Has anyone out there read Wendell Berry's essays that criticize Bucky's ideas? I just found them. They are insightful, penetrating, uncanny in their parallelism to Bucky's ideas and writings.
I read them in Standing By Words (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005; originally 1983). The two essays that discuss Bucky's ideas are:
Standing By Words (1979)
Poetry and Place (1982)
I think that Berry has only a superficial understanding of Bucky's work and ideas, but his criticiam is aimed at the core of his philosophy.
Has anyone read and thought about Berry's argument?
In Chapter VI of Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth(see http://www.bfi.org/?q=node/416), Fuller brilliantly defines wealth: "Synergetics discloses that wealth, which represents our ability to deal successfully with our forward energetic regeneration and provide increased degrees of freedom of initiation and noninterfering actions, breaks down cybernetically into two main parts: physical energy and metaphysical know-how. Physical energy in turn divides into two interchangeable phases: associative and disassociative ‹ energy associative as matter and energy disassociative as radiation." However, he goes on to claim: "We find experimentally, regarding the metaphysical phenomenon, intellect, which we call know-how, that every time we employ and test our intellectual know-how by experimental rearrangement of physical energy interactions (either associated as mass or disassociated as radiation, free energy) we always learn more. The know-how can only increase." This is simply not true. Know-how can decrease by all kinds of means, including plain old death and destruction. Knowledge is too often lost. There are other areas of knowledge about which Fuller was simply ignorant. He was especially good at the physical universe, but less so at the cognitive and social reality - despite great insight.
Nonetheless, the point is that we should begin where we can with the knowledge that he affords us. Then go beyond that. Sustainability is not an end-state or ultimate attainment or grand design. Sustainability is an ongoing process of living to create and attain what Fuller aptly defines as wealth. Fuller, while prophetic in many ways, was as fallible as any other human. His words are for inspiration, not worship.
Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment
The fast-paced, consumerist lifestyle of Industrial Society is causing exponential rise in psychological problems besides destroying the environment. All issues are interlinked. Our Minds cannot be peaceful when attention-spans are down to nanoseconds, microseconds and milliseconds. Our Minds cannot be peaceful if we destroy Nature.
Subject : In a fast society slow emotions become extinct.
Subject : A thinking mind cannot feel.
Subject : Scientific/ Industrial/ Financial thinking destroys the planet.
Subject : Environment can never be saved as long as cities exist.
Emotion is what we experience during gaps in our thinking.
If there are no gaps there is no emotion.
Today people are thinking all the time and are mistaking thought (words/ language) for emotion.
When society switches-over from physical work (agriculture) to mental work (scientific/ industrial/ financial/ fast visuals/ fast words ) the speed of thinking keeps on accelerating and the gaps between thinking go on decreasing.
There comes a time when there are almost no gaps.
People become incapable of experiencing/ tolerating gaps.
Emotion ends.
Man becomes machine.
A society that speeds up mentally experiences every mental slowing-down as Depression / Anxiety.
A ( travelling )society that speeds up physically experiences every physical slowing-down as Depression / Anxiety.
A society that entertains itself daily experiences every non-entertaining moment as Depression / Anxiety.
FAST VISUALS /WORDS MAKE SLOW EMOTIONS EXTINCT.
SCIENTIFIC /INDUSTRIAL /FINANCIAL THINKING DESTROYS EMOTIONAL CIRCUITS.
A FAST (LARGE) SOCIETY CANNOT FEEL PAIN / REMORSE / EMPATHY.
A FAST (LARGE) SOCIETY WILL ALWAYS BE CRUEL TO ANIMALS/ TREES/ AIR/ WATER/ LAND AND TO ITSELF.
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sushil_yadav
I think that the Buckminster Fuller Institute ought to be a forerunner in our humanity's need to succeed without us first having to qualify as a technically illiterate person. Minimum pattern is elementary to technology and I think so, too, is generalized Universe. We seem so eager, almost as if we have been programmed by the establishment, to criticize someone's philosophy for the sake of selling the other point of view, without exploring in depth the relevant connections to one's own geometry of thinking which is a technology in conceptual process.
That probably sums up Berry's criticism of certain, perhaps many, modern technologies: they do less with more. They cost more (if you do the accounting comprehensively) and give you less (of the side benefits of the simpler technologies they replace).
He's not a Luddite, but he does have a set of standards to assess value of new technology that many modern technologies cannot pass. The standards are comprehensive in Bucky's sense. They're in a book I don't have to hand, but will get and post next week. His ideas are similar to E.F. Schumacher, who liked his technology scaled down to human community size.
Berry's one-word answer to your question, what will solve our problems, if not technology? would be "community." His main idictment is that the industrial economy (driven by technology, "progress," and the narrow-minded quantification of value in terms of money) is destroying our communities. His work elaborates at length the one example he knows best, family farming and the strip mining of coal in his native Kentucky.
Next week I'll list the parallels in Berry's essays and arguments to points in Bucky's works and life. That is what really gets me: these two thoughtful men conisdered the same issues within the same sorts of constructs and came to radically different conclusions.
I just found this Bucky quote here at bfi in their education department:
"The 99% of humanity who do not understand calculus and other branches of advanced mathematics, think of science and technology, particularly the latter, as a new disease that has come along to plague society. Western hemisphere people associate technology most prominently with weapons of proliferation, world resources exhaustion, and both physical and metaphysical environmental pollutings.
The solid, cubic diversion and distortion of popular thinking prevents the technically illiterate 99% from realizing that the physical Universe consists only of and operates entirely according to the most exquisite technology."
http://bfi.org/node/356
Maybe Wendell is technophobic but why is the question. If technology isn't going to solve our problems, what is?
Isn't Wendell a luddite? No wonder he'd have a problem with Fuller.
However, doing more-with-less is something both Bucky and Berry embrace.