The Realities Civilizations Deny
Many years ago, I reflected on the fact that the terms we use to describe-not name, just describe-behavior in ourselves and others come almost exclusively from drafting:
All of these terms, derived from geometry, have nothing to do with actual behavior. An outward willingness to follow rules has nothing to do whatsoever with straight lines drawn on paper. Nowhere on a behaviorally unusual person will you find a circle with its center point slightly shifted. No, we grab these words from the graphic arts and apply them to situations we can recognize, but which we find difficult to describe absolutely. They are metaphors for behavior, not descriptors. They are heuristics, simple concepts we apply to complex situations that allow us to communicate the situations with each other.
I also noted that these communicative heuristics don't exist in the world outside the one we have created. Nature doesn't like straight lines like we do.
I was reminded of that reflection just today when wading through John Michael Greer's weekly blog. This should seem similar:
Modern industrial civilization, for example, is obsessed with simplicity; our mental models and habits of thought value straight lines, simple geometrical shapes, hard boundaries, and clear distinctions. That obsession, and the models and mental habits that unfold from it, have given us an urban environment full of straight lines, simple geometrical shapes, hard boundaries, and clear distinctions-and thus reinforce our unthinking assumption that these things are normal and natural, which by and large they aren’t.
Sorry if this is too "down" a topic for readers needing a shot of happy, but Greer's post (third of a trilogy, actually) concerns why civilizations that manage to build cities of size seem always to peter out after a millennium or so, while pre-city "primitive" societies can trudge through the earth with much the same traditions far longer. He blames the conformity of thought patterns reinforced by the urban environment, patterns that fall apart in the natural world.
By limiting, as far as possible, the experiences available to influential members of society to those that fit the established architecture of thought, urban living makes it much easier to confuse mental models with the universe those models claim to describe, and that confusion is essential if enough effort, enthusiasm, and passion are to be directed toward the process of elaborating those models to their furthest possible extent.
And, since the map is not the territory, those realities of the natural world not featured in the urban architecture of thought will get missed, if not ignored or even hotly denied. What happens then? Economists can assume unlimited growth on a finite planet, even when the fallacy of such an assumption defies the laws of physics.
And that's just one example. Our human built world is full of unoccupied or simply buried examples of civilizations that fell because what they assumed would happen if they did X simply didn't happen that way.
The world around us-call it nature if you will-doesn't care if you don't agree with its laws.
All of these terms, derived from geometry, have nothing to do with actual behavior. An outward willingness to follow rules has nothing to do whatsoever with straight lines drawn on paper. Nowhere on a behaviorally unusual person will you find a circle with its center point slightly shifted. No, we grab these words from the graphic arts and apply them to situations we can recognize, but which we find difficult to describe absolutely. They are metaphors for behavior, not descriptors. They are heuristics, simple concepts we apply to complex situations that allow us to communicate the situations with each other.
I also noted that these communicative heuristics don't exist in the world outside the one we have created. Nature doesn't like straight lines like we do.
I was reminded of that reflection just today when wading through John Michael Greer's weekly blog. This should seem similar:
Modern industrial civilization, for example, is obsessed with simplicity; our mental models and habits of thought value straight lines, simple geometrical shapes, hard boundaries, and clear distinctions. That obsession, and the models and mental habits that unfold from it, have given us an urban environment full of straight lines, simple geometrical shapes, hard boundaries, and clear distinctions-and thus reinforce our unthinking assumption that these things are normal and natural, which by and large they aren’t.
Sorry if this is too "down" a topic for readers needing a shot of happy, but Greer's post (third of a trilogy, actually) concerns why civilizations that manage to build cities of size seem always to peter out after a millennium or so, while pre-city "primitive" societies can trudge through the earth with much the same traditions far longer. He blames the conformity of thought patterns reinforced by the urban environment, patterns that fall apart in the natural world.
By limiting, as far as possible, the experiences available to influential members of society to those that fit the established architecture of thought, urban living makes it much easier to confuse mental models with the universe those models claim to describe, and that confusion is essential if enough effort, enthusiasm, and passion are to be directed toward the process of elaborating those models to their furthest possible extent.
And, since the map is not the territory, those realities of the natural world not featured in the urban architecture of thought will get missed, if not ignored or even hotly denied. What happens then? Economists can assume unlimited growth on a finite planet, even when the fallacy of such an assumption defies the laws of physics.
And that's just one example. Our human built world is full of unoccupied or simply buried examples of civilizations that fell because what they assumed would happen if they did X simply didn't happen that way.
The world around us-call it nature if you will-doesn't care if you don't agree with its laws.