Worlds Under Construction
The year was 1965. I was a member of an Eagle Scout Troop sponsored by Monsanto. Our meetings typically were in the lab where our scoutmaster worked at the Monsanto Research Triangle facility. I’ve never forgotten the evening. I remember the whine of the power supply and capacitors powering up. Then we heard the sound of a high energy laser punch a hole in a billet of tungsten. The emotional sensation was moving, leaving an indelible residue of memory, and of possibility. A few years before it would’ve been impossible to imagine that insubstantial light could be aligned and focused to instantaneously burn a tiny hole in a substance as hard as tungsten. I was there and I knew the world had changed.
Here I am …. years later, with the memory.
The technical development of lasers and of much else has continued apace, and we are well into the 21st century. A net of geo-synchronous satellites has made cell phone communications convenient and ubiquitous around the world. In fact a neural net of advertising and a constantly undulating offerings of crowd-sourced material transfixes the attention of multitudes glued to cell phone screens during their waking hours.
Within the few years of my adult life, the world has changed for everyone. Our ability to manipulate matter and energy to suit our desires has changed everything. Yet each of us remains a standard-issue-human being. We are little different from our parents, our grandparents, and their grandparents, etc. By contrast our physical and social context has changed radically in ways innumerable.
Last night seated with two friends at Taste of Paris café a comment was made that our President has done some good things. I took the speakers statement as a effort to stake out a modicum of approval for a bombastic, inept, tyrannical minded leader. Well and good. A mother finds something good even in a child who has committed mass murder.
What interests me is the zeitgeist of our time. It is credible to assert as fact something that rests upon a bare sliver of reality. Nietzsche philosophized at length on thought as an act of creation. Thought in our time, is not a matter of turning to or a turning from truth—but the attempt to create a world. This is the image of thought that obtains today. We have multiple, competing, even hostile, antithetical worlds under construction.
No image of thought can be limited
to a selection of calm determinations,
and all of them encounter something that is abominable in principle,
whether this be the error into which thought continually falls,
or the illusion within which it continually turns,
or the stupidity in which it continually wallows,
or the delirium in which it continually turns away from itself
or from a god.
–Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
excerpt from What Is Philosophy page 54
