Tom Walker wrote:
[snip]
>
> http://ericdarton.net/index.html
Very nice resource.
>
> "Building skyscrapers is the nearest peacetime equivalent of war."
> - Col. William H. Starrett, Skyscrapers & the Men Who Build Them, 1928.
(You forgot about dams, and probably a bunch of other things.)
There is a point here that most persons will overlook
because it is an abuse that is taken as part of the way things
are rather than the way men make them be: I am referring to
The Charette
Architedtural workers work terrible long hours as a "deadline"
approaches -- as if they were mobilized as part of a war effort,
and they are indeed. That war is the bellum omnes contra omnia (sp?),
which we call "the free market". We have organized our society
as eternal universal strife, and we call it "freedom of enterprise".
We pride ourselves on "being men", on "taking it like a man", etc.
What does this mean? that our potentials for subtlety get
foreclosed by the formation of callouses which enable us to
endure harsh conditions -- and make us callous.
>
[snip]
> Both master-builders and bombers adhere to singleminded cataclysmic visions
> - either the creation of a bright, corporate future; or a return to the
> "fundamental" values of the past. Both visions are abstract projections of
> an ideal world which has nothing to do with the here-and-now.
>
> To them, people are insubstantial - the plan is what is real. When you think
> like this, whether you are a futurist or a fundamentalist, it becomes
> possible - even desirable - to push aside whomever and whatever gets in your
> way. You can justify anything without ever falling prey to doubt, or guilt.
[snip]
Hermann Broch (among others...) diagnosed the problem of our time as
the totalization of partial value systems. *An aspect* of life is
acted upon as if it was the whole. We have producers and
consumers, but both are adversarial decomposition products of whole
persons.
Nihilism is not a threat -- it is our fons et origo. Galaxies
may thrive on having lack holes at their center, but is that
the human[istic] way?
+\brad mccormick
