Ratios of Understanding

Re: Ratios of Understanding


If the amount of art that was produced directly to address urbanity is any indication--from Baudelaire to Wilde to Woolf to Ellington to O'Hara to Sedaris--dealing with "civilization" requires a lot more creativity and affords a lot more depth of understanding than you give it credit for. And that's just loooking at the artistic side of things. But I realize that this thread is less about historical understanding than about fantasy.

I am not convinced that either knowledge or understanding are the pivotal ratios. I would counter with a single number in absolute terms and not your ratio in relative terms.

That would be the ability implement knowledge and understanding.

This number does not necessarily need to be a function of either knowledge or understanding in the same way that you do not have to know how an airplane works in order to use it.

In fact I would go one step further and suugest that mankind collectively does not have to be directly involved in this knowledge / understanding ratio in order for increased net implementation to occur.

Chumley


I think you have pointed to a fact of reality. Americans are motivated to join in the production/consumption cycle with little knowledge or understanding of what they are doing or way they are doing it. I think that we have become so proficient at behavior control through mass propaganda that you are correct "that mankind collectively does not have to be directly involved in this knowledge / understanding ratio in order for increased net implementation to occur."

I had hoped Katrina would teach us how ludicrous (not to say offensive) it is to speak of "Americans" as if they were a unified social class about which one could make grandiose generalizations of "their motivations" in working. I guess if natural disasters won't do the trick, nothing will. The omnipotent mindreading approach to social theorizing is just too easy and too safe for us to give up, unfortunately.

But that's old hat. What I'd like to hear more about is what you imagine the motivation for those rugged 19th century farmers when they joined the production/consumption cycle was (for farming is nothing if not a cycle of production and consumption).

I think that imagination is a necessary ability for us to understand people in an entirely different life style than we are in. Just as in empathy we must try to create a situation that will allow us to understand a person in a different environment than our own.

I can imagine a situation where I, with my family, am attempting to establish a new home in the wilderness. Just deciding upon a good location for the house and the fields would require a good deal of study.

Then the problem of clearing the fields?-how could that be done and how long would it take? How to feed the family until the fields were cleared and a harvest could be made?

I can imagine a vast number of problems that creatively must be overcome and that the failure to create solutions for those problems would mean the death of the family. I do not think it takes much effort to care this motif forward for the first hundred years of the family.

Many novelists have imagined such scenarios to help us in our quest to understand if we are curious and if we care enough about understanding.

It seems a simple task to then compare such a situation with today's family where the parents work in factory or office.

Our experience in schooling has robbed us of this curiosity and imagination and left us unable to understand situations alien to our own. But with an effort we can restore our lost capacity.

So far every one of those problems have correlaries in the "civilized" world, as you put it. If these scenarios you imagine are the kind that foster "imagination," I don't see why you don't attribute them to the "modern" world as well--except that you obviously don't want to, in order to preserve this idealized image of the rugged frontiers.

I'd have to ask "So what??" It is a lot easier to have a 1/1 ratio if the person only "knows" one thing. If the person "knows" 10 million things then it becomes much harder to maintain the 1/1 ratio.

Contrary to your asertion that "Our experience in schooling has robbed us of this curiosity and imagination and left us unable to understand situations alien to our own." I would assert that our educations have allowed us to "know" enough about basic sitautions that we don't need to concentrate on them for basic survival needs and we have more leisure time to be creative in other endeavors.

You and your entire family would be totally consumed in the process of building and running a frontier homesetad and you'd all be starving much of the time you were doing so (this was a fairly common scenario in the development of the west...).

With a wider base of basic knowledge (even without complete understanding) we've managed to create a basic society where most people work an 8 hour day/5 days a week. The only thing that prevents people from being as creative or imaginative you might think they should be is their own personal interest in doing so.

Interestingly this thread goes to my thread somewhat. Although of course my thread is ever so much more elegant and congruent

Ignorance Of Man's True World
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=70355&highlight=