It never ceases to amaze me how we imprison ourselves.
One of the most insidious forms of colonization is the deference to external authority for self-esteem, confidence and knowledge. We are not aware of our own inner resources when we have been colonized. Our volition is stolen from us and we wander around aimlessly until someone comes to save us.
“The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps
sent a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy wasteland.
It began to snow
immediately,
snowed for two days and the unit
did not return.
The lieutenant suffered:
he had dispatched
his own people to death.
sent a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy wasteland.
It began to snow
immediately,
snowed for two days and the unit
did not return.
The lieutenant suffered:
he had dispatched
his own people to death.
But the third day the unit came back.
Where had they been? How had they made their way?
Yes, they said, we considered ourselves
lost and waited for the end. And then one of us
found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down.
We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm and then with the map
we discovered our bearings.
And here we are.
The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map
and had a good look at it. It was not a map of the Alps
but of the Pyrenees”
— Miroslav Holub, Brief Thoughts on Maps. TLS, Feb 4, ’77
That’s an amazingly tragic allegory. Soldiers, especially in this most classical of depictions, rely entirely on the command structure for their volition. When the command structure is broken, as it was in the blizzard, the soldiers are lost. When they find a map, a shred of authority that relieves their doubt and loss of confidence, they come home. When it is shown that the map is entirely irrelevent to their situation, the stake is plunged into the heart of their salvation: they are alive, but forever imprisoned in their dependence on external authorities. They are so far gone that they don’t even recognize that their survival was a result of their own resources.
The lieutenant should be proud.
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From an essay by Jose Saramago called Reinventing democracy:
True democracy should begin with what is immediately to hand – the country of our birth, the society we work in, the street we live on. Without that, all the underlying reasoning, the theoretical foundation and practical operation of the system will be vitiated. It is no use purifying the water in the taps if the reservoir is contaminated.
Good essay…have a read of the rest.
Thanks to wood s lot for the find.
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There is a long discussion going on at Peter Rukavina’s Reinvented about Canada’s Olympic team. It started as a post about the CBC and streaming media, but morphed into a series of comments about why Canadians celebrate “mediocraty.”
I weighed in with these comments:
All of our athletes at this year’s games were chosen because they were ranked top 12 in their sport. I think anything better than 12 then is an improvement and when you see a guy like Rick Say swim the race of his life against the field of the century and finish sixth, you HAVE to cheer that on. Why? Because he never finished better and therefore he delivered an excellent performance. A perect performance. It was just not as fast as Ian Thorpe and four other men. What more could he do?
And then there are the heartbreaks, where athelets come ranked high and have a bad day and finish early. Sherraine Mackay the fencer was like that. She should have won gold but got knocked out by a Greek no-chancer. It was a huge win for the Greek woman…did you see the look on her face? She had just pulled off the best performance of her life, beating one of the top ranked competitors in the world. Amazing. And for Mackay, it was heartbreak at the Olympics, but how many of us know just how good this woman has been? She has medalled at 15 world cup competitions since 1999 and won gold in seven world class events. She fought the worst performance of her entire international career in Athens, but does that make her a loser? On any given day she can be the best in the world.
This is why I watch sports. They are the only thing on TV and radio that IS unpredictable. Even the news offers few surprises. The only real reality TV is athletics. And it’s gripping stuff to see the top people in the world trying to find an edge that will grant them the ultimate reward.
As for only cheering number one, I’m not too hung up on that. Sports doesn’t really matter. As much as I love it, it’s not like winning the Stanley Cup is as important as being a Nobel Peace Laureate. It’s compelling to watch people try to win and I like celebrating their acheivments, however measured. But finishing first is not the sole benefit of sport. Sport produces people who, if they undertake their activities with a good sense of balance, grow to understand what it means to win and lose, to work in a team, or to become deeply aware of themselves and their limitations. Taken in a larger context and with a balance on training, winning and participation, sport can leave us with members of society who transfer their pursuit of excellence to realms that truly benefit us. In that respect, sport, appropirately played, can be a great practice field for transformation by understanding ourselves, our partners and what it takes to overcome conditions and deal with success and failure.
Most of our Olympians are not professionals, and they will go back into our communities as people who have a deep understanding of these things and who can share them with others. I think, even though it sounds over the top, this kind of approach is a benefit to our society, where so often people are told NOT to rely on their own resources, creativity and spirit.
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Clarksburg, Ontario
Cruising the highways and byways of southern Georgian Bay in my old homeland of Ontario. Eating lots of corn, swimming in the lake and cursing our luck at an overcast sky for the meteor shower tonight.
Spent some time with my old friend Stephen Couchman with whom I killed many nights in Peterbourough, Ontario in our student days doing performance art and making music. Nice to connect with one’s original collaborators.
I’ll be back soon…in the meantime, have a look at what I’m reading on this trip.
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Not quite done with The Gift yet, although definitely slowing down. Chapter five of the book deals with the community that is created by gifts and goes into some interesting detail about the scientific community and the implications of gift exchange on the free market. We’ll save the free market piece for the next post. Right now I want to focus on something Hyde says that has applicability in the blogging world.
Hyde takes the view that “gift exchange at the level of the group offers equilibrium and coherence, a kind of anarchist stability…[T]he conversion of gifts to commodities will have the effect of fragmenting the group or even destroying it.”
From here, Hyde details the circulation of ideas as gifts that brings coherence to the scientific community. When those ideas are converted into commodities, when scientists go to work for the private sector, or publish text books, it creates a shunning from the community. There is an implicit understanding that ideas are shared freely, at conferences, through journals and so on. All of this allows science to proceed toward the collective human goal of understanding the universe. And here, Hyde enters some interesting territory about the emergence of a group mind:
…[T]he task of assembling a mass of disparate facts into a coherent whole clearly lies beyond the powers of a single mind or even a single generation. All such broad intellectual undertakings call for a community of scholars, one in which each thinker can be awash in the ideas of his comrades so that a sort of “group mind” develops, one that is capable of cognitive tasks beyond the powers of any single person…A scientist may conduct his research in solitude, but he cannot do it in isolation. The ends of science require coordination. Each individual’s work must “fit,” and the synthetic nature of gift exchange makes it an appropriate medium for this integration; it is not just people that must be brought together but the ideas themselves.
This is such a concise and elegant description of why blogging matters. I’m discovering the power of this from the follow up for the Giving Conference, which benefited tremendously from Phil’s insistence that bloggers be a key target audience for the invitation. There were bloggers there (myself included) who know little of philanthropy, but whose engagement with the ideas presented at the conference have ensured that the story has continued to be told, refined and developed.
I cannot conceive of ever planning a conference like this again where bloggers were not invited to be the voices of diversity and story that emerge and continue the spirit of the gathering.
Bloggers offer immense gifts of time, reflection, engagement with each other’s ideas. My own thinking gets continually pushed and stretched by reading others and trying to respond to them. This quality of gift exchange provides a beautiful and powerful foundation for the community of people who share ideas freely on a myriad of subject areas. When bloggers form communities, it is around the cohesion of those who contribute to each other’s thinking.