called from footers of A-E. NB. id lostCrit renamed to Crit.
preface
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.
Yea, faileth now even dream
The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist;
Francis Thompson wrote those words in 1890; but as digitization impassively immures the old world, they feel more apt today.
In a world driven by data, questions are expected to be simple, and science to give easy answers. But questions of wellbeing are subjective complex and chaotic, and science's answers simply pass them by.
Where is the wisdom
we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge
we have lost in information?
Elementary facts felt familiar to me, and I needed them to find where I was and see a way ahead. They seemed hopeful, and central not only for me but also for society more generally, so presenting their knowledge, freed from the silos and looping rhetoric that had hidden it from me, then became my goal. Yet, although simply stated they appear mundane, in their assembly I found them disturbing.
To all involved,
however remote,
observations are
of consequence.
It seemed to me that the brain, cognition, memory, and affect, were a recursive system. And I realized, that what I have felt setting me apart all my life was not simply inexperience and angst but a lack of fluency. Often understood to be carelessness, argumentative, or arrogant, even experts seemed not to recognize it as an expression of my adaption in ontogeny.
In writing I finally learned of what I thought I instinctively knew, of words, expression, and culture. Over two thousand years ago Lao Tzu wrote, "Sincere words are not pretty. Pretty words are not sincere, but pretty words still charm while those that are not often offend and are dismissed. Far too late I have realized I am not a writer. This site then remains a work in progress.
My father's life now mine, my work,
humbled by the tyranny of code,
dimly comprehended and clumsily grasped,
is quiet, surrounded by more cultured sounds
while your imagination, wondering on the page,
dwells in words, breathes, and pauses
expecting itself.
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contents of n_A1pre_Chaos.php inserted into footnote 'Chaos' in e_Preface_Footnotes.php via PHP-include, - called from e_Preface.php#infoHum and A1-Footnotes.php#A14..
chaos
Chaos refers to the apparently random states of disorder and irregularity exhibited by complex, nonlinear, dynamical systems actually governed by interconnectedness, underlying patterns, and self-organization. While these systems are deterministic, their predictability is limited as it is is impossible to completely know their actual state at any point in time and the smallest difference in this from what has been assessed leads to behaviours that diverge exponentially over time from that foecasted —a characteristic often referred to as the Butterfly Effect.
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The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?
A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought, the practices that we accept rest on.
Michel Foucault in Practicing criticism, or, is it really important to think?, an interview by Didier Eribon, 1981, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. L. Kriztman, 1988, p. 155.
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wellbeing
Since the Prussian model was decreed by Frederick the Great in the 18c, education and well-being, rather than being defined in relation to the well-being of individuals, have in practice increasingly been defined in relation to their fitness-for-purpose for the social economy —with criminality and deviance defined in relation to expected social norms.
Having been widely implemented, throughout the world, to serve the various needs of industrialization, the Prussian model has almost completely replaced Socratic education. The role of schools, pre-schools, universities and hospitals has come to be defined within the context of maintaining social stability and economic growth, with the work of well-being professionals and educationalists organized to service national economies and their governance.
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socratic education
a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue, introduced as 'midwifery' by Socrates in Plato's dialogue:Theaetetus, because it is employed to deliver the thought of others through helping them to recognize and question their beliefs.
The aim of the Socratic method is not to elicit the repetition of accepted facts, but rather to demonstrate the complexity, difficulty, uncertainty and assumptions lying behind people's statements and argument. In this way, it probes the value systems and beliefs that underpin people's actions and decisions; however, by demanding the fundamental re-examination of these it constitutes a real and present threat to the coherence of their lives.. While Socrates is famous for saying that the unexamined life is not worth living, for this belief, and its practice, his fellow Athenians condemned him to death; —the real fate for a one-eyed man in the kindom of the blind.
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e_Preface_Footnotes.php#InProgress
in progress
..the length of the period during which the subject, under its various aspects, has been present in my mind, may suffice to satisfy the Reader that, my conclusions, be they right or wrong, have not been formed hastily or enunciated crudely.
Thomas Huxley, London, 1863.
In 2012, my goal was to simply articulate ideas I had developed over the previous eight years living and working in Finland. Oblivious to the narrative challenge this involved I imagined my lack of social fluency irrelevant; the internet surely providing a ready audience. The project, however, inexorably revealed the centrality of both, not only to the writing required but also in my life.
And how can a man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods.
In Macaulay's epic poem these words stand out, an ironic, defiant cry against his Whig view of history and its racialist account of the militarized, financial and mercantile interventionism of the British Empire — a 'Great Game' that continues to this day in central Asia, defending British 'interests' from Russian 'influence'.
My father was born in Ukraine,
his father from Yorkshire
a Polish princess his mother.
A Russian palace their home
he was interned. Then repatriated
to England, and sent to be schooled.
In love with Nemesis he died alone.
And I loved her too,
in Finland, fifty years on.
e_Preface_Footnotes.php#Macaulay, linked to from [fathersAshes].
It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England.
We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
Both quotations from Macaulay's Minutes On Education In India, 1835-1837, collected from records in the Dept. of Public Instruction, Calcutta, by H.Woodrow, printed by C.B.Lewis, at The Baptist Mission Press. 1862.
..the East India Company taught either in Sanskrit or Persian; hence, he (Macaulay) argued, "We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language."
