[smygo] Don't Shoot the Columnist
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Don't shoot the columnist
By Andrea Runyan
Opinions Columnist
Thursday, April 14, 2005
I complained last week that rare ideas get labeled as
"crazy," even if they're decently rational.
Stanford takes care to promote diversity of backgrounds and
lifestyles. Could we also promote diversity of ideas? Here
are some radical opinions that probably don't get much air
time at Stanford:
"In modern industrial society only minimal effort is
necessary to satisfy one's physical needs . . . . Thus it is
not surprising that modern society is full of surrogate
activities. These include scientific work; athletic
achievement; humanitarian work; artistic and literary
creation; climbing the corporate ladder; acquisition of
money and material goods far beyond the point at which they
cease to give any additional physical satisfaction; and
social activism that addresses issues that are not important
for the activist, as in the case of white activists who work
for the rights of nonwhite minorities. These are not always
pure surrogate activities, since many people may be
motivated in part by needs other than the need to have a
goal. Scientific work may be motivated in part by a drive
for prestige, artistic creation by a need to express
feelings and militant social activism by hostility. But for
most people who pursue them, these activities are in large
part surrogate activities. For example, the majority of
scientists will probably agree that the 'fulfillment' they
get from their work is more important than the money and
prestige they earn." That's what Theodore Kaczynski wrote in
"The Unabomber's Manifesto."
From Derrick Jensen in "A Language Older than Words":
"Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should
write or blow up a dam. Every day I tell myself that I
should continue to write. Yet I'm not always convinced I'm
making the right decision. I've written books and I've been
an activist. At the same time I know neither a lack of words
nor a lack of activism kills salmon here in the Northwest.
It is the presence of dams."
John Zerzan is a former Stanford student and current
anarchist. He's one of the most radical thinkers around,
criticizing not only recent technologies, but symbolic
culture in general -- numbers, language . . . even keeping
track of time. Here's what he said in an interview with
Derrick Jensen (from Zerzan's book, "Running on Emptiness"):
Zerzan: In the 1960s, many people, including me, quit
wearing watches.
Jensen: For a while in my early twenties, I asked visitors
to take off their watches as they entered my home.
Zerzan: Even today children must be broken of their
resistance to time. This was one of the primary reasons for
the imposition of this country's mandatory school system on
a largely unwilling public. School teaches you to be at a
certain place at a certain time, and prepares you for life
in a factory. It calibrates you to the system . . . If I can
share another quote, it would be Wittgenstein's: "Only a man
who lives not in time but in the present is happy."
Zerzan wrote in the same book, "Surviving non-agricultural
peoples often exhibit, in the interplay and interpretation
of the senses, a very much greater sensory awareness and
involvement than do domesticated individuals. Striking
examples abound, such as the Bushmen, who can see four moons
of Jupiter with the unaided eye and can hear a single-engine
light plane seventy miles away . . . Symbolic culture
inhibits human communication by blocking and otherwise
suppressing channels of sensory awareness. An increasingly
technological existence compels us to tune out most of what
we could experience."
Bob Black is another interesting anarchist. Here's a
sample from one of his more famous essays, "The Abolition of
Work":
"No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all
the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name
comes from working or from living in a world designed for
work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working .
. . The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier
demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take
advantage of whatever it is that various people at various
times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some
people to do the things they could enjoy it will be enough
just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which
afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I,
for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much)
teaching, but I don't want coerced students and I don't care
to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure."
* John Taylor Gatto, New York Teacher of the Year in 1991,
wrote in "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of
Compulsory Schooling":
"Mass-schooling damages children. We don't need any more of
it . . . Before [compulsory schooling began] schooling
wasn't very important anywhere. We had it, but not too much
of it, and only as much as an individual wanted. People
learned to read, write and do arithmetic just fine anyway;
there are some studies that suggest literacy at the time of
the American Revolution, at least for non-slaves on the
Eastern seaboard, was close to total . . . . Were the
colonists geniuses? No, the truth is that reading, writing
and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to transmit as the
audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait
until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on.
Millions of people teach themselves these things, it really
isn't very hard. Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric
textbook from 1850 and you'll see that the texts were
pitched then on what would today be considered college level."
As I said at the outset, these aren't my ideas, and I admit
that they are "crazy," but seeing other people brave enough
to say what they think might inspire us to do the same.
Don't shoot Andrea. E-mail her at mailto:aru...@stanford.edu
http://www.stanforddaily.com/tempo?page=content&repository=0001_article&id=16824
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
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As the Government of the United States of America is not, in
any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in
itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or
tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never
entered into any war, or act of hostility against any
Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no
pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce
an interruption of the harmony existing between the two
countries.
-- The Treaty of Tripoli, entered into by the USA under
George Washington
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