* Disruptive technologies being built in suburban garages…
* Teabaggers…

Your point is a good one, but my own view is that change, or adaption, was geographically-based only very early on in human history. In the centuries since desert religions arose, we’ve seen other metaphors for what I think of as the control-adaptation dialectic. Think democracy-aristocracy, or working class-oligarchy, or science-revealed religion.

The key to our dilemma, it seems to me, is to find a way to incorporate chaos into our control systems. On the level of individual psychology, this means finding a way to encourage the ego to be less paranoid, more able to define itself in fluid terms. On the level of politics, it means finding our way toward what SDS once called participatory democracy.

It’s always seemed to me that living in a Heraclitean universe, which our previous successes at adaptation, and the technologies which they’ve engendered, have forced upon us whether we will or no, obliges us to reconsider much of what we think we know about stability in human society. The real question, though, is this: Do we have the time to reconsider?

I don’t know the answer. I fear the worst, but I also know that no matter how dark the answer proves to be, we nevertheless have to ask the question. If you hang around Dogtown long enough, I promise that I’ll ask it in places which our current political leadership has already written off. More than that, I can’t promise you.

We now think we understand that humans are unique among all critters because we, in response to the pressures Malthus defined, are able to geometrically increase food supply. The agricultural revolution being the textbook example. The greater the malthusian pressure, the greater the pressures/incentives become for technological change.

Interestingly (at least to me), when we look at the invention of agriculture in the middle east many millenia ago (it was also invented in at least 3 other global regions, independently), it appears to have been born at the fringes, by those in the most trouble, rather than at the big centers, where the religious and managerial elites would have been.

There may be some generally-held bullshit generalization (aka scientific consensus) that human technological and social change generally works this way–beginning at the margins, and then marching inwards to the “center”, driven by necessity. An example in the social realm might be the fact that three of our major world religions “were born in the desert”.

So we have thousands of years of change coming from the fringes and margins, struggling against the stability that dwells in the center. And any elite centrists who argue that Malthus was all wrong (as they eat their morning cereal, or pancakes, or corn grits), are now living in a world completely rocked and re-created by those exact pressures that Malthus defined.

via BoingBoing

Woolworths stores follow uncanny geometrical patterns

My grandmother was a hoot. Long after she should have given up driving – and, she was never good to begin with – she had an accident in an intersection right in front of the big old Roman Catholic church, which was her destination. Somehow, in giving her report to the nice policeman, she got her super-sized handbag entangled with the cop’s arm. In getting untangled, he wound up with her handbag, and she wound up with his gun!

As an immigrant who came though Ellis Island – an orphan born somewhere near Rome, Italy – she was one of those ubiquitous, small statured, tightly corseted, elderly European women who dressed in dark dresses, sturdy shoes, and had her hair coiled in a U-shaped bun at the nape of her neck. She was barely able to write in English, but she diligently answered every letter I sent her my Freshman year in college. Phonics was never so useful as when it came time to decipher her letters. And, she loved Woolworths. Getting to Woolworths with her, however, was always an adventure.

There was also a sundries/drug store in the (once) sleepy village where she and my grandfather used to live. One of my friends from high school and I used to stop in there for hot fudge sundaes some times, best sundaes I ever had anywhere. If that store is still there, I doubt it has the same ambiance it did then.

What resonated most with me, though, about this post was your comment about being old enough to recognize that the Pax Americana we grew up in may not have been what we thought it was. When I was a child I used to wonder how/why I was lucky enough to be born in the U.S. Now, I wonder the opposite. I suspect that what has changed the most is just my own perspective.

Come to think of it, the feeling of being trapped in their own impoverished reflections might explain some of the rage of the teabaggers. (Whatever you do, don’t tell Sarah Palin.)

We have a lot to be proud of, but none of it is enough to engender a sense of complacency when we look at just how stuck our leaders are. The smartest of them have outsmarted only themselves, and are now trapped in the dysfunctional system which they themselves have created, as much so as we are.

The force necessary to break the logjam in Washington will have to come from outside the city, and from minds that haven’t been acclimated to the insanity inside the Beltway, of that much I’m sure. What it will look like I have no idea, nor do I know how long we’ve got before it arrives. It’s hard not to fear the worst, though, when you realize that none of the people who should be leading the search for solutions have any clue about the peril they’ve put us all in.

That’s why I want to go have a look for myself.

She’s 97 now and, at times, even the sight and feel of my still-long hair, hair she used to brush endlessly, isn’t enough to allow her to recognize me. But I often think back on those times and wonder what she would have to say if she were able to visit Victoria’s Secret. I’m just guessing, but I think it would be curt, pungently acerbic and very, very funny.

Thanks for sharing that memory, WT, and for triggering memories that I haven’t had for far too long.

Happy New Year to you and yours!