What Man Has Made of Man Can poetry reconnect the individual and society? BY A. F. MORITZ Here is a poem Juan Ramon Jimenez wrote for his mother in her extreme old age: I wish I could carry you in my arms from your life to nothingness the way you carried me, when I was a child, to the cradle from your breasts. Notice the role of desire: I wish. The loving dialogue, a man speaking to his mother, giving back the care he received. The powerful, defiant transformations: the poet turns approaching death into a woman’s breasts, and nothingness into a cradle. Notice too the near hopelessness of the desire and the way the poem holds out, not eliminating hopelessness but never defeated, maintaining life in the face of annihilation. This poem is a primary political document. In addition to and because of its rich human meanings, it has greater relevance to public action than any work of political philosophy or political science, any constitution, bill of rights, speech, or policy paper. In fact, a society’s health might be measured by how it understands and admits that such a poem is essential to sound social organization. In each era, the relation of poetry and society changes; for us, it is bound up with the problem of isolation and communion—our basic social question. Sounding this question leads us to the role of poetry, in the general sense, as it exists, or could exist, in all of us, and in the specific sense, as poems. Isolation and communion can be viewed in two ways. The first has to do with the private self. For each person, some isolation and some communion are necessary. A balance. Reflection and busyness. The contemplative life and the active life. Sainthood and heroism. In this perspective, “isolation,” which has negative connotations, should perhaps be replaced with “solitude,” which can mean a self-chosen retreat. The second way to view isolation and communion is social. Do we have satisfying access to our society or are we cut off from it, rebuffed and frustrated by it? Does it allow us to have an effect on it, a worthy place within it, or does it repel any decisive influence from individual persons, such that we feel ignored, even tyrannized over? Today, it seems to me, this isolation and communion question, as it relates to society and politics, has one formulation that is most important. Society certainly permits and in fact requires participation, but does it do so only at the cost of agreement to preordained structures and behaviors that are non-negotiable? In other words, can you only participate if you agree? Does society allow only certain forms of participation to be real, while others are basically illusions, distractions, games? For instance, are we required to work in the way the present economy dictates because otherwise society would collapse, while we’re required to vote only to maintain the illusion we have true participation, an illusion without which we might revolt or despair and drop out, threatening the economy? Is the person who truly disagrees always thrust to the margins of social life? I’m sure you recognize this tension. It comes to us all now and then, in one form or another. We constantly hear it, for instance, in the debate over voting that occurs around elections, such as the US presidential election of 2000. It’s an essential question. The formative struggle of the modern individual’s life is to find a place in society, as the whole history of the novel shows us. There’s no such division as the one usually made, between inward and private life on the one hand, political and economic life on the other. It’s a matter of life and death. Isolation is death. A society that isolates its individual members from itself, placing them in enforced solitude, or that gives them only a simulacrum of communion, is deathly, and it is deathly because what it believes in is death. Communion on the other hand is life and comes out of belief in life. Another way of putting the social question of isolation and communion is Albert Camus’ famous statement from The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” Camus is not speaking of suicide due to clinical depression or other such causes, but the temptation to death in the person who feels a reason to doubt the value of life. “To be, or not to be—that is the question,” said Hamlet, and Camus is a modern repetition. To believe in and choose life; to participate worthily in your society: these two are akin. Have one, tend to have the other. And the following two are also akin: to believe in and be dominated by death; to be isolated from your society, excluded and made little by it. By “believe” here, let me say in passing, I don’t mean some supposed intellectual operation by which you can assert a thing that in fact you know nothing about. I mean the orientation of your enti

Scientists. We got this funny noun for a while. But actually the word is a very stupid and foolish one. Say more or less we got scientific capacity. All of us has it to a degree. Some got more or some are fast at developing it and furthering it and so on. But for most real and actual part of our life, most concerned scientists around us is the ones who sell out their scientific capacities. In that sense their determining element of what they are is greed, weakness, selfishness, vanity and so on. In that sense, scientific education is like develop scientific capacities of some population and without last or final binding - like ethics - how you used that capacity for what purposes. Or sci tech is a mirror of how greedy and petty we are, often. Problem is that this is a pretty much large enterprise with lot of mixed ingredients. But that doesn't mean we can be using such lame labeling such as 'science' and 'scientists'. and not much humans really have been up to this task. We've been rather busy eating the fruits out of this enterprise. We never cared who they are too, in a sense. Good scientists are fine. Aimeless and clueless ones may be problem. Bad scientists - well, they are just bad humans. But we haven't developed even this much of 'human' literacy about how we live. (So let's stick with specific cases...) -- It's hard to stick with still, Asymmetry feeds - because got sci cap and no sci cap makes those who got sci cap useful. give them advantage. Efficacy and Asymmetry. Also issue of science and democracy. one thing is that science kind of destroyed one pillar of Abrahimic? organized religions. But we aren't sure that pillar or pillars - were main and central pillars which sustain the gathering hall of organized religions. And scientists - I don't know how much they are really concerned about educating public. For modern societies what are the subjects we need to deal with - is this the task of political or governmental rationality/responsibility or scientifci - or ethical rationality or responsibility? (or religious hehehe.) We haven't done this. We haven't done this comprehensive list up, and then prioritization. [And that may be the point that we have to point out role of visualization, diagrams, because factors are many there and writing can't really cope or manage etc. but we will see/Role of 'managemental' visualization - I don't know how much Edward Tuft really does this kind of analytical job, or he just say vizualization works indiscriminately and ahistorically etc, without any specificity. and that lack of comprehensiveness/comprehensive listing, and lack of prioritization - kind of indicates why people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris is doing useless fireworks. Hm. So I'd better stick with best or top quality ones. How that'd go? [That section for Engelbart carries it.]