NETFUTURE
Technology and Human Responsibility
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Issue #78 A Publication of The Nature Institute October 15, 1998
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Editor: Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)
On the Web: http://netfuture.org
You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.
CONTENTS
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Editor's Note
Some Changes
Who's Killing Higher Education? (Or is It Suicide?) (Stephen L. Talbott)
Notes of an Outsider
DEPARTMENTS
Correspondence
Don't Be Hysterical about Privacy (Kevin Kelly)
Words Past and Present
About this newsletter
---------------------
** From the NETFUTURE Archives **
"I've [asked] people to imagine themselves in 1957 or so, trying
to discuss the social consequences and significance of the nascent
U.S. Interstate Highway System. If they got all enamored and
enthusiastic about life on the highway itself, they'd completely,
*utterly* miss the real story. Which was not about what it was
like to *drive* on an Interstate Highway, but about the myriad
ways in which Interstate Highways dramatically (and often
detrimentally) altered American society off-road." (Richard Sclove)
(For an updated context,
see "Words Past and Present" below.)
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EDITOR'S NOTE
Some Changes
------------
NETFUTURE finally has a home. I have occasionally mentioned my desire to
affiliate the newsletter with a worthy organization, and now I have found
one that feels good and right beyond my greatest hopes. It's called The
Nature Institute, a nonprofit research organization established just this
year and headquartered a mile down the road from my home in Ghent, New
York. A couple of months ago, and quite unexpectedly, NETFUTURE and I
were invited to join the Institute. I agreed immediately.
The vision for The Nature Institute was primarily Craig Holdrege's, with
strong support from his wife, Henrike. Many of you will recall Craig as
the author of Genetics and the Manipulation of Life: The Forgotten Factor
of Context (reviewed in NF #31) and also as the author of "Pharming
the Cow" in NF #43. A biologist (as is Henrike), he carries a passion
for what he calls "whole-organism biology". You will find a wonderful
example of his work in a paper entitled "Seeing the Animal Whole: The
Example of Horse and Lion", printed in Goethe's Way of Science,
edited by David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc (SUNY Press, 1998).
My favorite story about Craig derives from an internationally well-known
biologist. After the publication of Craig's book -- and after learning
that Craig is a teacher of high-school biology -- this scientist
exclaimed: "It's wonderful that you're a high school teacher! It shows
that you haven't been corrupted yet!" Not irrelevant to the feature
article below.
Currently Craig is the only paid (part-time) research associate at the
Institute. Early fund-raising has been promising, and there are ambitious
plans for the future. My own role is to pursue technology studies
(leading to a book on the philosophy of technology), continue my public
speaking, and produce NETFUTURE. The hope is to draw in a number of other
researchers from around the country over the next few years.
I will introduce The Nature Institute further in coming issues, describing
its mission and activities. I should make clear, though, that my work
with NETFUTURE will have to remain self-supporting for the foreseeable
future. You'll hear more about this shortly.
You can reach Craig at craig@natureinstitute.org.
---------------------
It seems a good time to make another change. While I've enjoyed putting
together the regular feature, "What People are Saying about NETFUTURE", I
suppose enough is enough, and by this time there might be a more valuable
use for that small space. In this issue I begin a "From the NETFUTURE
Archives" feature, drawing on past issues of the newsletter. The first
NETFUTURE appeared in late 1995, and it may prove stimulating to pull out
brief snippets of the older material for a fresh look.
Incidentally, don't forget that you can look at all the archived material,
aided by the online topical index. We've covered a lot of ground over
these three years! You'll find the index, along with various other
resources, at http://netfuture.org.
SLT
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WHO'S KILLING HIGHER EDUCATION? (OR IS IT SUICIDE?)
Stephen L. Talbott
(stevet@netfuture.org)
NOTES OF AN OUTSIDER
A growing consensus holds that new information technologies foretell the
end of higher education as we have known it. I suspect this is true. Its
truth, however, is not that the technologies are positively
revolutionizing education. Rather, what we are watching is more like the
end -- the final perfection and dead-end extreme -- of the old regime's
shortcomings.
For a long while now we have slowly been reconceiving education as the
transfer of information from one database or brain to another. Access to
information is the universal slogan, and by "information" we demonstrate
with countless phrases every day that we mean something routinely
transferable between containers.
What we haven't realized is that this fact-shoveling model of education
renders both teachers and schools superfluous. It's true that many
colleges and universities have struggled mightily to convert themselves
into more efficient vehicles for information delivery. But they can
hardly hope to compete successfully with the computer in this game.
The old institutions, however, are not the only things placed at risk by
the computer's fulfillment of the reigning model of education.
Eventually, we will realize that students, too, are superfluous. It's
much more efficient to transfer information from one database to another
than from a database to a mind.
The logic of this has already been glimpsed in the workplace, where the
remarkable phrase, "just-in-time learning", is taking ferocious hold as
only the latest business jargon can. The idea is that you need no longer
worry about the general resources your employees bring to the job; all
operations are managed by sending exactly the right information to exactly
the right terminal at exactly the right time. Everything is taken care of
automatically, with the employee functioning smoothly as little more than
an assistive cog in the mechanisms of information transfer.
If you want a model for effective information delivery, here's where it
is, not in the classroom -- not even in the wired classroom.
Actually, some people are already explicitly urging this model as the
basis for an education of the future. Lewis Perelman, author of School's
Out, lauds those businesses that have replaced "preparation-oriented
education" with just-in-time learning:
They saw, correctly, that the systems they were constructing were doing
to knowledge what the just-in-time delivery processes the Japanese
called kanban had done to material resources and goods in
manufacturing. /1/
Perelman's "kanbrain", the instrument for so-called hyperlearning, amounts
pretty much to an (unnecessarily biological) name for the technical
networks of information exchange. The network is what gets "educated",
not people.
When Business Embraces the Academy
----------------------------------
Information delivery has always been intimately associated with well-
defined, effective procedures -- algorithms. That is, information is
designed more for manipulation and doing than for understanding, and this
helps to explain the convergence of business and education today. A spate
of recent news items illustrates the trend:
** A survey reported in Computerworld suggested that forty percent of
large corporations plan to negotiate training deals with colleges and
universities this year. The idea is to encourage the creation of
academic programs tailored for the needs of particular
businesses. /2/
** High-tech companies such as Cisco Systems, 3Com, Oracle, and IBM are
going into the teacher-training business, helping teachers with the latest
technologies. But more than training is involved:
Rather than selling products and services to schools ... companies are
now developing curricula for schools and giving them the equipment to
aid the learning process. And while most four-year colleges are
reluctant to offer credit for vendor-developed courses, that may be
changing -- students at the University of San Francisco can take a
Cisco course in networking and a database course from Oracle, both for
credit. /3/
** The number of corporate "universities" -- comprehensive training
institutions run by corporations -- has increased from 400 to 1600 in the
last ten years. A few of these have formal degree-granting powers, and
many have cooperative relationships with colleges and universities. But
now these corporate institutions, under growing pressure to become self-
supporting, are bringing their "branded" education into competition with
mainline higher education. /4/
** Los Angeles businessman Alfred Mann has donated $100 million each to
the University of Southern California and the University of California at
Los Angeles. His main objective, according to the Economist, is
"to build biomedical institutes that will act as bridges between industry
and the ivory tower". UCLA accepted the gift only after a decade of
hesitation -- a decade whose changes certainly did not make the acceptance
more difficult. As for Mr. Mann, he
is a tough-minded fellow who has detailed plans for his institutes.
They will be large, each employing more than 100 people, including
graduate students. They will license their ideas to a range of
companies (not just Mr. Mann's) for commercial exploitation. And they
will use their patents to generate a steady stream of income for their
host universities. /5/
All this worries a growing contingent of educators, who fear the
corporation's "crushing solicitude". (The phrase is William F. Buckley's
which he applied many years ago to the ministrations of centralized
government.) I share this fear, but it seems to me that the more
fundamental issue often goes unnoted: our changing notions about what
education is make it inevitable that business and industry should step
into the picture aggressively. If you want efficient delivery of
effective facts and procedures, then business -- already attuned to such
computationally rigorous training -- will far outperform the university.
In other words, having increasingly accepted their role as training
grounds for business -- which is what the information-transfer model of
education implies -- universities are now finding that business is better
situated to train its own employees than schools are. At best the
universities will simply hire themselves out to corporations.
Buying an Education More Cheaply
--------------------------------
But I seriously wonder about the long-term survival of the university in
any form. How long before the students rebel? If someone handed me
$25,000 a year for four years and said "Go get yourself an education",
could I possibly choose to blow it all at a university? Unthinkable.
Why should I pay a school $100,000 for a vocational education when I can
almost certainly find a business or agency or laboratory or nonprofit
organization willing to hire me for nothing, assign me some useful chores,
and give me an opportunity to start learning my desired vocation? Even if
I had to pay something to the business at first, it would be well worth
it. Long before I would have graduated from school, I'd be earning an
income in my chosen field.
The options are unlimited. Nothing prevents me from obtaining the best
textbooks the world has to offer. Nothing prevents me from approaching a
first-class researcher or business manager or teacher with the
proposition, "Will you give me an hour per week for a year in exchange for
a couple of thousand dollars?" (In such a highly motivated context, the
mentoring will likely prove more valuable, more humane, and more intense
than several college courses put together.) And, in general, nothing
prevents me from going wherever the "action" is in my field and plunging
in with the aid of some of that $100,000.
The irrelevance of our educational institutions today has been summarized
by Albert Borgmann:
We assume that the increasing length of average education reflects
rising requirements of training for typical technological work. But
this summary view fails to inquire whether education in this country,
for instance, is also of increasing quality; nor, if that were the
case, does it ask whether typical labor allows for the exercise of
greater knowledge and training. The answer to both questions is
probably negative. To avoid the consequent embarrassment of finding
that much of our education is irrelevant to labor, length of education
has been put to new purposes which are really foreign to its nature.
Since desirable work is scarce, education is used as an obstacle course
which is lengthened as such work becomes scarcer. Educational
requirements are used as a device to screen applicants. And finally,
educational credentials serve to solidify the privileges of professions
and the stratification of society. /6/
The Credentialed Society
------------------------
The most damning testimony against higher education today may be that
students have not rebelled; they are evidently incapable of it. Two
things prevent such rebellion. One is the inability of high school
graduates to take their own education in hand. We do not teach them to
become self-learners. I am continually amazed at the number of adults who
assume that, if they are to learn anything new, they must "take a class".
The second obstacle, pointed out in Borgmann's analysis, is the fact that,
for extraneous social reasons, we insist on the academic degree. It is
one of the revealing facts about the Information Age that it is the
supreme Age of Credentials. Not just credentials as such (against which
I have no complaint), but wooden credentials -- degrees, certificates,
diplomas, and licenses based solely on "measurable outcomes", such as
credit hours and standardized test grades, with scarcely any reference
whatever to the actual inner accomplishment and capability of the
certificate bearer.
Being married to a registered nurse, I have been able to note the
unfortunate inferiority complex within that wonderfully humane profession.
(I think "doctor-envy" might be a good name for it, but my wife threatened
to protest in a scorching letter to the editor if I wrote that.) In order
to raise the standard of respectability for nurses, the governing bodies
try to define an ever more proprietary training that can be seen as the
nursing profession's own. They pile on credit-hour requirements in
vacuous subjects (you haven't seen gobblydegook until you've tried to read
three consecutive sentences in the typical "nursing theory" book). And
they continually raise the barrier for "outsiders" who might have traveled
by a slightly unconventional route.
So it is that a nurse who has worked in a particular field for fifteen
years and may be one of the best healers around, can find himself blocked
from advancement, while someone else whose sensibilities were sufficiently
dulled to endure endless hours of post-graduate make-work marches straight
ahead. And a nurse trained in Switzerland has no hope of practicing in
this country without going back to school for a couple of years to
duplicate his education.
Of course, the same syndrome afflicts virtually every profession. (Was it
Mencken who said, "Every profession is a conspiracy against the public"?)
Just think of the educational establishment, with its obstacles for non-
credentialed outsiders, and its protection of incompetent insiders. In
general, the closed professional circle, protecting itself through
artificial requirements, is one of the pressing social problems of our
day.
The credential problem threatens quickly to become even more acute. The
European Commission is now trying to create a smartcard-based European
Accreditation System. According to Joe Cullen, who is working on the
project, the idea is to "set up permanent and accessible skill
accreditation mechanisms that will allow individuals to validate their
knowledge however it has been acquired."
Central to this vision is the use of new technologies such as personal
smart cards that will allow citizens to record their training and
experience on portable, computer-readable curriculum vitae. Another
set of applications involve the use of remote, electronic assessment
and testing systems that can allow individuals to obtain qualifications
and credentials that in turn can be recorded on their personal skills
card, perhaps via existing frameworks such as the European network of
chambers of commerce, or even at home. /7/
The goal is admirable. But, as with so many cases of computer-enabled
"flexibility", the flexibility easily turns out to be a higher-order
rigidity with a vengeance. You can expect to see the final, irrevocable
triumph of the numerically scored, standardized test.
Toward Greater Standardization
------------------------------
An element of standardization is inescapable in all social interaction.
Lacking it, we would be helpless to connect with each other. Language
itself represents a kind of standardization. But so long as language and
society are healthy, there is a creative tension and balance between the
standard (lexical) meanings of words and the speaker's individualized
meanings. (It turns out that you can't say anything meaningful at all
without this individualized element, but that is a larger topic.) In this
play of tension and invention all change, all human growth, all new
understanding, is incubated.
In the business of establishing credentials today, where is the
recognition of a principle to set against standardization, to prevent its
becoming tyrannical? A one-sided pursuit of standardization (which,
incidentally, coheres wonderfully well with the pursuit of information as
shovelable fact) means neither more nor less than the obliteration of
everything individual. In a valuable set of reflections upon educational
standardization, Phil Agre casts the issue in terms of diversity:
We need to recognize ... that the ease of transferring courses between
schools -- effectively assembling one's college education a la carte
from among the offerings of a large number of potentially quite
different programs -- may come at a significant price in intellectual
diversity. If the internal modularity of degree programs must be
coordinated centrally, or at least negotiated among numerous
independent universities, then the result will be less flexibility and
greater uniformity. Power over fine details of the curriculum will
inevitably shift in the direction of accrediting organizations,
university administrators, and other professional coordinators.
Faculty may effectively lose the ability to write their own syllabi. /8/
Agre urges us to "preserve the institutional conditions for a diversity of
intellectual approaches". I will suggest what this might mean shortly.
Meanwhile, to summarize:
The central focus of information technology upon the reliable, precise,
and quantifiable transmission of well-defined bits from one place to
another, and the emphasis upon algorithmic procedures for manipulating
this information, accord perfectly with
* the "shoveling facts" style of education;
* the increasingly cosy relationship between education and businesses,
whose primary concern has more to do with operational effectiveness
than with depth of understanding; and
* the rigid "credentialization" and standardization of society, which, in
turn, amount to a denial of the life of the individual.
But, in the end, this model of education leaves little room for schools
or, ultimately, students.
Everyone disowns fact-shoveling education. And yet the computer and its
databases, into which we pour information, have emerged utterly triumphant
as the reigning metaphors for learning. The metaphors that powerfully
grip us are more indicative of what's going on than our much too frequent
protesting.
Becoming Qualified
------------------
I know of a school in Europe -- it happens to be a seminary -- where there
is no fixed term of study. The sense of calling is high, the demands upon
students are remarkably heavy, and students graduate whenever they are
"ready". This averages out to something like three or four years, but,
depending on prior experience and qualification, may be as little as two
years -- or, not infrequently, never at all. I have heard, perhaps
apocryphally, of one student who was still trying after seven years.
I do not understand how a human-centered institution of higher education
-- one not conceived as an assembly-line or information-transfer system --
could operate without at least some of this flexible, individual-centered
character. If, as I indicated above, standardization tends to obliterate
everything individual, the principle we need to set against
standardization in order to hold the balance is recognition of the
individual. Every individual follows a unique path through this
world, and the teacher's failure to enter upon that path with the student
is a failure to teach. This failure also makes any profound assessment of
the student's performance impossible.
Inevitably, though, the objection is voiced that an individual,
qualitative assessment of students is not even desirable, since it
eventuates in merely subjective and often biased judgments. After all,
who has not heard of doctoral students suffering irremediable loss at the
hands of willfully antagonistic thesis advisers?
Nothing is more symptomatic of our age than this objection, with its
implicit argument for unmitigated standardization. It would eliminate
from consideration everything not measurable, which is to say, everything
qualitative, which is to say, everything giving individual character to
the human being.
Certainly educators can lose their objectivity; they can yield to
biases of one sort or another. But in no domain do we solve this by
denaturing human relationships so that the opportunity for bias and
subjective error does not arise. We can overcome our subjective
limitations only by ... overcoming them, only by seeing more truly, more
deeply.
We can, and should, try to build some checks and balances into the
arrangement (there is a place for standardization) but to eliminate the
decisive role of profound and healing insight because it may fall short
is like eliminating the institution of the family because there will
inevitably be instances of child abuse. It is to say, in effect, "Let's
cease our striving toward higher things, since to be human is to err".
And it is to lose sight of the fact that an unduly zealous drive toward
"objectivity" and standardization is a drive to erase ourselves. We are
not, after all, objects.
A teacher can genuinely assess a student's achievement -- but only by
meeting the student, by traveling along the path with him. This is likely
to prove wrenching, and there is great risk: the experience may transform
the teacher fully as much as the student. The difficulty in it is the
difficulty in confronting another human spirit, and it's all too easy to
pull back in fear. Without a doubt, it's simpler to disengage from the
individual and resort to the comfortingly definitive testimony of the
standardized test.
All this bears on the transfer of credits between institutions. We do not
have to impose diversity-killing standardization to enable student
movement between institutions. If teachers know what it means to have a
grasp of their own subject matter, and if they must eventually determine
their students' adequacy before conferring a credit or a degree, why can't
they just determine their students' adequacy? Why do they need the
reassurance of a certain number of standardized credit hours on a
transcript? Is it that, like convicts putting in prison time, students
must "pay their dues"?
Obviously, a record of "dues" paid will prove helpful. For one thing, a
teacher's knowledge of a student can fully develop only over the entire
course of study, so on what basis does the student get admitted in the
first place? But the point is that personal knowledge, as well as
standard measures, must be applied so far as possible from the very
beginning. This introduces a balancing principle of flexibility,
preventing a standardized system from simply crushing students.
Nothing to Teach
----------------
But there is one final piece of the puzzle of higher education. If the
university is sinking into irrelevance, and if the student is disappearing
from view, so, too, the subject matter of education is evaporating,
leaving only the informational dregs of what once were living subjects.
If, as I said above, we've been reconceiving education as the transfer of
information from one database or brain to another, this is because what
passes for knowledge has more and more been reduced to the kind of
decontextualized fact fit for such transfer.
The world we ought to be engaging has disappeared behind a tissue of
brittle, yes-or-no abstractions. Just as we have ignored the student in
favor of an array of measurements, so also we have turned our faces away
from the world itself, as qualitatively given -- the world that might,
unnervingly, speak to us. From the scientist's instrumentation to the
sociologist's surveys, we have perfected the means for ignoring the
immediate, expressive presence of the people and the natural phenomena
around us, and therefore we have no meaningful context in which to anchor
our swelling cascades of data.
This, of course, is a huge assertion -- as huge as the entire range of
academic subjects. I can hardly justify it here -- although much of the
ongoing content of NETFUTURE bears on it and I will have much more to say
in the future. All I have room for in conclusion is the barest sketch of
one observer's crazy dream about the higher education of the future.
I envision an education where students gather around a teacher because
they find his life to be a pathway to new understanding. The teacher in
turn will take responsibility for helping the students along their own
paths to the realization of their deepest capacities.
Teachers may come together, along with their students, to form
institutions of learning, but the curriculum of these institutions will be
determined by the teachers themselves, out of their direct experience with
students, rather than by remote administrators. From kindergarten to
graduate school, the state will have no authority over the curriculum at
all; this will eliminate the absurdity whereby the state says, "We will
defend to the death your freedom of speech, but we will control, through
education, your ability to speak".
Neither will the state directly fund schools. It will only guarantee a
system that gives students access and choice.
Accrediting and certifying agencies will be as diverse as the extant
educational movements. Just as the teacher cannot be spared
responsibility for reasonable assessment of the student, neither can the
student and parent be spared responsibility for inquiring into the
character of any movement whose schools they are considering. As a
parallel, our society is finding it increasingly necessary to allow
competing forms of medicine -- each with its own accrediting bodies -- to
flourish side by side, while giving every informed citizen the right to
seek his own health as he chooses.
Actually, there are a few encouraging signs. Alternative educational
arrangements are thriving on all sides, from the internship program at the
organic farm in my community, to the various "new age" institutes offering
self-help seminars, to traveling troubadour-like teachers who move between
groups of students around the country, to more traditional schools where
the meeting between teacher and student remains the throbbing heart of the
educational transaction.
The diversity of these undertakings, from fringe to mainstream, is exactly
what you would expect of a truly free educational landscape. The need is
for the traditional educational establishment to take on more of this
character.
As to the computer, I imagine it will find its genuine, supportive role
only to the degree we gain deliverance from the silly notion that it is
educationally decisive.
(Thanks to Jack Keith for a relevant news item.)
Notes
-----
1. "Interview with Lewis J. Perelman",
Technos Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 3, Fall, 1997. Available at
http://www.ait.net/journal/volume6/3perelma.htm.
2. Computerworld, Apr. 13, 1998.
3. Investor's Business Daily, May
12, 1998, as reported in Edupage.
4. Financial Times, June 18, 1998,
as reported in Edupage.
5. Economist, July 11, 1998.
6. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the
Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1984), p. 119.
7. For further information about the
European Accreditation System, see http://tavinstitute.guinet.com/.
8. Red Rock Eater News Service, June 25,
1998.
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CORRESPONDENCE
Don't Be Hysterical about Privacy
---------------------------------
Response to: "Privacy and Prejudice" (NF-77)
From: Kevin Kelly (kevin@wired.com)
> Sitting at my terminal in my basement, I can probably find out more
> about you than you would care to divulge freely.
I doubt it. Your sentiment is a common hysteria. I challenge you to
"find out more about me that I would care to divulge freely." I've been
online since 1982, so there should be no lack of potential.
--kk
Kevin Kelly kevin@wired.com www.hotwired.com/staff/kevin
Wired magazine 520 3rd Street San Francisco, CA 94107 USA
+1-415-276-5211 vox +1-415-276-5150 fax
---------------------
Kevin Kelly --
That's a fair challenge. I suppose its force will only be increased by
the fact that I myself decline to divert my energies into an attempt to
invade someone's privacy. But I can at least pass the challenge on to
the readers. Not that I would ask them to go after someone else's privacy
either. But I suspect they will have a few things to say, evidentially,
about privacy on the Net.
In any case, if there's a hysteria about, it's hardly been evident in
NETFUTURE. In general, I've much preferred to note how privacy worries,
real or imagined, are secondary symptoms of more fundamental problems.
(See, for example, "Privacy in an Age of Data" in NF #28, 29, and 30.) And
even in the current case, I was less intent on suggesting that privacy is
itself a first-order concern than drawing attention to the general worry
about it and the kind of matrix from which the worry arises.
All of which makes me as curious as you may be about what sort of
response, if any, your challenge will produce.
Steve
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WORDS PAST AND PRESENT
Dr. Richard E. Sclove was founder and, until this year, executive director
of the Loka Institute, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization
concerned with the social, political, and environmental repercussions of
science and technology. The quotation at the beginning of this newsletter
is from the first part of a five-part interview with Sclove called "A
Quick Guide to the Politics of Cyberspace", carried in NF #6, 7, 8, 10,
and 15.
If you go to http://www.loka.org/, you'll find that the Loka Institute is
thriving. While I've not had much occasion to mention it in NETFUTURE,
its activism and strong emphasis on citizen participation in crucial
decisions about technology make it a good complement to this newsletter.
The Institute's work toward community-based research networks and
citizens' panels for the evaluation of technology have been ground-
breaking in this country.
I've often wondered -- especially after interviewing such an effective
spokesman as Sclove -- why I myself am so little drawn to traditional
forms of activism. Part of it is probably that I have no skills for it,
just as I have no skills as an entrepreneur. Part of it, too, may be my
discomfort with those portions of the political spectrum (on left and
right) that seem to spawn most activism. But much of it, I fear, may just
be a personal irresponsibility I've been managing to conceal from myself.
Nevertheless, I hope the crux of the matter is my sense that the
decisive issues today have at least as much to do with what we have become
(especially in our habits of thought) as with what we do, and that
programs of social action, while vitally urgent, are doomed to fail if the
one-sided thinking we have perfected over the past several hundred years
is not effectively countered. It is this last task that I have always
felt most compelled to take up.
But maybe I should write to Sclove asking for advice. I have a hunch
he'll be willing to give it!
SLT
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ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER
Copyright 1998 by The Nature Institute. You may redistribute this
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NetFuture is supported by freely given reader contributions, and could not
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Current and past issues of NetFuture are available on the Web:
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http://netfuture.org/subscribe.html.
Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #78 :: October 15, 1998
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