War and Peace in the Global Village
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore
1968
The village has indeed become global. Marshall McLuhan was right. No man is an island any more. The earth itself is an island. ~Time Magazine, 1981
The teenagers have begun to experiment with clothing as artist does with his pigments. Many hippies made their own clothes. Nudity itself is not a visual so much as a sculpture and tactile experience. Women are dressing like men and in a sense becoming men, men freed of responsibility of running things. They can be flamboyant.
Tribal societies have long been called, “The People of the Dream.” Precisely because they are locked in a collective awareness.
Ortega y Gasset History of a System. “Each species builds up a stock of useful habits by selecting among, and taking advantage of the innumerable useless actions which a living being performs out of sheer exuberance. For man, on the contrary, to exist does not mean to exist as once as he maybe is, but merely that there exists a possibility of an effort towards accomplishing this. Who of us is all he should be and longs to be? In contrast, the rest of creation, man existing has to make his existence. He has to solve the practical problem of transferring reality into the program that is himself.”
B.F. Skinner says, “When men strike for freedom, they strike against jails and the police or the threat of them—against oppression. They never strike against forces which make them want to act the way they do. Yet it seems to be understood that governments will operate only through force or the threat of force. And all other principals of control will be left to education, religion and commerce. A government can never create a free people with the techniques now allotted to it. What do you think the world wars have been about? Something as simple as boundaries or trade? Nonsense. The world is trying to adjust to the new conception of man in relation to men.”
Report from Iron Mountain, “War is not as widely assumed primarily an instrument of policy utilized to extend or defend their expressed political values or their economic interests. On the contrary, it is itself the principal bases of organization on which all modern societies are constructed. The common proximate cause of war is the apparent inference of one nation with aspirations of another.”
Courtesy is a social technique that eases collision and strife and friction that sociality is. Around each individual it creates a series of tiny buffers that lessons others bump against and ours against the other.
Emerson observed that manners were made to keep fools at a distance.
Japanese have flowery ceremonial phrases so that instead of “you” one says something like “The miracle that is here.” And instead of “I” something like “the wretchedness here present.”
The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzu. To me it’s not the teat but the ceremony that matters. All clothing and all technology is a part of the ritual that is desperately sought to be kept stabilized and permanent. An oral tribal society has the means of stability for beyond anything possible to a visceral or civilized and fragmented world.
But it has never occurred to them that the innovations resulting from this research and development are precisely the ones that obliterate the identity image indispensable to peace and tranquility among nations.
War is the principal motivational force for the development of science at every level. And War enables the physical deteriorating older generation to maintain its control of the young destroying it if necessary. Violence in its many forms, as an involuntary quest for identity.
In any war, the foe studies the resources and characteristics of his attackers as earnestly as the attacker tries to understand the foe in death.
Caesar and Napoleon were accompanied by scholars to advise them in their enemies’ pattern of culture.
New technology disturbs the image of war so much so that fear and anxiety ensue and a new quest for identity has to begin. Nobody has ever studied what degree of innovation is required to shatter the self-image of man or a society.
Hollywood houses have more redskins and more cowpoke than ever existed on the frontier.
The saying “Seeing is believing” may fittingly be reversed, “Believing is Seeing.”
New Environments inflict considerable plain on the perceiver.
We now see the visual world very plainly and began to realize that other cultures, native and orient, have been on quite a different sensory plans for not only is each sense a unique world, but offers unique pleasures and pains.
Book by Ashley Montague The Human Revolution. The fact is that as man has become increasingly, not less, violent and warlike. The violence’s that have been attributed to original nature have, in fact, been acquired predominately within the relatively recent period of man’s Cultural Revolution.
The Basis of Communication by Harold Innis. Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White.
The fall of the Inca Empire led to the death of a civilization whose greatness had been perceived even by the rude adventures who destroyed it.
Edmund Burke “First right of every man in civilized society is the right to be protected against the consequence of his own stupidity.”
Most sciences are intertwined and related like biology, psychology and sociology.
John Treble said, “Because the job they know how to do has been eliminated by the automation. The nation has been willing to put up with an educational system which is not geared toward new society. Just as it support a horse and buggy congress, which only dimly approaches the needs of the space age.”
“The westerner lives in a man-made environment, mechanically conditioned and time structured.”
Strategy of permissiveness in upbringing of the young as opposed to obedience and discipline that enabled the young to fit in to the mechanical world.”
Our confused efforts to re-establish goals, habits, attitudes and a sense of security, they have become the main order of business.
The United States is by far the most visually oriented country in the history of the world—labels and classification for everything and everybody.
The book Siddhartha by Herman Hesse was a favorite of intellectuals. (As was The Wasteland) Siddhartha story of violence as a quest for identity…No longer to be a self, to experience the peace of mind of an emptied heart, to experience pure thought was his goal. When all the self was conquered and dead, when all the passions and desires of the world were silenced, the last must awaken the innermost being that is no longer self—the great secret.
He reflected deeply, until his feeling completely overwhelmed him and he reached a point where he relinquished causes, for to relinquish causes it seemed to him, is to think through thoughts alone and feelings become knowledge and are not lost, become real and begin to mature. The reason why I do not know anything about myself, the reason why Siddhartha has remained alien and unknown to myself is due to one thing…fleeting from myself.
Yes, he thought breathing deeply, I will no longer try to escape from Siddhartha, I will no longer try to escape from Siddhartha. I will no longer devote my thoughts to Ataman and the sorrows of the world. I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins. I will no longer study yoga-Veda or any other teachings. I will learn from myself, be my own pupil. I will learn from myself the secret of Siddhartha.
He looked around him as if seeing the world for the first time. The world was beautiful, strange and mysterious. Here was blue. Here was yellow. Here was green. Here was the sky and the woods and the mountains. All beautiful, mysterious and enchanting. And in the midst of it, he, Siddhartha, the awakened one. On the way to himself and all this yellow, and blue and river, and wood passed through the eyes of Siddhartha for the first time. It was no longer the magic or Mara. It was no longer meaningless and the chance diversities of the appearances of the world. Despised by the deeper thinking Brahmin’s, who scorned
This kind of story today (1960s) is a popular best seller among the teenagers. They too feel alienated from a fragmented, mechanical world that have classified patterns of which have merely presented a slot for each person.
Education: We simply impose them the patterns that we find convenient to ourselves and convenient to ourselves and consistent with the available technologies.
The children Watts, California were quite right in asking, “Why should we go to school only to interrupt our education.”
A US educators says Indians have a happier way of getting along with people than white men and do not experience loneliness that often accompanies success in white society.
Rev John Bryde, “The Indian works as a group. His motivation is do something for his group. The Indians have a better set of values than white man. As to teaching Indians about human living, we can teach them nothing and they can teach us everything. An Indian feels a mystic relationship to the land. It is part of their identity.”
“The frightening thing about this kids that they’ll take anything anywhere” a Yale student said of college kids taking drugs.
New York Times Dr. Kormas said, “One gets from these kids a feeling of nothingness. There is a genuine feeling that life has little to offer and they speak continually of the dreariness and drabness of everyday life.”
The jet airplane changed diplomacy by extending the powers of presidents.
Computers are good and bad. Which is the lesser of two evils? When one had been hurt by new technology, the private person or corporation finds its entire identity endangered by physical change or psychic change and it lashes back in a fury of self-defense.
There are matters directly related to phonetic literacy and its effects on politics and social life. Napoleon was enthusiastic about Rousseau who taught primitive tribalism as a basis for humanity and happiness—like many semi-literates, Napoleon was prolific.
Charles A Lindberg expressed his disillusionment with Western man and his mechanical technology, saying that if he were to have a choice, he would settle for the life of nature.
carilynn27 