called from footers of A-E. NB. id lostCrit renamed to Crit.
Although Francis Thompson wrote this verse in 1890, as virtual reality comes of age it feels particularly apt today.
Our world now hums with data. Questions are expected to be simple, and science to answer them simply. But questions of wellbeing are complex and chaotic, and science's answers simply pass these by.
Finding I was lost, I needed elementary facts to move ahead. Those I found seemed familiar and hopeful, and kept me going. My goal then became was to condense the knowledge in them, central to ourselves and to society, free from the looping rhetoric in which it appeared to me to have been hidden. Simply stated these facts may now appear mundane; however, in bringing them together I have found them disturbing.
From simply setting out elementary facts, the concept of a natural, recursive brain emerged. With that I came to realize that what I have felt all my life to be setting me apart was not just inexperience and angst but a lack of fluency. Often this has been seen as argumentative, careless, or arrogant, even experts seeming not to recognize it simply as a learned adaptation to the environment of my ontogeny.
In writing here I have learned of words, and that unfortunately I am not a writer. Two thousand years ago Lao Tzu wrote: "Sincere words are not pretty. Pretty words are not sincere." Yet pretty words still charm, while discordant ones offend, and are dismissed. This work of mine continues then to be a work in progress.
contents of n_A1pre_Chaos.php inserted into footnote 'Chaos' in e_Preface_Footnotes.php via PHP-include, - called from e_Preface.php#infoHum and A1-Footnotes.php#A14..
Chaos refers to the apparently random states of disorder and irregularity exhibited by complex, nonlinear, dynamical systems actually governed by interconnectedness, underlying patterns, and self-organization. While these systems are deterministic, their predictability is limited as it is is impossible to completely know their actual state at any point in time and the smallest difference in this from what has been assessed leads to behaviours that diverge exponentially over time from that foecasted —a characteristic often referred to as the Butterfly Effect.
The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?
In 2005, in response to Pinker and Jackendoff's critique, Chomsky et al. wrote The Evolution of the Language Faculty: Clarifications and Implications. My interest in language then was being spurred by the demands of living in Finland —where I was finding diametric mistranslation rather than universal grammar. Twenty years on, perhaps too late, I have rediscovered their refined, linguistic analysis of cognition; however, for me back then it was lost in the academic debate.
Since the Prussian model was decreed by Frederick the Great in the 18c, education and well-being, rather than being defined in relation to the well-being of individuals, have in practice increasingly been defined in relation to their fitness-for-purpose for the social economy —with criminality and deviance defined in relation to expected social norms.
Having been widely implemented, throughout the world, to serve the various needs of industrialization, the Prussian model has almost completely replaced Socratic education. The role of schools, pre-schools, universities and hospitals has come to be defined within the context of maintaining social stability and economic growth, with the work of well-being professionals and educationalists organized to service national economies and their governance.
The aim of the Socratic method is not to elicit the repetition of accepted facts, but rather to demonstrate the complexity, difficulty, uncertainty and assumptions lying behind people's statements and argument. In this way, it probes the value systems and beliefs that underpin people's actions and decisions; however, by demanding the fundamental re-examination of these it constitutes a real and present threat to the coherence of their lives.. While Socrates is famous for saying that the unexamined life is not worth living, for this belief, and its practice, his fellow Athenians condemned him to death; —the real fate for a one-eyed man in the kindom of the blind.
e_Preface_Footnotes.php#InProgress
Thomas Huxley, London, 1863.
In 2012, my goal was to simply articulate ideas I had developed over the previous eight years living and working in Finland. Oblivious to the narrative challenge involved, I imagined my lack of social fluency was also irrelevant, as the internet would provide a ready audience; however, the project has inexorably revealed the centrality of both, not only to the writing required but also to my life.
e_Preface_Footnotes.php#fathersAshes
And how can a man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers And the temples of his gods.
These words stand out ironically in Macaulay's epic poem, as a defiant cry against his Whig view of history, and the racialist account of the militarized financial and mercantile interventionism of the British Empire. That 'Great Game' continues in central Asia to this day, defending British interests from Russian influence.
My father was from the Ukraine, his father from Yorkshire, a Polish princess his mother. They lived in a Russian palace. So he was interned; then repatriated to England, and sent away to be schooled. He fell in love with Nemesis, and he died alone. I have met her in Finland, fifty years on.
e_Preface_Footnotes.php#Macaulay, linked to from [fathersAshes].
Both quotations from Macaulay's Minutes On Education In India, 1835-1837, collected from records in the Dept. of Public Instruction, Calcutta, by H.Woodrow, printed by C.B.Lewis, at The Baptist Mission Press. 1862.