Lawrence DeBivort wrote:
>
> Good morning, everyone,
>
> Still struck by Ray's powerful language, "creating great soaring works of
> human imagination," I wonder whether we might not on this list take a shot
> a describing what such soaring visions might be in our view, and what that
> then might mean in terms of "building economies around such...."
>
> Would you be interested in doing this?
[snip]
Here's one for starters: An computer operating system, e.g.,
IBM's OS/360 -> MVS/370, or Microsoft's Windows NT | 2000 | XP,
or Unix. These projects are a lot more monumental than
medieval cathedrals. They are big enough to become the
"armatures" of [what is the plural of polis]?
I wrote about this when I was working in this area in IBM:
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/giftdoc.html
--
Jacob Bronowski's BBC/PBS TV series _The Ascent of Man_ remains
inspiring in this regard. Bronowski, who knew many of the
principals personally, described 20th century particle
physics as: The great collective work of art of the 20th century.
(But what about the lab techs? What about Rosalind Franklin? ?? ??? ....
--I am not criticizing Bronowski here, but merely trying to
stand on the shoulder of a giant.)
I think the story of The Tower of Babel in the Bible
merits rereading. The words in the story quite clearly
speak of a great cooperative endeavor of peers, *not*
masters and slaves or bosses and employees, not about
overweening hubristic pride, but about the dignity
of interlocutors in universalizing dialog (and, of course, also
about capital-P-Paranoia):
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/babelsig.html
A first step in a constructive direction is to
deconstruct the dichotomy between producer and consumer,
and to resurrect a word which seems to have fled
the earth due to repulsive force of the postmodernist
occurrence-complex [I cannot think of a more precise word
at the moment for this devolutionary "development" in
western culture]:
alienation (as in: alienated labor, etc.)
--
"The earth has become small,
and on it hops the Last Man,
who makes everything small....
"The Last Man lasts longest...."
(--Nietzscher, "Zarathustra's Prologue")
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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