The one book I keep returning to, my personal bible, is The Question of Value, by James S. Hans. I keep wondering why no one else sees its enormous value. But I seem to be in a world where there are few of us. That is life: you have to take it as it is – wherever it takes you.
One of his main points is the difference between discursivity, a word he has made up for himself, but is based on discursive: “proceeding logically or coherently from topic to topic” or “reasoning from premises to conclusions based upon analytical reasoning” – as contrasted with intuitive.
And recursivity, another new word based on recursive: “of, relating to, or being a procedure that can repeat itself indefinitely.” The basic idea is simple: you never get anything right the first time, you have to keep working on it – endlessly.
He also has another idea, which he got from Nietzsche: the human revulsion against time. I cannot explain this, and only absorbed it after reading him over and over – a procedure I am sure he would have approved of. You have to let go of the past, and accept that in the future things will be different. I cringe at this paraphrase, because it is so trite and new-age. But sometimes even they are on to something important – even if they have no idea what to do with it.
But to proceed. I have been obsessed, once again, with the desire to learn programming. Why I had no idea, I just had to do it – not the brightest of reasons. So in my usual fashion, I started to flounder around – trying this, and trying that. Buying book after book to help me along. Microsoft’s developer tools seemed attractive at first – at least I could install them successfully. So I bought some more books and started to learn JavaScript and Microsoft’s Visual Web Developer.
Two technologies, I found, that do not work well with each other. I was beginning to worry, but plunged on ahead anyway. Perhaps my Fairy Godmother would appear to help me. She never did.
Microsoft’s Visual Web Developer is an over-developed tool – I can only describe it that way. It has forty ways of doing everything and their interactions, to me, are baffling. It seemed to be testing me to see if I was really a programmer. I failed the test.
So I tried something else: web2py another application framework that seems to be doing everything right. At least that is what it claims. I downloaded the book (it was cheaper that way) and set to work. My previous programming experience (I was a programmer back in the early Eighties) came in handy as I navigated my way through their programming interface. I managed to avoid most of the minefields, but then got stuck – on something that to any real programmer must seem trivial.
Real programmers, I must say, have a sixth sense about how to program and can see things ordinary mortals (such as me) cannot. It must be genetic – and I don’t have those genes.
I realized right away something I realized before: that these guys need someone less bright than they are to explain them to others. That is why I became a technical writer – and a successful one for twenty years.
But that time also taught me something else: tech writers, although they are well-paid, get shit on (to put it bluntly). What they crank out is junk, but that is what employers seem to want. Good technical writing is done by people who know what they are doing – and can also turn to writing to help them pay their bills.
Let me get back to my original subject: exploring my limits, because that is what I am doing here. Once again, I have found one of my limits – but I have also found ground I can maneuver in.
Maybe, if I talk to web2py right, they will let me work on their documentation. If I can penetrate their wall of silence, that every organization seems to protect itself with, I might be able to help them.
But then I ask myself: “Can they help me, as a person?” I very much doubt it, they are not into that kind of thing.
The Urge to Destroy the World
This is going to be a difficult posting. My lead here is James S. Hans in his book The Question of Value, in its last chapter, which I am in the process of reading and rereading. And to be perfectly fair, the book The Master and his Emissary, which complements it.
Hans does not consider the impulse I am describing here – a strange blank spot in his reasoning which I cannot account for, because he describes its setting perfectly. Basically it is this: man is finding that the world limits his plans for infinite expansion; finds this intolerable; and therefore wants to destroy it. In the case of America, he is destroying America – and much of the rest of the world is doing the same, following our lead.
This is something few can see, even the brightest – probably because is it so horrible it is not believable. Hannah Arendt noticed this when she was writing about the Holocaust. The same thing happened in the Russian Gulag and in the Cultural Revolution – while the rest of the world still could not believe it. In that respect, nothing has changed.
I personally found this destruction intolerable in the working world, when I was part of it. Now that I am out of it, I can watch it happening; write about it; and see that this makes no difference to anyone. They cannot hear me talking.
This approach may sound familiar to you: apocryphal warnings have been going on for a long time. But the situation now is different: it is entirely new – and entirely new things are going on in it.
What is new? In the past five hundred years change has been so rapid and continuous that we are now looking at a new world – and we do not like what we see. People are ambivalent about this: insisting both that everything has changed and nothing has changed at the same time. It’s about time we made up our mind. But there is one problem: we have no mind left – it has been left far behind.
For most, this is not a problem at all. For them, it is a good thing: “Our minds only created big problems for us.” they say – and they are right. We misused our minds entirely. But this is no reason to quit using them entirely. We should start over and start using them right: in harmony with everything else. But this is precisely what they do not want to do. They are like spoiled children: insisting that they must have their own way – if not, they will demolish their play-pen.
Everything has to be taken into account when we think about changing things – and this is no easy matter. But, on the other hand, it is probably not impossible – we just have to start taking the first few baby steps in that direction.
There is no shame in being a baby – but for Americans, it is. Our history is clear: babies get destroyed.
Psychology
Technology