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I have, as is only right, illustrated the thesis of my art show (that we need to use every body of knowledge, from traditional attention-expanding practices to the insights of the neurosciences, to extend our awareness of the interconnections of complex systems) by my own failure of attention. I have failed to see—or forgotten when I did see—the things that many of my ridiculously disparate interests have in common, or not seen it simply enough.
By and large, I have been an advocate of the preservation of diversity...of a cultural as well as physical ecology that remains productively complicated, even as each ecological system under discussion mutates and hybridizes at the edges where habitats or cultural habits collide and merge.
Diverse species and diverse cultures are constantly threatened with extinction for essentially independent reasons—so you can’t identify a single set of causalities and address them to correct the problem. But sometimes the independent causes reinforce the effects of one another.
We aren’t really trained to look across enough different categories to notice this. Constructing an ecological niche for a threatened species isn’t even remotely related to creating options for maximizing the survival chances of fragile cultural entities—and the cultural entities to be preserved are so disparate that you can’t even mention them in the same sentence without inviting ridicule. Buildings and books and monastic practices and grandma’s way of cooking cherries and the herbal remedies of traditional healers in some godforsaken corner of the planet, or at least it sure looks forsaken to us. Anybody who loves all of that equally is in danger of being labeled a fetishistic sentimentalist; nobody can possibly get exercised about all of the world's problems and threats, even when the boring ones affect the ones we care about; and you will be happy to know that some of the world-endangering topics about which I ought to care cause my eyes to glaze over at their very mention.
But all of the things I feel are worth caring about involve preserving a level of complexity in the planetary ecology and the ecology of human culture. The fact that some of the shifts from many complexities to a few dominant simplicities depend on purely physical factors—the depredations of climate change and alternate alterations of the physical landscape on which species and cultures depend—and others on the influence of media-mediated cultures on traditional ones, and still others on the decision-making of men with guns, does not change the overall fact that the planet is losing options, and that it may be necessary to invent new ones to maintain the niches formerly occupied by the ones we have lost irremediably.
By and large, I have been an advocate of the preservation of diversity...of a cultural as well as physical ecology that remains productively complicated, even as each ecological system under discussion mutates and hybridizes at the edges where habitats or cultural habits collide and merge.
Diverse species and diverse cultures are constantly threatened with extinction for essentially independent reasons—so you can’t identify a single set of causalities and address them to correct the problem. But sometimes the independent causes reinforce the effects of one another.
We aren’t really trained to look across enough different categories to notice this. Constructing an ecological niche for a threatened species isn’t even remotely related to creating options for maximizing the survival chances of fragile cultural entities—and the cultural entities to be preserved are so disparate that you can’t even mention them in the same sentence without inviting ridicule. Buildings and books and monastic practices and grandma’s way of cooking cherries and the herbal remedies of traditional healers in some godforsaken corner of the planet, or at least it sure looks forsaken to us. Anybody who loves all of that equally is in danger of being labeled a fetishistic sentimentalist; nobody can possibly get exercised about all of the world's problems and threats, even when the boring ones affect the ones we care about; and you will be happy to know that some of the world-endangering topics about which I ought to care cause my eyes to glaze over at their very mention.
But all of the things I feel are worth caring about involve preserving a level of complexity in the planetary ecology and the ecology of human culture. The fact that some of the shifts from many complexities to a few dominant simplicities depend on purely physical factors—the depredations of climate change and alternate alterations of the physical landscape on which species and cultures depend—and others on the influence of media-mediated cultures on traditional ones, and still others on the decision-making of men with guns, does not change the overall fact that the planet is losing options, and that it may be necessary to invent new ones to maintain the niches formerly occupied by the ones we have lost irremediably.
