Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking.
Sometimes components in a highly connected system are tightly coupled. This means that a change in one component has rapid, multiple effects on other components of the system. The change branches out through the web of components, producing distant and often unexpected results.
C. D. Broad, who had paraphrased Bergson’s ideas about the eliminative function of the brain. Broad had written that “Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.” Were the brain not to reduce or “edit” this universal awareness—or “cosmic consciousness,” as the psychologist R. M. Bucke, a little known secret teacher, called it—we would be swamped, Broad said, with a “mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge.” As it is, our inner editor does a very good job of providing us with only that very small selection of reality “which is likely to be practically useful.”
[C]ompared to even a few decades ago, our species now has a much greater ability to innovate in answer to our problems. That’s because human social systems— whether community associations, municipal councils, societies, or planet-spanning institutions and corporations— are all instances of what scientists call “complex adaptive systems.” They learn and adapt by exploiting the power of combination— a power that’s essential, as we’ve seen, to our recursive imaginations— as they join together bits and pieces of existing ideas, institutions, technologies, and practices in new ways to meet new challenges.
Our modern global connectivity gives us the potential to supercharge this “combinatorial innovation.”
Thus my first problem was how to write historically about something—totalitarianism—which I did not want to conserve but, on the contrary, felt engaged to destroy. My way of solving this problem has given rise to the reproach that the book was lacking in unity. What I did—and what I might have done anyway because of my previous training and the way of my thinking—was to discover the chief elements of totalitarianism and to analyze them in historical terms, tracing these elements back in history as far as I deemed proper and necessary. That is, I did not write a history of totalitarianism but an analysis in terms of history; I did not write a history of anti-Semitism or of imperialism, but analyzed the element of Jew-hatred and the element of expansion insofar as these elements were still clearly visible and played a decisive role in the totalitarian phenomenon itself.
Inference in history proceeds not from data given in advance, but from secure answers to productive questions.
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