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I heard an interesting broadcast on NPR this evening while driving home on the extinction of rock stars and the decentralization of culture. And it collided very prettily with an Aldous Huxley quote I've been fondling, and I thought I'd give the resultant thought-smash to you guys, because being de-brained by waitressing I find that I have nothing better to say.
First, the Huxley, from "Brave New World Revisited":
Science may be defined as the reduction of multiplicity to unity. It seeks to explain the endlessly diverse phenomena of nature by ignoring the uniqueness of particular events, concentrating on what they have in common and finaly abstracting some kind of "law," in terms of which they make sense and can be effectively dealt with...The wish to impose order upon confusion, to bring harmony out of dissonance and unity out of multiplicity is a kind of intellectual instinct, a primary and fundamental urge of the mind...
[moving into the sphere of society] Here the theoretical reduction of unmanageable multiplicity to comprehensible unity becomes the practical reduction of human diversity to subhuman uniformity, of freedom to servitude. In politics the equivalent of a fully developed scientific theory or philosophical system is a totalitarian dictatorship. In economics, the quivalent of a beautifully composed work of art is the smoothly running factory in which the workers are perfectly adjusted to the machines. The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification of despotism.
Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely co-operating individuals. But, though indispensable, organization can also be fatal. To much organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom.
The NPR report was lamenting the end of unified popular culture, talking about the way that my generation doesn't rally round its rock stars in the same way that previous ones did. And that we're fragmented, all in our own niches by ourselves. But what really rang out to me, in its very abscence, was the understanding than in order for there to be unity in culture certain things would have to be suppressed, either intentionally or just through neglect and lack for funding for new endeavors. In oder to have unity, some part of human multiplicity has to be sidelined. And that's what people who yearn for the good old days never seem to remember or talk about.
What do you think?
(Oh, and hopefully I'll be around more soon. The combination of a new job and no online computer of my own sort of killed my eljay-fu. But I bought a new laptop, to arrive within the week, and then look out intarwebs!)
First, the Huxley, from "Brave New World Revisited":
Science may be defined as the reduction of multiplicity to unity. It seeks to explain the endlessly diverse phenomena of nature by ignoring the uniqueness of particular events, concentrating on what they have in common and finaly abstracting some kind of "law," in terms of which they make sense and can be effectively dealt with...The wish to impose order upon confusion, to bring harmony out of dissonance and unity out of multiplicity is a kind of intellectual instinct, a primary and fundamental urge of the mind...
[moving into the sphere of society] Here the theoretical reduction of unmanageable multiplicity to comprehensible unity becomes the practical reduction of human diversity to subhuman uniformity, of freedom to servitude. In politics the equivalent of a fully developed scientific theory or philosophical system is a totalitarian dictatorship. In economics, the quivalent of a beautifully composed work of art is the smoothly running factory in which the workers are perfectly adjusted to the machines. The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification of despotism.
Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely co-operating individuals. But, though indispensable, organization can also be fatal. To much organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom.
The NPR report was lamenting the end of unified popular culture, talking about the way that my generation doesn't rally round its rock stars in the same way that previous ones did. And that we're fragmented, all in our own niches by ourselves. But what really rang out to me, in its very abscence, was the understanding than in order for there to be unity in culture certain things would have to be suppressed, either intentionally or just through neglect and lack for funding for new endeavors. In oder to have unity, some part of human multiplicity has to be sidelined. And that's what people who yearn for the good old days never seem to remember or talk about.
What do you think?
(Oh, and hopefully I'll be around more soon. The combination of a new job and no online computer of my own sort of killed my eljay-fu. But I bought a new laptop, to arrive within the week, and then look out intarwebs!)