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Actually, this post will be no more than a summary fragment of several long-winded observations, a fact that will delight my friends-post readers until they see how long the summary turns out to be.
The July 17 New York Review of Books, as much as the previous issue, seems a veritable jigsaw puzzle of information regarding the human condition. It may have been arranged by the editors simply to appeal to as wide a range of their usual readership as possible, though some of the juxtapositions make it difficult to believe that was the only motivation.
It did occur to me that the inclination to see interlinked patterns is a standard symptom of paranoia. But the world really is a unified whole of incredibly disparate elements; paranoia is not the condition of seeing fragments of information as akin to a disassembled jigsaw puzzle. Paranoia is forcing together a handful of the pieces in the wrong order, then screaming at the sight of the bizarre image revealed by the random pieces one has managed to make fit into one another.
I hope jigsaw puzzle fans will not write indignant notes about my comprehension of how one can go wrong in, for example, putting together all the pieces with similar color schemes and then wondering why they form such a strange vision. (I love the work of an artist who collected all the jigsaw puzzles of a cheap-puzzle company that used only one template for all the puzzles they sold. He then assembled compositions by putting all the right-shaped pieces together, but the pieces were from many different pictures.)
In any case, i've written before about how the habits of mind needed to put the puzzle together the right way is made more difficult by the many intellectually disreputable people who have tried to do this in the past, and the sheer mistaken assumptions of the ones who came close to getting it right.
But we do have to find some way of reducing our own tendencies to jump to the same old conclusions, while keeping our fantasies about the world under some sort of control. The condition of the world demands nothing less.
I wrote one post, derailed by the contretemps I addressed instead, that had to do with how difficult it is to believe that the present condition of the world might indeed be unprecedented, not because we haven't seen all of its aspects before for thousands or tens of thousands of years, but because they have never before occurred in this order, in this connected a fashion, in as large a number of disparately developed societies at the same moment.
So we really do need more conversations among people like the designer Karim Rashid, who can see how new manufacturing techniques permit individual preferences to be met to an unparalleled degree and how designers can now create one-of-a-kind objects in unlimited series, making design and art meld seamlessly. But the same technology that makes it possible to transmit 3-D design to individual machines that then require only a little final-product finishing ought to make it possible to decentralize all sorts of manufacture of heavy objects such as furniture that currently use up enormous amounts of petroleum, thanks to their transport by ship, train and truck from China, or (in the United States, for nostalgic patriots) from North Carolina.
It would mean getting used to the choice of elegantly molded plastic (from biorenewable sources), or hand-crafted wood furniture made the old-fashioned way close to one's home, or somewhat more expensive versions of the particleboard that currently is so cheap that the costs of transport are offset.
I don't know the economics of furniture manufacture in sufficient detail for this speculation to be valid even for a moment. My point is that designers such as Rashid, whose I Want to Change the World I was reading again last night, are resources that should be diverted from the design of tchkotchkes, unconventional seating, and whimsical watches to thinking about how to change the world in a more significant sense.
I've read newspaper analyses of how manufacturing will be shifted closer to areas of consumption, but the writers don't seem to be fully aware of the already existing technology that might be adapted to areas of consumer goods for which they were impractical so long as conventionally made objects could be produced more cheaply on the other side of the planet from their ultimate destination.
I've reported on, but not absorbed in depth, books on how things are currently done, fabric shipped from one continent to another in quest of the cheapest labor for weaving, dyeing, cutting, and delivery to the designer who ordered the jeans in the first place.
It is silly to think that the only alternative to this is to go back to 1950s American-style blue jeans, made by 1950s-type American workers in 1950s-type factories.
But nobody seems able to look at 2008 economic conditions and 2008 styles of life and imagine how it might all be maintained more economically without giving up standards of comfort to which the more fortunate in the developed world have become accustomed.
I will put up with watching the Business Class Special pull into the mass transit station, on the other side of the gates that are locked against my kind, if it will get a few hundred thousand S.U.V.s off the road and into parking lots or scrap yards. (Europeans think of the vestigial division into classes of transport on trains and subway cars as an anomaly barely noted; in America, you would have to have the equivalent of a gated community to get the Sunbelt executives out of their cars and into some privatized supplement to public transit.)
I will put up with having the ceilings of every air conditioned space in America lowered by six more inches, as I have put up with lower-flow toilets that, in America, work infinitely less well than the ones found in Europe.
It will take far more tweakings to make this work, but more than that, it will take habits of mind that are substantially different from the habits of mind that we habitually have.
The trouble is that this sort of thinking has gotten associated with "holistic" crackpots given to solutions that are distasteful to most people in America (Europeans find the ways of thinking about the solutions more distasteful than the misguided solutions). So nobody can imagine a sensible way of avoiding apocalypse.
And that is why habits of mind that were once associated with the mistakes of occultists might be rejiggered into completely hard-nosed and practical ways of putting things together, and thereby become something of use to our present condition.
The July 17 New York Review of Books, as much as the previous issue, seems a veritable jigsaw puzzle of information regarding the human condition. It may have been arranged by the editors simply to appeal to as wide a range of their usual readership as possible, though some of the juxtapositions make it difficult to believe that was the only motivation.
It did occur to me that the inclination to see interlinked patterns is a standard symptom of paranoia. But the world really is a unified whole of incredibly disparate elements; paranoia is not the condition of seeing fragments of information as akin to a disassembled jigsaw puzzle. Paranoia is forcing together a handful of the pieces in the wrong order, then screaming at the sight of the bizarre image revealed by the random pieces one has managed to make fit into one another.
I hope jigsaw puzzle fans will not write indignant notes about my comprehension of how one can go wrong in, for example, putting together all the pieces with similar color schemes and then wondering why they form such a strange vision. (I love the work of an artist who collected all the jigsaw puzzles of a cheap-puzzle company that used only one template for all the puzzles they sold. He then assembled compositions by putting all the right-shaped pieces together, but the pieces were from many different pictures.)
In any case, i've written before about how the habits of mind needed to put the puzzle together the right way is made more difficult by the many intellectually disreputable people who have tried to do this in the past, and the sheer mistaken assumptions of the ones who came close to getting it right.
But we do have to find some way of reducing our own tendencies to jump to the same old conclusions, while keeping our fantasies about the world under some sort of control. The condition of the world demands nothing less.
I wrote one post, derailed by the contretemps I addressed instead, that had to do with how difficult it is to believe that the present condition of the world might indeed be unprecedented, not because we haven't seen all of its aspects before for thousands or tens of thousands of years, but because they have never before occurred in this order, in this connected a fashion, in as large a number of disparately developed societies at the same moment.
So we really do need more conversations among people like the designer Karim Rashid, who can see how new manufacturing techniques permit individual preferences to be met to an unparalleled degree and how designers can now create one-of-a-kind objects in unlimited series, making design and art meld seamlessly. But the same technology that makes it possible to transmit 3-D design to individual machines that then require only a little final-product finishing ought to make it possible to decentralize all sorts of manufacture of heavy objects such as furniture that currently use up enormous amounts of petroleum, thanks to their transport by ship, train and truck from China, or (in the United States, for nostalgic patriots) from North Carolina.
It would mean getting used to the choice of elegantly molded plastic (from biorenewable sources), or hand-crafted wood furniture made the old-fashioned way close to one's home, or somewhat more expensive versions of the particleboard that currently is so cheap that the costs of transport are offset.
I don't know the economics of furniture manufacture in sufficient detail for this speculation to be valid even for a moment. My point is that designers such as Rashid, whose I Want to Change the World I was reading again last night, are resources that should be diverted from the design of tchkotchkes, unconventional seating, and whimsical watches to thinking about how to change the world in a more significant sense.
I've read newspaper analyses of how manufacturing will be shifted closer to areas of consumption, but the writers don't seem to be fully aware of the already existing technology that might be adapted to areas of consumer goods for which they were impractical so long as conventionally made objects could be produced more cheaply on the other side of the planet from their ultimate destination.
I've reported on, but not absorbed in depth, books on how things are currently done, fabric shipped from one continent to another in quest of the cheapest labor for weaving, dyeing, cutting, and delivery to the designer who ordered the jeans in the first place.
It is silly to think that the only alternative to this is to go back to 1950s American-style blue jeans, made by 1950s-type American workers in 1950s-type factories.
But nobody seems able to look at 2008 economic conditions and 2008 styles of life and imagine how it might all be maintained more economically without giving up standards of comfort to which the more fortunate in the developed world have become accustomed.
I will put up with watching the Business Class Special pull into the mass transit station, on the other side of the gates that are locked against my kind, if it will get a few hundred thousand S.U.V.s off the road and into parking lots or scrap yards. (Europeans think of the vestigial division into classes of transport on trains and subway cars as an anomaly barely noted; in America, you would have to have the equivalent of a gated community to get the Sunbelt executives out of their cars and into some privatized supplement to public transit.)
I will put up with having the ceilings of every air conditioned space in America lowered by six more inches, as I have put up with lower-flow toilets that, in America, work infinitely less well than the ones found in Europe.
It will take far more tweakings to make this work, but more than that, it will take habits of mind that are substantially different from the habits of mind that we habitually have.
The trouble is that this sort of thinking has gotten associated with "holistic" crackpots given to solutions that are distasteful to most people in America (Europeans find the ways of thinking about the solutions more distasteful than the misguided solutions). So nobody can imagine a sensible way of avoiding apocalypse.
And that is why habits of mind that were once associated with the mistakes of occultists might be rejiggered into completely hard-nosed and practical ways of putting things together, and thereby become something of use to our present condition.
