On 2009-Feb-21, at 21:04, Jeffrey Hergan wrote:
So it's the ideas in the book that make the printing press valuable,
or the conversations held in the light that make bulb valuable.
So Stephen King is more important than the wheel, right?
Or, to put it differently, the US Constitution is a better
achievement than the paper it was written on.
Right?
I think I need more coffee...
Well in Ken Wilber's model, the material domain and the cultural
domain run in parallel, and he expressly depicts them as two halves of
the diagram to make the point that any attempt to reduce one side to
the other, in either direction, is destructive to understanding.
And nevertheless, the two sides are related. Broadly speaking,
agrarian technology was accompanied by agrarian mythic religious
culture. Modern technology is accompanied by modern thought, which
questions dogma. Freedom from dogma allowed rapid scientific progress.
Before people could truly question dogma, they needed to realise that
what they saw was a perspective. Renaissance art introduced the
conscious use of perspective, with lines originating from two points
on the horizon.
So the aesthetic, moral, and material domains are all interrelated.
"Guns don't kill people, people kill people" is an endless debate
trying to decide whether the gun or the person is more important. They
both are, although what's different is that you might be able to
change one and not the other. Earlier we came to the agreement that
actually, whilst we wanted to get rid of the gun, it's the people
themselves we were really hoping to change. I think that's actually a
new insight for us here.
When we were focussing on the gun, that's a similar problem to your
daughter's essay and Stephen King. I mean, the teachers are probably
going to be focussing on material things when reading you daughter's
essay. (Unless they are very arty in which case the material won't
matter to them.)
And our point is, that sure, material stuff is happening, but at the
same time, culture is happening. Ideas are happening, and aesthetic
feelings are happening. And these run in parallel with and are
interrelated with material things.
When we talk about 2-point perspective in the Renaissance, we can see
in hindsight that it was interrelated with rational scientific
progress. The difficulty with Stephen King is that he's still around
so it is not easy to see what he's related to materially.
Still, let's say we pick some aspect of his work, like the way horror
enters ordinary life and happens to ordinary people. It is not a thing
from outer space, it is right here next to you. It is that girl you
always teased. It is even inside you.
I'm not a film buff, so I've googled a quote by Kubrick on The Shining:
Stanley Kubrick: "I've always been interested in ESP and the
paranormal. In addition to the scientific experiments which have been
conducted suggesting that we are just short of conclusive proof of its
existence, I'm sure we've all had the experience of opening a book at
the exact page we're looking for, or thinking of a friend a moment
before they ring on the telephone. But The Shining didn't originate
from any particular desire to do a film about this. The manuscript of
the novel was sent to me by John Calley, of Warner Bros. I thought it
was one of the most ingenious and exciting stories of the genre I had
read. It seemed to strike an extraordinary balance between the
psychological and the supernatural in such a way as to lead you to
think that the supernatural would eventually be explained by the
psychological: "Jack must be imagining these things because he's
crazy". This allowed you to suspend your doubt of the supernatural
until you were so thoroughly into the story that you could accept it
almost without noticing."
One of the cool things about the arts is that they can be so cutting
edge, way out ahead of where science and technology is. We can imagine
the idea of life on another planet long before we develop the material
means to get there. And who knows, the fiction writer may have even
created the impetus to go explore.
The scientific detection, discovery, measurement, and understanding of
subtle energies would be an astounding and world changing phenomenon.
Even if subtle energies were only present in the close vicinity of a
living material body, it would have tremendous implications for health
and well being. Stephen King may simply have, through his writing and
imagination, shown us that we are much stranger and complex than we
dared accept. It may open our interest in really researching the so-
called "paranormal" and devising new ways to detect the previously
undetectable.
And I'm still curious why your daughter picked Stephen King.
Stefano
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