Quotes
"In the past three or four decades, television has provided a source of
enormous social stimulation at very low cost, air transportation can now
bring together two people from opposite points on the globe in little more
than 24 hours; personal computers, microchips, satellite transmitters,
copy machines and faxes have set a vast, humming grid of connections upon
the entire world. Through these technologies, we are now, whether directly
or indirectly, significantly connected to vastly more people, of more
varied ways of life, spread over broader geographical domains than could
scarcely be imagined in any other historical time. At a social level, we
have become embedded in a multiplicity of relationships. We are aware of
the needs of more people, empathize with a greater number of tribulations,
join more causes, confront more potential threats and enemies, sustain
more social obligations, experience more longings and disappointments, and
are tempted by more varied and tantalizing possibilities than ever before.
"At another level, we ingest myriad bits of others' being--values,
attitudes, opinions, life-styles, personalities--synthesizing and
incorporating them into our own definition of self. As we blend the
qualities we find in others with our own potentialities, we find it
increasingly difficult to look inward to discover what we desire and
believe. We have gathered so many bits (or bytes) of being to create
ourselves that the pieces no longer mix well together, perhaps even
contradict each other. To look inward, then, is to risk seeing a maelstrom
of partial beings in conflict. It is, for example, to locate a realist
coexisting with a romanticist, a lover of tradition mixing with a
revolutionary, an advocate of commitment at odds with a free adventurer.
This is the experience of the world and the self that I call 'social
saturation.'
"For each new investment in a cause, an ideal or a person, a host of inner
voices stands ready to belittle our latest interest, laugh derisively at
the newest waste of time, prick our vanity for previous failed
investments, undermine our confidence. As every new choice invites a sea
of mixed opinions and speculations, both from outside ourselves and from
the multiple voices we have already collected within ourselves, the
possibility of rational choice fades away. When one can see the situation
in multiple ways, how is one to discern the 'best' or the 'right' way?
"At the most subtle level, these changes in social patterns bring about a
profound shift in our conception of ourselves and others. Our traditional
belief in ourselves as singular, autonomous individuals gives way. Where
in the interior lies the bedrock self? Are not all the fragments of
identity the residues of relationships, and aren't we undergoing
continuous transformation as we move from one relationship to another?
Indeed, in postmodern times, the reality of the single individual,
possessing his/her own values, emotions, reasoning capacities, intentions
and the like, becomes implausible. The individual as the center of
cultural concern is slowly being replaced by a consciousness of
connection. We find our existence not separately from our relationships,
but within them." "The Saturated Family," Kenneth J. Gergen, Networker,
Sept/Oct 1991, p. 28.
"The possession, use and control of knowledge have become their
[societal elites] central theme--the theme song of their expertise.
However, their power depends not on the effect with which they use that
knowledge but on the effectiveness with which they control its use. Thus,
among the illusions which have invested our civilization is an absolute
belief that the solution to our problems must be a more determined
application of rationally organized expertise. The reality is that our
problems are largely the product of that application. The illusion is that
we have created the most sophisticated society in the history of man. The
reality is that the division of knowledge into feudal fiefdoms of
expertise has made general understanding and coordinated action not simply
impossible but despised and distrusted." Saul, John Ralston.
Voltaire's Bastards. Vintage Books. 1992. p. 8.
“What we see around ourselves in
recent decades has been an enormous expansion of cultural production.
There are over 1 million publications annually in the natural sciences,
over 100,000 in the social sciences, and comparable numbers n the
humanities (Price, 1986: 266). To perceive the world as a text is not too
inaccurate a description, perhaps not of the world itself, but of the life
position of intellectuals: we are almost literally buried in papers. As
the raw size of intellectual production goes up, the reward to the average
individual goes down–at least the pure intellectual rewards of being
recognized for one’s ideas and of seeing their impact on others. The
pessimism and self-doubt of the intellectual community under these
circumstances is not surprising.
“Which of the three types of stagnation do we exemplify? Loss of cultural
capital (Stagnation A), certainly, marked by the inability of today’s
intellectuals to build constructively on the achievements of their
predecessors. Simultaneously there exists a cult of the classics
(Stagnation B): the historicism and footnote scholarship of our times, in
which doing intellectual history becomes superior to creating it. And also
we have the stagnation (C) of technical refinement: to take just a few
instances, the acute refinements and formalisms of logical and linguistic
philosophy have proceeded apace in little specialized niches; in the same
way among all factions of the intellectual world today we find the
prevalence of esoterica, of subtleties, and of impenetrable in-group
vocabularies.” Collins, Randall. The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global
Theory of Intellectual Change. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
1999. p. 521.
Examples
Statement of Point
Contemporary complexity is so
all-reaching that the use of fixed ideas has become unworkable. No
traditional society has coped with this degree of complexity. It is around
us and also shown to be within us. On the one hand the shared meaning (conceptscape)
from a researching and interconnecting world shows up as the remarkable
complexity from publishing and databases that themselves cannot even be
catalogued. The mental environment itself has become a deceptive and
inundated semantic minefield that includes: a graphics revolution, an
advertising avalanche, zillions of memes and the revolution in
communications technology. On the other hand the personal factors that
each of us has been dissected with and that we are invited to use (lifescape)
include an unfathomable list: socio-economic determinants, psychological
history, patterns hardwired into the body from the species history or
through development, hormonal chemistry, emotional bondings/IQs, the
incredible cognitive complexity of even simple thoughts such as the
identification of a chair as a chair, or the incredible amount of
potential perceptual information impinging subliminally on our senses.
Below all these the physical environment that we have constructed such as
our houses and electronics are more vast, more interconnected and thus
more susceptible to normal decay. “Can’t keep up” is the usual response.
Bibliography
Further
Considerations