No human — nor any other human being we know of — can wrap their brain around the universe. It’s just not possible, in the same way that if there really were a “God” it would not be like a human and no human could understand the reality. We must think in metaphors, accepting that small blobs of organized cells, even acting in unity with others of the kind over long stretches of time, are too tiny, limited, and governed by desire to get outside ourselves.
Thus, the beginning of existence is only a question that can’t be answered, and so is the end. Anyway, what we do right now is what counts, but we do it against a background so vast and intricate that we go out of control all the time, veer back to something that works, and then get thrown completely off again. Recently we’ve barely survived the invention of agriculture, cities, science and law separated from religion, the industrial revolution, atomic power, and the internet.
There are too many people and too many people having babies they don’t want and can’t raise properly, so we invented birth control and completely deranged the fertility-based politics between sexes, generations, and entitlements. We discovered how to read DNA and the news was almost more than we could bear without the previous secrecy and pretenses.
New forms of transportation smashed the principle of being sedentary, which meant staying within one’s ecosystem, and sent people surging around the planet, destroying the cultural assumptions they had drawn from their ecosystem. But besides that, instant communication and videos rather than print have reconfigured relationships and organizational structures until it becomes impossible to know where people are, but also impossible to lose information — like bookkeeping that used to be safely hidden for criminal purposes. Now theoretical money moves like ghosts through our systems, so that the value of money is challenged.
Once there was a deep divide between the country and the city, which set people to making the country as much like city as they could, ie international corporations. That was my grandparents and parents socioeconomic problem, as they grew up rural and tried to fit into an urban world. The next divide was between the locally educated, up to 8th grade and then to high school — staying local morally and in knowledge. Often they became defensive, building themselves a kind of fort that rejected anything outside the known — like science or history.
Then people went to local colleges and junior colleges and tribal colleges which raised their skill levels technically, but often didn’t push back the horizons of their knowledge very much. My brothers were college graduates but stayed in the state for education. Neither grew past the Fifties. Neither thrived.
Then there was me, who craved to go beyond, to really know things as much as I could without math. But it is a known principle that if one pushes something as far and farther than is known, it becomes something new. Not that the idea itself is new.
“In the Symposium, a Socratic dialogue written by Plato, Diotima describes how mortals strive for immortality in relation to poiesis. In all begetting and bringing forth upon the beautiful there is a kind of making/creating or poiesis. In this genesis there is a movement beyond the temporal cycle of birth and decay. "Such a movement can occur in three kinds of poiesis: (1) Natural poiesis through sexual procreation, (2) poiesis in the city through the attainment of heroic fame, and, finally, (3) poiesis in the soul through the cultivation of virtue and knowledge.”
“ . . . the technomorphic paradigm contrasts with the biomorphic; the theory of nature as a whole with the theory of the living individual. “
We don’t know who wrote this because it’s from Wikipedia where authors are veiled. I like this, except that DNA studies tell us that all living things are connected, not just through their participation in the ecosphere they occupy but more deeply in the molecular systems of only four molecules, arranged with infinite cleverness that “make” life — the ability to pass the world through themselves. This is done through self-organizing, unfolding, blooming, gestation. The peak achievement so far is thinking to the point of consciousness. No doubt something is self-organizing in us from our present complexity, which is underlain by the simplicity of the double helix.
“In their 2011 book, All Things Shining, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly conclude that embracing a "meta-poietic" mindset is the best, if not the only, method to authenticate meaning in our secular times: "Meta-poiesis, as one might call it, steers between the twin dangers of the secular age: it resists nihilism by reappropriating the sacred phenomenon of physis, but cultivates the skill to resist physis in its abhorrent, fanatical form. Living well in our secular, nihilistic age, therefore, requires the higher-order skill of recognizing when to rise up as one with the ecstatic crowd and when to turn heel and walk rapidly away."
“Furthermore, Dreyfus and Dorrance Kelly urge each person to become a sort of "craftsman" whose responsibility it is to refine their faculty for poiesis in order to achieve existential meaning in their lives and to reconcile their bodies with whatever transcendence there is to be had in life itself: "The task of the craftsman is not to generate the meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill for discerning the meanings that are already there.
- Allopoiesis, a process whereby a system can create something other than itself
- Autopoiesis, the ability of a system to recreate itself
- Practopoiesis, a kind of adaptive system, a theory of adaptive organization of living systems
- Sympoiesis, collectively producing systems that do not have self defined spatial or temporal boundaries.
Sympoiesis is what I was trying to get at with my idea of Romanticism. There’s a website that applies it to communities:
The line of thought based on self-generating development and avoiding arbitrary limits is highly relevant both to our election and to our lives as individuals. I’ll return to this word that is a door to meta-thought and progress that we want but can’t define. Yet. It’s a clue to more.
(I apologize that links are not working at present. At least you can copy and paste.)
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