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  • From: Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Out of Control
  • Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2001 11:07:37 -0800


A few things that have caught me from this great thread: (and Sean, no
you're bot boring me, at least. And I'm only a dilettante in many fields and
"general" semantics is one of them. I stand corrected, rightly so)

Bob Howard wrote:

> My impressions are that the book rehashes material previously published by a
> number of recent authors. (e.g James Gleick's Chaos)

mmm, "Chaos" was mostly physics, "OOC" is about biology and economics,
though Kelly did interview some of the same people as Gleick. Kelly covers
Complexity (the step-child of chaos theory), describing hive minds,
succession, biological microcosms, and emergent properties of living and
economic entities.

Bob, as a one-time geneticist, I loved the organic chem rap. I got lost at
one point, and I do want to understand. That was at
> The resulting gobbledegook of what is today about 60,000 synthetic molecules
> produced by industrial chemistry has clearly resulted not just in pollution
> but also in a loss of language and pattern.

Your next post helped me a bit with

> The result was the construction of a synthetic chemistry which is
> antithetical
> to living processes.

But if you explain a bit about how synthetics destroyed language and pattern
(of just chemicals, or of more?), I'd be gratefu.l

Also, where Souscayrous wrote
> All words lie

This is the stuff I've never been able to grasp. I've hacked my way, a
little, through the thickets of Foucault and Derrida and some others of the
language Left, and I've never gotten much out of it (I liked Ortega y
Gasset, tho); mostly just threw up my hands at what looks like utter
nonsense written by bright men who live only in their heads. But if you, or
someone, could explain to me in a couple paragraphs of simple language how
all words lie, I'd love to read it.

From: "darren simo" <wannafarm@hotmail.com>

> The whole idea of primary and secondary school
> is to teach the student how to learn

I reached my senior year at a pretty good prep school before it dawned on me
that the point of school was teach us how to learn, rather than to take
tests or memorize and forget repetitively. Too bad that can't be made more
explicit; I would have been much more interested in school. (It was obvious
though, that the real point of school was to make us good consumers and, for
the upper classes, good producers. Peter Medawar wrote that universities
mostly just educate people beyond their ability to undertake rational
thought--no critical thinking, just cash cropping of human resources. This
month I finally got around to reading Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the
American Mind." It's a good counter to the dumbing down of schools, a fine
plea for a classical education, and touches on many of the themes of this
thread, all circling around, What do we need to know, and to ask, to be
fully human?)

Sean wrote that he learned to
> memorize phone numbers by evoking a strong emotion while
> reciting the number to myself.

The Greeks taught mnemonic memorization of verse by visualizing a room, and
associating a line of verse with each object in the room. People could
recite hundreds of lines this way, I'm told. Mnemonic devices are about the
only way I can memorize things. I still have a horrible ditty stuck in my
head from a childhood TV cartoon show, where the host played a spaceman who
sang a song listing the planets in order, ending with "Even Pluto wants to
see a cartoon." Arrgh.

Darren Simo wrote
>if vocal tradition is the only way to keep information in your
> memory why is PDC taught that way.

One of the things I love about the PDC is its evolution beyond Mollison's
lecturing to encompass diverse, experiential learning: games, discussion,
hands-on, small groups, slides, stories, salon, song, dance, and on and on.

There are about 200 other things in this thread that have piqued my
interest, but I'll quit now to make room for others.

Toby





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