroglyphic thinking'. This designation suggests a new synthesis of art, science, and religion. I may be wrong about the emergence of a new mentality, for there is much in genetic engineering and capitalistic ecology that can force nature and culture into mechanistic forms of control. The future may be an earth that is a space colony on earth: a canned civilization of total control and rational management. Since the larger ecology of Mind always eludes the controls of conscious purpose, and since wildness and catastrophes are nature's portection against the forms of rationalization that would make an ecology a closed system, I trust that nature has her Gaian resources to defend herself. If acid rain, the Greenhouse Effect, or other disasters from dioxin or genetic engineering continue to alter the environment drastically, then I believe that the new mentality will finds its kairos, its appropriate season of action. Transforming
History: A Curriculum for Cultural Evolution |
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