Marshall's Way

Romanticism / Gustave Dore/ The Enigma

I am getting my groove on for the week.  This is a five day week, only punctuated by a dental and an ophthamology appointment.  Heavy week for maintenance and preparation.  Moving forward much doesn't seem to be a great option.  Maybe downtime and routine maintenance is the way to go.

Went over to Vantucky yesterday to hang with the eldest and the ex.  Interesting times ahead for those two.  Contentment means being good with your person and your relationship with the world.  Not certain that those two have that fully in hand.  But in their defense, no one does and they are both working on it.

Came home last might and read (surprise here) talked with friends on the phone a lot.  This time of year going out and hanging is done inside.  I much prefer being outside to hang.  So this is my backup plan during the rainy season.

Screed:

Maybe Marshall McLuhan had it right.  The medium is the Massage.  The medium is just about everything when it comes to communication.  Content sometimes seems to take  second place.  That is a bane. 

In a sense, the internet is now making me suspicious about the long term project of Democracy.  Not that Democracy ever was going to last. Not that it ever really had a decent chance of lasting forever.  Anacyclosis most certainly is a real deal and we aren't immune to its charms.  

What the internet does is diffuse the ideas of the elite and the would be elite in a manner that almost ensures contention.  Look, the stream of bile that passes for political thought today is primarily due to a sampling error.  Well, maybe not a samling error, but maybe a too fine-grained approach to the issue of giving voice to political thought.

When political thought seemed more rational (and there is more than a decent chance that it never really was rational, I just imagined that it was so), there slowness and narrowness of the channels of dissemination made for a de facto means of "averaging" political thought.  Large circulation newsprint and television were conservative enough and tried to be liberal, but the conservative nature of the organizations kept thought clustered around an average.  Radical thought of any stripe was force to the edges, delivered through the mail in plain envelopes with contents reeking of mimeograph fluid. 

The edge to edge democratization of thought allowed by the internet, while intellectually sexy, doesn't appear to be working that well in the real world.  Having access to the full range of political thoughts and beliefs on an expansive, full-spectrum, basis just seems to force folks into "gated communities" of thought, with heresies being shut out in an attempt to make sense of the constant conflicting opinions being presented 24-7. 

I have no idea how to fix this.  We seem to be fragmenting into a bunch of virtual societies intermingled with each other.  I can't for the life of me see how this will end, but I have my fears.



Podes, Stephan. "POLYBIUS AND HIS THEORY OF "ANACYCLOSIS" PROBLEMS OF NOT JUST ANCIENT POLITICAL THEORY." History of Political Thought 12, no. 4 (1991): 577-87. www.jstor.org/stable/26213908.