Looking Backward, Going Forward

As I begin to transform my old website Owldroppings into a more complete exploration of the concerns that show up in this blog (which will become a component of a newly realized Owl’s Farm: The Website), I keep running into questions about what I really want to think and write about.

After all, I’m about to turn seventy, an age I never thought I’d reach. So what does a seventy year-old former academic, wannabe political economist, sometime philosopher of technology, lapsed archaeologist, retired art and design history teacher, and compulsive writer do with what remains of her life?

Early on in my musings I realized that I want to stop being so grumpy. Even though I don’t have grandchildren, my siblings do, and so I do have a small genetic investment in the future. It might behoove me, therefore, to begin to consider better alternatives than seem to be available in the present political moment.

Owl’s Farm: The Blog has always been about utopia. It was inspired by two of the best utopian thinkers I ever ran across: William Morris and Yi-Fu Tuan. Morris was a celebrated designer and an early socialist, and Tuan is a humanistic geographer with a profound understanding of place. Both developed creative visions of the notion of home, which led to my explorations into its many meanings.

As I searched for a focus for the new iteration of the website, I realized that it still had to be about education, and should still embody the “teaching philosophy” I was required to articulate for my annual evaluations as a college instructor.  But it also needs to spend less time on the current state of education and more on locating what could improve it—especially since there are good models available.

In addition, instead of just complaining about current economic conditions, perhaps I should focus on locating bright spots on the horizon, like alternative energy solutions or promising community developments.

The website should also continue to provide resources for the curious, since former students still occasionally use it for the links. I’ll also archive my topical essays for courses I taught (not just art and design history, but philosophical perspectives on food, anthropology, culture, and the Arts and Crafts movement), and see if I can stay on top of issues relevant to them.   

All along this blog was meant to be an adjunct to my novel, More News From Nowhere. That, too, is in the process of being revised somewhat—now that I have the time to revisit its reason for being.  As a lifelong interdisciplinarian, I want to use the novel (and others in various stages of development) and the blog(s) as outlets for the results of curiosity. It’s often difficult to compartmentalize my many interests, but occasionally I can focus on a single aspect (museums, for example) and develop lines of inquiry that can be labeled. Hence: Owl’s Cabinet of Wonders. Other attempts (like The Owl of Athena, a blog on educational concerns) kept leaking into The Farm, and so were abandoned (although they, too, will be archived on the revised site). 

The ultimate aim now is fun—as much as is possible in this moment. I’m too old to keep wasting time being a complete curmudgeon. I can’t promise that I won’t ever go off on another grumpy rant again, or that sarcasm won’t sneak into my commentary on life, the universe, and everything. I am by nature a cynic, in its original sense. I’m dog-like: suspicious, reluctant to trust without reason (see my post from The Owl of Athena on the topic). But also both faithful and curious, and willing to explore new ideas and approaches.  

And yes, I can be a cranky old bitch. But I’ll try to do more Frisbee chasing and romping around in the garden, and less pissing on the flowers. I hope what I’ll have to offer is interesting, entertaining (in a very broad sense of the word), thoughtful, and educational. I also hope it will provide a sense of hope for the future, and tools for building more of a eu-topia than an ou-topia. I’d rather that we move toward a good place than continue to imagine what can only be a no-place, a place possible only in the imagination.

Wish me luck.

PS: owlfarmer.com is “live” but practically devoid of content. Design work will progress as I have time, depending on concurrent pursuits.

Image note: The photo is of Mount Whitney, taken in the Alabama Hills outside of Lone Pine, California, during our winter trip in 2015/16. Whenever I stayed with my Grandmother, I could see a more distant version of this image from her living room window.

Sheltering In Place

Last summer I spent my first weeks as a quasi-retired educator doing what I called "philosophy in the garden." This involved spending a couple of hours reading Mary Midgley or John Ruskin whilst sitting on comfy chairs out back with the puppies. Sometimes I read aloud to them (which no doubt made folks who walked by in the alley wonder about my sanity; but then, they probably already do), and sometimes I just sat and enjoyed not doing anything productive.

Just this week I came across several articles and/or blog posts about leisure (the sources are recorded in the latest Cabinet post), and revisited John Hodgkinson's Brave Old World for his advice on what to do in November ("Kill Pig"), which took me back to his page on The Idler (to which I used to describe in a digital edition, but it seems to have disappeared). I'd subscribe to the print edition, except that I'm trying to winnow down my stacks of periodicals I can't bear to toss by trying to get at as many as possible online. So I'll just mosey by every once in a while, and read his books. It is, in fact, time to read the chapter on December: "Feast."

And just a couple of days ago, I wrote in the Cabinet about Maria Popova's wonderful page called Brain Pickings, in which she discusses Josef Pieper's book (1948), Leisure: The Basis of Culture. So even if I'm not now hanging about at the bottom of the garden with puppies (they're snoozing here in the study with me), I'm still philosophizing about doing very little in the traditional sense of work.

Given the state of the world at the moment, I might also seem to be hunkering down, trying to stay away from it all.  It's not just the blowing people up and the guns, although that's probably not a bad reason to stay home and out of it, but the sheer idiocy that seems to be taking over in the public sphere.  Donald Trump's ridiculous pomposity; Ben Carson's willful ignorance; everyone else's ideological shortsightedness and terror at the possibility of losing voters if they admit that climate change isn't just a communist plot. 

Thirty years ago I'd be out doing something--volunteering, teaching, trying to combat the Dark Side in imaginative ways. But now I'm not. I'm reading more, writing more, and cooking more, fighting personal battles against household food waste, mouse infestations, dreary days, and (twice a week) treading educational water by teaching and trying to prepare lessons that will engage and inspire. The Beloved Spouse has it much harder, because rather than trying to teach art history to art students, he's trying to teach students to think when they flat out don't want to. So, two years down the line, the plan is for him to retire and for us to do something more enjoyable with the rest of our lives.

And so the decision that faces us is whether to shelter in place (stay here and do the best we can in a part of the world that seems to abhor the life of the mind, but where we have a well-loved daughter and a house), or to move to somewhere, not here. I've written about the fantasies (Living In Interesting Times), but my desires ebb and flow as we weigh the possibilities. For example, for a time we were intrigued by the idea of Montana, but realized that it's too far away from either child and any family, and that we'd be more isolated than we might really want to be. So now the exploration of possibilities has moved west, to eastern Washington State, or perhaps Oregon, where we have family and friends, or even to Owens Valley, should a reasonable place show up when/if we start thinking seriously about any of this. But the ties that bind us here--all the work on the house, the proximity to other family--are pretty compelling, especially when I'm feeling particularly tired, and particularly (mentally) lazy.

This probably seems extremely trivial and self-serving in the moment. But having spent some serious time fighting the good fight, trying to help make meaningful changes, and ultimately achieving only very small victories, I think we might have earned a respite. Some of our (admittedly few) friends feel much the same way, so perhaps these sentiments really reflect a coming of (old) age, or another rite of passage. 

Or, they might simply stem from more than a week of dreary, driving rain, mud, soggy leaves, and post-Thanksgiving capitalist overload.  We did go out over the weekend--but only to buy coffee filters and have a nice lunch-time conversation after not leaving the house for six days. But we didn't participate in any of the buying frenzy that doesn't even wait for the holiday to end. Last Thursday's binge-watching of the original Star Wars films and an appropriately themed Thanksgiving meal with the Daughter, the Boyfriend, and the Dog provided a bit of an anodyne to the weather-related malaise. And that's probably reason enough to tick the "shelter" column on the decision list. By the time we can actually do anything, maybe we'll have built a strong enough argument for one or the other that the final choice won't seem nearly as onerous as it does now.

Summer Is Icumen In

Rather than celebrating the coming of this particular season with Medieval rapture, I'm tempted to substitute Ezra Pound's snitty little salute to winter ("Lhud sing goddam!") in place of "Lhud sing cuccu!" This is, after all, Texas, and it's only by the grace of some current climatic weirdness that we're not slow-cooking in our own juices already.

I'm generally a bit ambivalent about summer anyway, because I fully realize that what's actually happening is that the daylight hours are now beginning their long decline toward the winter solstice,  the "darkest evening of the year," and the end of my 67th--even though I'm "only" 66 (and a half) at the moment.

Until I read Akiko Busch's op-ed post in the New York Times last Friday (The Solstice Blues), I thought I was alone in not necessarily seeing this moment as some grand seasonal celebratory event:

The moment the sun reaches its farthest point north of the Equator today is the moment the light starts to fade, waning more each day for the following six months. If the summer solstice doesn’t signal the arrival of winter, surely it heralds the gradual lessening of light, and with that, often, an incremental decline in disposition. 

In North Texas, the end of June is usually marked by the onset of 100-degree days; but this year we've been treated to a bit of rain and temperatures hovering around 90 during daylight hours and low enough at night to sleep without air conditioning. Even the dogs don't seem all that uncomfortable with the humidity--although we do tend to hole up in a small room with a window unit to watch TV in the late afternoon/evening, by which time the house has heated up enough to make the humid air a bit heavy.  Still, by bedtime, it's tolerable again; with a breeze it's even better, because the bedroom has windows on three sides.

When I was looking for an image to illustrate this post, I had wheat in mind for several reasons. For one, a search for "summer" on Wikimedia Commons inevitably produces photos of wheat. In addition, I'm working on a new philosophical perspectives course called "Food and Culture," and my first lecture involves the early history of human victuals--inevitably involving the ancestors of modern wheat. Since a later topic in the course will consider food and art (or food in art), I snapped up the Carl Larsson painting (which I've probably used before) because it touches on both, and because his stuff always makes me think of utopia.

The Food and Culture course has been (ahem) cooking in my brain for several years, but it was only recently that I realized I could teach it without having to go through the bureaucratic effort involved in getting a new course accepted.  Years ago, when I helped design the general studies offerings for our baccalaureate program, I pinched an idea from SUNY Stony Brook and crafted a course called "Philosophical Perspectives," thinking that whatever philosophical types we might hire could then teach what they knew, from within whatever intellectual context they were trained.  I've taught several topics under this catch-all rubric (The Arts and Crafts Movement, Pioneers of Modern Design, and Technology and Utopia), and it finally occurred to me last quarter that Food and Culture could easily fit under the umbrella.

As it turns out, I'm only catching up with a trend that's been evolving since the '90s, and even in the immediate region there's a Philosophy of Food project developing out of the University of North Texas. What this means is that although I'm not exactly on the cutting edge of things, I can take advantage of the work people are already doing in order to locate resources for my students (30 as of the last time I checked). It also means that thinking about food and its cultural meanings is being taken more seriously than it was at first. In a Chronicle of Higher Education article I had saved from 1999, it was clear that the scholarly value of food-studies was somewhat suspect. Since then, however, a looming variety of food crises (scarcity, waste, obesity, malnutrition, and myriad others) has forced folks to start talking about the many ramifications of food consumption, including the effects of global climate change on the future of food.

William Morris's effort to move the education of desire into the center of our consciousness about how we live (and how we might live) fits squarely into the aims of my course: to get students to start thinking about the difference between need and want, and how understanding that difference can inform sustainable futures.  I'm not sure how this lot will respond to having to read and write and think about something most of them don't consider except at mealtime. But there's some potential here to poke a stick into complacency.  Since most of those enrolled are in a culinary management program, the results could be quite interesting.

We will, of course, be suffering through the worst part of this region's summer weather. But we'll be doing so within an overly air-conditioned classroom, sucking down cold bottled water, iced tea, diet sodas, and energy drinks--matters I'll have to design another course to deal with.

Image credit: Carl Larsson (1853-1919),  Summer (date unknown). Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Niklas Nordblad.

Engaging Chaos

As time goes on, I'm finding it more and more difficult to get a handle on things. It's as if the flow is going by so fast that I when I reach into the stream, I only manage to grab a handful of water. Meanwhile, all sorts of detritus is washing up on the banks, and none of it makes much sense.

I keep trying to tidy up the house, but get distracted or run out of steam before anything significant gets done. The holidays weren't much help, because I spent most of my time off constructing a new course (Technology and Utopia) and updating the old ones. I began to wonder why the only thing I could accomplish was related to what I was supposed to be vacationing from.

During this last week, our "faculty development" period before the new quarter starts on Monday, I discussed the problem with a couple of colleagues, and we agreed that the combination of advancing age and an ever-increasing work load seems to suck the psychic energy right out of a person. And since I'm older than most of the people I work with, I seem to notice it more than they do.

Admittedly, I've taken on quite a bit. Nearly four years ago, when I started this blog, I was also participating in an online forum. I joined another when it became apparent that I'd have to have heart surgery again. The spin-off blogs (the Cabinet and The Owl of Athena) probably didn't expand the load because I soon realized that I wasn't going to be able to maintain them all with any regularity. Since then, though, my total output has diminished, and the forums are all but abandoned. I do wonder, as a result, how anyone who's on Facebook manages do do anything at all.

My selectivity toward social media has paid off to some extent. Not "doing" the Facebook thing (nor Twitter, which I find preposterous) may have been my wisest choice. I still keep hoping that if I can just get the course prep all snugged up, I'll have more time to write. I did, after all, manage to get a short story written in November for a contest I never entered. But while I'm teaching, most of my (remaining) little gray cells are tied up with the growing problem of engaging students who want less and less to do with what I teach.

If it weren't for the small number of adoring (and, I might say, adorable in their own way) current and former student acolytes, I might be tempted hang up my guns altogether. I'm pretty sure I won't end up watching soaps and eating bonbons all day when I retire, but the prospect of not teaching still seems more empty than enticing. Every now and then, too, I manage to come up with an idea that works with the over-connected generation, and that buys me breathing room.

As the new year rolled in the urge to organize increased: clear off the desk, get things in order around the house, and rid myself of distracting clutter. But at heart I'm still an archaeologist, and the piles of stuff represent layers of discovery--strata that I can carefully mine for scribbled notes and pages stuck into stacked books that record ideas gleaned from the op/ed pages of the newspapers I still make time to read. There are useful artifacts to be discovered, deposited during decades of enjoying the life of the mind. The spirit is still willing, at least until the flesh poops out.

One tangible result of having accumulated the thousands of books, piles of notebooks, and collections of tear sheets from magazines I've managed to recycle, is that constructing the new course has been an adventure in serendipity. One day I walk by a bookshelf and my eye lights on a book I haven't picked up in years. I sit down to leaf through my marginalia (few books I own aren't marked up with comments and my personal set of hieroglyphs to indicate important passages) and rediscover something useful. Or the end notes in an essay lead me to other forgotten works that reveal further fodder for the course. And so it goes.

The slow, episodic excavation of what amounts to an intellectual midden has allowed the new course to evolve into a reasonably organized, well-focused introduction to philosophy and how it works, as well as how we can use it to understand an increasingly technologized world. I get to ask my students to wrestle with questions I wonder about all the time, and I'll probably learn a great deal from their contributions. If the course numbers hold through today (fourteen), I'll get my first real seminar in sixteen years.

I've begun to think of my desk as a metaphor for my brain: it seems to be muddled, but it has its own internal coherence and logic. I still have to clear it off and sort things out, but that's the kind of cataloging process I love--and it may enrich the new course even further, as I uncover more forgotten bits under layers of more recently encountered material.

As an added bonus, by Monday I'll have opened up enough space to hold the new piles that are sure to build up over the next eleven weeks.

Why there is something rather than nothing

This last week, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries concerning the concept of broken symmetry. The awardees, Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi, and Toshihide Maskawa, were all born in Japan, but Nambu (who garnered half of the prize) is a US citizen and works out of the Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago.

Now what, one might thoughtfully ask, has this got to do with home and hearth?

For one thing, these three gentlemen figured out why it is that we can even exist in this universe. At all. Broken symmetry is one of those ideas that's actually central to a theory of everything, in that it answers the question of why is there something rather than nothing--a question raised primarily in theological circles and regarded by some as a central issue in philosophy. This question never really perplexed me particularly because 1) Who cares? I mean, there is something, so why is why a problem? and 2) If there is a problem, physicists will certainly figure it out eventually.

And, indeed, these three guys did. The basic idea as explained on All Things Considered the other day, is that if there were perfect symmetry between matter and anti matter, nothing would exist because the two would cancel one another out. But the fact that the symmetry was broken, and there's more matter than anti matter, is why there's stuff rather than no stuff.

I can't even begin to understand all the forces involved in this, or even the basic physics underlying the process. But the Wikipedia article on spontaneous symmetry breaking is pretty helpful, and so is PhysOrg's article, Broken Symmetry: Answering the Solace of Quantum.

Were it not for this particular phenomenon, I wouldn't have to worry about learning to love the prairie. I suppose I could wax all kinds of poetic about what it all means, but for the moment, I'm just happy that these three men were finally recognized for work that helps me understand my universe just a little bit better.

Now, if CERN can get the Large Hadron Collider back online, it will have been a good year for particle physics.

Image credit: Big Bang, by Cédric Sorel, via Wikimedia Commons.

Taking Care of the Roots

I just read Pico Iyer's short essay in Orion, "The Inner Climate," about global warming, and the necessity to gauge our internal temperature as well as that of the local climate. This was an especially timely happenstance, because the weather's started warming up again and my snarkiness level is going up with the temperature.

Iyer's thesis revolves around the notion that in order for us to effect change in the physical environment, we have to make some changes in the philosophical climate:

Action without reflection is what got us into this mess in the first place, and the only answer is not action, but, first, clearer reflection.

As I look around, at the superficial evidence of change (I can, for example, see my blue recycling trash bin from where I type), there seems to be a great deal of it going on. I could--and may still do--post on what my town is touting in the way of "green living," what with its McKinney Green Building, its model elementary schools, its "green" Walmart, and its snappy new logo ("McKinney--Unique By Nature").

But it's clearly external. I can't imagine for a minute that most of the neighbors who use their blue bins are doing it out of any deep philosophical understanding of what human beings have wrought. Many are using them because their kids are urging them to, or because it's kind of trendy (like buying organic produce--at least until the price makes a dent in the fashion budget). A couple of houses have been ticketed for using their blue bins as extra trash bins (the bigger green ones). Some houses--smaller than ours, with only two or three people living in them--have two green bins they fill up weekly (we used to put ours out twice a month; now it's down to maybe once because we can now recycle most of our waste). The only way they'll really begin to stop buying over-packaged merchandise and throwing all that stuff away is if it starts hurting them in the pocketbook. Capitalism has done this to us: consume more and more to help the economy. But put the packaging in the recycle bin whenever possible.

If the oil companies weren't rolling in their profits, and bitching about new drilling sites (when they're not drilling the places they've already got access to), I'd be happy that gas prices are hovering around $4 per gallon. It's got me to increase my mileage by about 4 mpg (simply by slowing down to 60 and using cruise control whenever possible) and combine necessary shopping with trips to and from work. High gas prices may actually encourage the city of Allen to rethink its participation in the local rapid transit consortium, which would mean that we'd hop on that bandwagon, too (Allen is the next town south, and without its participation, McKinney can't get train service this far north).

But that's just it. As a nation we are reluctant to do anything simply because it's the right thing to do; we've clogged our ears with iPod buds, turned on the TV, the computer, the video game, and tuned out reflection. Thinking makes us uncomfortable, so we don't do it. Until this aspect of our collective experience changes, efforts to do anything substantial to save the planet or to prevent political catastrophe will continue to be cosmetic and, in the end, they won't work.

We need what Tom Kuhn would call a paradigm shift. And maybe, if things get bad enough, the evidence in favor of a philosophical shift--from rampant consumerism to responsible stewardship; from rabid partisanship to true community--might tip us over the edge. We might reconsider our position as Lords of the Earth and begin to see ourselves as just one species, one political entity, among many, but with power that requires vigilant reflection to wield properly.

Take care of the roots, says Iyer, and the flowers will take care of themselves.

Photo credit: "Bluebonnets and Fence" by Observer12 on Wikimedia Commons. I loved the juxtaposition of the state flower with the barbed wire--it says a great deal about Texas.

Golf, Life, and Metaphor

An overhead shot of the Royal Birkdale golf course in Southport, England, looks like a post-glacial landscape: swales and valleys amid gorse-covered dunes. It's a veritable topographical map of the game of golf, and an emblem for the true nature of the game. The photo is of Annika Sorenstam at the approach to the 10th green, during the 2005 Women's Open (the only shot of the course I could obtain legally).

The 2008 Open Championship is also being played on this dramatic stretch of British coast, where the English sand meets the Irish Sea, and it promises to be every bit as exciting as previous tournaments where I like best to watch the game.

"Exciting? Golf? Well, maybe, but Tiger's not there this year, so what's the big deal?" scoff the scoffers.

I'm afraid I'm a bit of a purist, and although I'll watch golf played anywhere, I've been known to refer to the way it's played on municipal golf courses around here in pejorative terms ("sissy golf" is one of the more polite). Maybe it's the Scot in me, but I prefer the wild, rugged, coastal links courses in Great Britain to any of the manicured pretty-boy courses in the U.S.

The wind and rain blow, the clouds lower, the bunkers are real traps, not baby beaches, and the water hazards can pitch a leader out of the top ten in a few strokes. In today's third round, the wind is the main factor, making it difficult for players to mark their balls on some of the greens. The sun's gorgeous, but shots of the sea give you a pretty good idea of just how tough things are going to be later in the day. K. J. Choi leads at the moment, and he's the only player under par.

So why am I yapping away about a game that I don't play (I think I've actually held a golf club in my hand once or twice) in a blog that purports to explore things philosophical? Because golf, like baseball, is metaphor writ large. In fact, I've sometimes shown The Legend of Bagger Vance in humanities classes, because of what it tells us about the nature and scope of myth itself. Based on the book by Steven Pressfield (who based it on the Bhagavad Gita, one of the sacred Hindu scriptures), the film (directed by Robert Redford) pits man against himself as he strives for meaning in lfe. As Bagger Vance (played by Will Smith) says about golf, "it's the only game in which you can call a penalty on yourself."

Golf, especially on a links course, provides lessons in a variety of skills I'd love to see my students develop: tenacity, concentration, patience, physical and mental stamina, fine-tuned technique, and adaptability. Grace in competition is a hallmark of the great players (Tiger Woods, of course, comes immediately to mind), but the real competition is between the player and his or her own mind. Young and old can compete in it; among today's leaders are K. J. Choi (38) and Greg Norman (53), along with Rocco Mediate (46) and Camilo Villegas (26) in the final two pairings for the third round. It's as much a mental game as a physical one, and a tournament can be won by both skill and will.

I was highly amused the other day to notice that the story line in the comic strip Judge Parker (choose July 18 and 19 on the link) is beginning to focus on golf, and that one of the characters is touting Harvey Pennick's treatise on life and golf, his Little Red Book. I've given it to duffers more than once, and it, like Bagger Vance, has as much to say about being human as about playing golf.

But golf is also about landscape, and especially on links courses, it's about nature's interaction with human design. To me, it's silly to see green grass in the middle of the desert (as in Las Vegas or Palm Springs), but the courses in Britain symbolize the human experience of adapting to the land. At the margins of the groomed fairways and greens lie the natural scrub, heather, gorse, beach grass, and other vegetation into which the course has been carved. The bunkers are cut into the underlying sand, and dug deeply to present a real challenge to the player whose ball wanders off the green or lands in one from the fairway. The weather in Britain also changes so rapidly that the character of play can be altered in a few minutes. As I type, the clouds are moving in from the sea, and the jackets are coming on in the gallery.

Golf can, in fact, be played under almost any conditions. The tougher the course and the weather, the hardier the folk it attracts. In More News From Nowhere, my characters play a form of desert golf, and folks apparently even play golf in Greenland (see above) in circumstances that must surely test one's grit.

I've never understood people who find precision-based games like golf to be tedious and/or boring. The character and skill of the players, and the battles of wills that often ensue, are plenty exciting for me, and watching the Open Championship gives me a chance to see talented human beings matching their wits against nature. Sports, for many, are tantamount to religious experiences, and it's easier for me to see this in Britain in July than at almost any other time of year--except, perhaps, during the World Series.

Photos: Annika Sorenstam at the approach to the 10th green at Royal Birkdale during the 2005 Women's British Open Pro-Am (modified), by Cath Mudford. Golf in Greenland (modified), by Graphicos. Both from Wikimedia Commons.

Ned Ludd's Bad Rap

Back when I was seriously formulating a dissertation, before I got tired (finally, at about 45 years of age) of being a graduate student, I was trying very hard to be a philosopher of technology. This, to me, provided a focus that made sense of the enormous variety of courses I'd taken (in both the social and natural sciences, as well as in the humanities) over some (then) 25 years of higher education.

It made sense to me that if one of the things that helped us define ourselves was our use of tools (for everything from hunting and preparing our food to expressing ourselves in art and music), then we ought to be able to examine critically the uses we make of these tools, and to assess their impact not only on ourselves, but on our fellow beings--animal, vegetable, and even mineral. When I first started looking around at the developing fields of technology assessment, environmental ethics (now more broadly characterized as environmental philosophy), and other branches of philosophy (mostly pragmatism and the Continental tradition), I wondered why there wasn't a more coordinated effort to study questions that seemed to be on everyone's minds: what are we doing to ourselves?

Some folks were, in fact, writing about this very question, and I discovered them when I started thinking seriously about what human beings were up to. Continental philosophy had, in fact, produced one of the most enduring critiques in 1954, when Martin Heidegger published his essay "The Question Concerning Technology." Even earlier, Karl Marx, John Dewey, Lewis Mumford, and William Morris (among many others) had written about technology in philosophical terms. The idea of questioning technology, I discovered, had been around since the Greeks. I wasn't exactly on to something new.

Nonetheless, pursuing the subject led me deeply into Morris and his work on the technologies of art and design, and on the social and political aspects of active critique. Some folks, it seemed, hadn't just written about this stuff--they went out and tried to whack people on the side of the head to try to get them to think about where all these new machines (steam engines, power looms) were leading us. Hence the notion of sabotage (and the rather odd choice of image to illustrate this post), perhaps related to the development of the Luddite movement during the Industrial Revolution.

Of course, terms like "sabotage" and "Luddite" carry primarily negative connotations these days, but their origins lay in the act of criticizing technologies--not in terrorism or the refusal to immediately adopt every damned toy that comes on the market. My question is this: How much different might the world be today if we actually stopped to think about new tools, and took a bit of time to imagine where they might lead?

I'm absolutely convinced that the manifold problems associated with the internet, for example, would not have arisen if we hadn't all jumped higgeldy piggeldy onto the bandwagon, brandishing our cherished American gospel of individualism and waving our technical superiority, trying to convince the rest of the world that if it wants to join the future, it had better become like us. Only it's not just us--it's the entire West (trying to be like us--or perhaps trying to convince themselves that they were like us before we were). The impact of computer technology alone, from manufacture to use, on the rest of the world has created such rapid and rampant change that nobody has a choice about it any more. Traditional tribal peoples all over the globe are (thanks to Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative) being introduced to the internet, and their children are being seduced by technology in the name of "progress" and "modernity" and the inevitability of globalization. The real crime here is that nobody asked them if they wanted it. We in the West are all for freedom of choice (walk down the supermarket cereal aisle to see where that's led us), but only when it comes to "choosing" which brand of computer to buy--not choosing whether or not to buy them in the first place.

The irony of the market, of course, is that choice exists only in the beginning. The "winning" technology eventually takes over (VHS beats out Betamax; DVDs beat out VHS; Blue Ray beats out HD DVD), and then those of us who bought into the "wrong" technology are left with stacks of obsolete, expensive crap that the conscientious person has to agonize over what to do with, and those who don't give a damn simply dump into the landfill.

I held out on using a cellular telephone for much longer than most (although I did own one briefly, about ten years ago, while my mother was still alive and under my care). It was only my daughter's emergency surgery a couple of months ago, and the ensuing difficulty of trying to contact me, that I finally acquiesced. And I didn't just buy a little pay-as-you-go model as I had originally planned. I bought an iPhone, because this way I could convince myself that I wasn't buying a phone--I was buying a little tiny laptop. In fact, most of what I use it for is checking e-mail, so it doesn't seem quite so much like selling out.

But of course I have sold out. I became a techno-whore when I bought that Commodore 64 back in the eighties and stopped writing my essays out by hand and then typing them on an electric typewriter. I was convinced, like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, and the rest of the Whole Earth crowd on The Well (which I never did join, however) that the internet was going to bind people together and make the world a better place. Our optimism was a bit over-frought, as Lee Siegel has rather succinctly pointed out in his new book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. If only we had thought it through a bit more carefully.

Now, I have to admit that there are things about the internet that I love. I truly enjoy writing this blog, and doing so actually forces me to think more carefully about the world and what's going on in it. It allowed me to publish my book without having to sell myself or pander to the whims of the book trade. I've also made some good friends that I'd never have even come in contact with without the rapid development of internet communication devices and programs. Best of all, I enjoyed a long and lively correspondence with my father in the years before he died, which would certainly never have happened otherwise because I'm so lousy with the phone and so bad at getting around to writing letters.

But this is only one technology, really, as all-encompassing and pervasive as it is. We don't tend to think seriously about the consequences of anything we do: cloning, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, nuclear power (well, that does cause some contemplation, thanks to Chernobyl). Unless we endure some whacking great disaster related to one or all of the above, we're not even likely to discuss potential problems before they're already out of our hands entirely. Anyone who does ask questions is an alarmist, or worse: a Luddite.

In her sort-of utopian novel, Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Leguin describes technology as "morally dangerous." The computers are all located somewhere in a city, most people live in low-impact rural enclaves, and even solar-powered electricity is looked upon with suspicion. As she explains in an appendix on practices, the "arts of the uses of the energies of sun, wind, water, electricity, and the combinations of things to make other things are all practices of exchange. They want vigilance and clarity of mind, a bright imagination, modesty, attention to detail and to implication, strength, and courage" (479). Imagine how different the world would be if we became equally mindful about the technologies we now so thoughtlessly pursue, oblivious as we are to the varieties of potential--not just the prophesied advantages.

Thanks to the wonders of technology, I'm still alive and able to wallow in my low-fi Luddism. I'm fully aware that were I to move to the valley in my own utopia, I'd last a couple of years at best, because I'm so dependent on the drugs that mitigate my unfortunate combination of genes (and my sedentary way of life, pounding away at a computer keyboard rather than charging around the garden as I should be doing). But that doesn't mean that it's a useless exercise, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing much more thinking about technological consequences, much more frequently.

To some extent, we are. The back-to-the-land movement that came out of the sixties has become more sophisticated and has begun to focus on permaculture and sustainability. "Green" blogs and websites abound (some are noted in my sidebar entries). People are more interested in the quality of their food, and the market is responding, at least on a small scale. But I did discover, while conducting a bit of background research for this blog, one ominous sign. The U. S. Government office of technology assessment has closed. I'm not sure whether it ever accomplished anything anyway, but if we're officially closing up shop in this regard, it makes one wonder whether Our Guys in Washington have permanently given up thinking about consequences, or whether it's just a temporary blip. It'll be interesting to see what happens after November.

We should not, however, need a government agency to do our thinking for us. We really need to be asking questions ourselves, every time we make a purchase, especially of the latest high-tech gadget. What went into its making? Did any being or environment suffer or die as a result of its manufacture? Will this object (or complex of objects) truly enhance my life? How will it affect my relationships with my family and friends? My ecological footprint? How long will it last? Does it have the potential to cause social or environmental harm? Do I really need it? It wouldn't hurt to treat any technology we adopt as if it were potentially dangerous not only to our physical selves, but to our moral being.

Heidegger himself put it best, at the end of "The Question Concerning Technology": "The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought."

Photo: Panthouse's own clogs (modified), from Wikimedia Commons.
Citation: Ursula K. Leguin, Always Coming Home. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.

Happiness is Bliss?

I once helped run a campaign for student government president at UC Riverside on behalf of a guy named Larry Bliss. Clever person and half-assed artist that I am, I ripped off Charles Shulz’s dancing Snoopy and under it drew (in cute ‘60s-style balloon letters) the slogan that I’m using to (sort-of) title this post. I don’t even remember if Bliss won the election, but I’m assured by the alumni magazine that he’s alive and well.

As usual, the urge-to-post is prompted by a confluence of newspaper articles and NPR broadcasts, together with latent notions brought to mind by snow and the realization that we’re not going to be able to escape north Texas after all, at least until summer.

I spent the entire day yesterday calculating a route, distances, and time for our proposed trip to California in a couple of weeks. I had made it only to Cathedral Gorge in eastern Nevada by suppertime, when my husband discovered that because of a mix-up in dates, we wouldn’t be able to go after all. It turns out that his spring break and mine do not overlap as we had originally thought, and he would miss two important tennis tournaments. So, instead of letting the players and the other coach down, we decided to postpone the trip, and I was plunged into a fit of melancholy that lasted only until snow started falling a couple of hours later.

This morning there is a six-inch deep layer in some parts of the yard (actual snowdrifts!), and the puppies—who haven’t seen snow since they were infants—are ecstatic. That last time, on Valentine’s Day four years ago, coincided with my last trip to see my father before he died, so that memory is rather bittersweet. I thought of him when I looked out and saw the ancient metate that has been in our family for nearly a hundred years, now ensconced in my back yard, and looking a bit like a caldera, with its rim covered with snow; he would have loved the picture I took with my new iPhone (yes, I know; another Luddite bites the dust).

As I settled into the Comfy Chair and began to read the paper, I came across mention of Eric Wilson’s new book, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy. I’d heard a brief bit of it on All Things Considered last month, but (because I have yet to start carrying a note pad in the car) had forgotten about it. I also remembered hearing about Eric Weiner's travelogue, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World, on Weekend Edition, and although I've yet to read either book, I was pleased to note that the world may not be as full of happiness-addicts as I had feared. Wilson's book, especially, seems to have garnered some interesting responses, from a blog for Moms to Book Forum, so it's got my interest piqued. Now I'm going to have to read both of them.

I have long been intrigued by the attractions of melancholy and the improbability of a sovereign nation’s having been founded on some foggy idea of insuring “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—none of which it could actually guarantee. Utopian literature often focuses on an equally fuzzy notion that everyone should be “happy,” and this is one of the stumbling blocks to writing about any kind of “ideal” society. I have also long been disturbed by the often vapid expressions of people who claim to have completed their lives by having found Jesus (or Buddha, or the Way), as if all the struggle involved in actually living (including its pains as well as its joys) were something to be done away with. Perhaps our collective reluctance to embrace the “down” along with the “up” is what has prompted pharmaceutical companies to keep inventing drugs to “cure” every minor ache and pain, as if to numb us from reality like Soma did in Brave New World. (As an aside, there actually is a drug called Soma, and it looks familiar to those of us who have read Huxley’s quintessentially dystopian novel.)

If, as I also read this morning (in a review of the new Fox series, New Amsterdam), death is what makes life meaningful (the protagonist calls it “God’s joke”), surely the absence of happiness is what makes happiness mean anything at all. Philosophical happiness, in fact, seldom has anything to do with the feel-good sensibilities of self-help books. It’s about being intellectually fulfilled—recognizing the good, even if one can’t actually attain it (Plato). Rather than seeking to forget about death (The Ultimate Sad Thing), philosophers tend to find in it a reason for living. Martin Heidegger’s term Sein zum Tode (being-toward-death), for example, actually describes what it means to be human: the human being is the only one aware of its own mortality.

In my utopia, happiness does not describe a blissful state of existence. I’m not sure I’ve even used the word in the story. What my characters try to build is a world in which people can exist without all of the artificial angst-makers the modern world presents: pollution, inequality, terror, greed, environmental degradation, violence, racism, and the like. Their freedom lies in the ability to do what people need to do, and to live meaningful, creative, fulfilling lives that center on be-ing, and not on the denial of death.

Happiness is a slippery notion, and I welcome books that buck the trend of trying to guide people out of “negativity” by urging them not to be “cynical” or “pessimistic,” or by developing step-by-step programs that earn their authors untold wealth by fleecing people who’d rather not think. Thinking is difficult and frequently uncomfortable, but it keeps the mind alive. Certainty is unattainable (and probably not any more desirable than blissful happiness), but the search for understanding is boundlessly rewarding. All the “definitions” of happiness promoted by popular culture seem to suggest that one should choose to be a contented fool, rather than a discontented Socrates.

And so I go forth to wallow in my uncertainty (Clinton or Obama?), and to mull over my delayed escape from Texas. I can, however, assuage my melancholy by planning to spend the time re-glazing needy windows and planting my new garden. And I can go out and watch the puppies, contented fools that they are, and ignorant of death and destruction, while they romp in the snow—which is, sad to say, melting as I type.

Photos: Chinaberries laden with snow; my grandmother's metate.

Thinking About Nowhere

Since I started this blog, I’ve spent quite a bit of time ruminating about different aspects of utopian vs. dystopian “life,” but I haven’t said much about what a utopia might actually “look” like, or what might go on there.

In part that’s because I’m still working on the book that prompted the blog, in preparation for putting it online (I bought the domains last weekend, actually). But since the book is in more or less its final form, I’ve begun to think about its implications, and how implementing it might actually happen. Throughout the time I’ve been interested in the idea of a good/no place (where things are somehow better than they are in the here and now, but remote in one way or another: physically, temporally, or philosophically), I’ve been asked about why I’m focused on this particular notion. Visions of utopia are usually relegated to the science fiction section of the bookstore—unless they’re concocted by political theorists or social critics like Thomas More, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, or even Aldous Huxley. To me they’re particularly valuable forms of speculation: thought experiments not unlike those that take place in a scientist’s lab. The conditions are laid out, and the writer lets the characters work through ideas rather than go looking for a cheese reward.

But people who think about utopia are most often considered dreamers, who lack a firm grasp of reality, or—even worse—are thought of as unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky seekers of the land of Cockaigne, the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the Golden Age, Shangri-La, or some other impossible and/or imaginary goal. The philosophical pursuit of utopia, however, goes at least as far back as Plato, who outlined his ideal state in the Republic, and whose heirs have included many of history’s most imaginative thinkers.

For me, the idea of utopia has long been the subject of intellectual inquiry, and when I was teaching and working on my since-abandoned doctorate at UT Dallas, I created a course called “Utopia and Technology” that considered the history of utopian thought and its relationship to technological development. Two other courses, one on the philosophy of technology and another on the Arts and Crafts movement, considered the ways in which thinkers responded to new technologies, either positively or negatively. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and William Morris’s News From Nowhere, for example, represented opposing reactions the Industrial Revolution.

What seems clear now, early in the twenty-first century, is that many of the utopian expectations about what technology could do for us have not panned out. In fact, it’s becoming more and more apparent to me that we’ve completely lost control of our machines—in the sense that we’ve no real sense of where we’re headed. Problematic paths such as genetic manipulation, cloning, and nanotechnology are being pursued with no true assessment of what they imply or what they might produce were they to get out of hand. In addition, the frantic pursuit of fossil fuel sources has led to potentially irreversible destruction of vital ecosystems, and the potential unleashing of microbes or pathogens to which human beings and other species will have had no time to develop any resistance or defense.

In such a world, utopian thought experiments would seem to be a necessary antidote to the almost compulsive quest for economic “growth,” endless accumulation of material possessions, bigger and more complex everything, and less and less consideration of potential consequences.

I am greatly encouraged by the recent interest in sustainability and “green living” reflected in the popular press. I am, however, skeptical about its depth, because it may turn out to be just another economic fad destined to fade away when people realize how difficult it is to give up some of their treasured luxuries (especially their big cars and granite counter tops) in order to reduce their impact on the environment. As the blue recycling trash containers appear more and more frequently on curbsides in my very conservative town, I am reminded that most people around here are not actually recycling to save the planet—they’re doing it so that they won’t have to pay taxes to build a new landfill. I’ll become rather more sanguine about motives when I see the number of the larger green bins dwindle.

Sustainability must become a moral pursuit, and not just a tax dodge. People really need to spend time thinking about the consequences of their choices, rather than just pursuing life as usual, with the occasional token “green” choice thrown in. This will be especially difficult in a culture not given to introspection, except on a “personal growth” level directed by the latest self-help guru. We don’t teach philosophy in our schools, and although there’s a great deal of talk about critical thinking in educational circles, I see little evidence of its actually being taught. Most of my students are ignorant of basic reasoning principles because they’re taught to write according to a formula (the infernal Five Paragraph Essay) that leads more frequently to sophistry than to logic.

As a country we’ve become very concerned about the lack of math and science knowledge among schoolchildren, but the pundits seem unaware that reasoning develops within a much broader scope. If we just focus on math, science, and rote writing skills, we won’t be any better off than we are now, because thinking and understanding can only be done well within a much larger context that includes historical and cultural perspectives. Our children not only score badly compared to those in other “developed” nations in math and science, but they don’t seem to know much about the outside world, either. Geography is apparently no longer taught much at all, because my students (as bright and creative as they tend to be) come to me not even knowing how to read a map properly. My hope is that hot new technical toys like Google Earth will help to ameliorate this problem—but only if someone provides children with a reason to be interested in something outside their immediate life-sphere. But unless we stop insisting that every other country be just like us, it won’t make any difference in the long run.

Monocultures can be lethal in biological communities, but they’re dangerous to human communities as well. The intuitive understanding that cultural variety is important seems to lie behind continued efforts to foster social diversity in this country. But we’re creating a world for our children in which the same restaurants serve the same basic menus, people live in identical suburbs with no architectural variety (or interest, for that matter), view the same kinds of television programs, see the same kinds of films, etc. Our kids dress virtually identically to one another, thinking that this reflects their individuality. Malvina Reynolds warned us about this, back in the sixties ("Little Boxes"--nicely performed here by Raymond Crooke), but we don't seem to have learned much since then. I am reminded of Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel, The Lathe of Heaven, in which a well-intentioned (but insufficiently imaginative) psychiatrist directs the hero (who has the power to effect change through his dreams) to create a world without conflict, and everyone turns the same shade of gray. To me this all seems entropic, as if we’re all slowly drifting toward identity with one another: all living the same kinds of lives at the same temperature so that conflict will no longer exist.

All of these problems and issues seem to provide fertile ground for utopian thought, and that’s more or less what I’ve been trying to do in this blog. The book, More News From Nowhere, has been my “laboratory,” where the parameters have been set up to allow the citizens of my eu-topia to address many of them in an effort to find a better way to live. Blogs have a way of generating conversations of the kind that precede my characters’ arrival in their ou-topia—and when I first began to write it (about ten years ago), I had no idea that this particular format would develop; nor had I any idea that internet forums would proliferate as they have. So it will be interesting to see, when I get the new website up and running later this month, if a little conversation about utopia can happen here.

Photo: A view of Big Pine, California, from near Uhlmeyer Spring. This is one of the settings for More News From Nowhere.