NETFUTURE

                    Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #117     A Publication of The Nature Institute      February 1, 2001
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            Editor:  Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)

                  On the Web: http://www.netfuture.org/
     You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.

NetFuture is a reader-supported publication.


CONTENTS
---------

On Forgetting to Wear Boots (Stephen L. Talbott)
   Sometimes we need help from the least capable

DEPARTMENTS

Correspondence
   NetFuture Gives Me Hope (Johan Eriksson)
   How Important Is Animal Suffering? (Phil Walsh)
   Do We Need Less Modesty -- or More Self-understanding? (Van Wishard)
   As Gods, We Are Powerless and Confused (Michael Goldhaber)
   Response to Goldhaber and Wishard (Kevin Kelly)
   John Gage, Computers, and Malaria (Ed Arnold)

About this newsletter


==========================================================================

                       ON FORGETTING TO WEAR BOOTS

                            Stephen L. Talbott
                          (stevet@netfuture.org)


"I have no doubt that Camphill is an expression of a
great intuitive thrust out of the deep heart of nature
which has us in its keeping and knows that both we and it
are in mortal peril".  (Sir Laurens van der Post)


Whenever friends visit Phyllis and me, one of our favorite places to take
them is the nearby Camphill Village in Copake, New York.  The village is
part of a thriving, worldwide movement for the care of people with special
needs.  You will find here villagers with Down Syndrome and a great
variety of other mental handicaps -- all pursuing their lives in a
beautiful, restful, productive, socially supportive, and artistically rich
setting.  If there is a place that can bring healing to a high-tech
society, surely this is it.


Dignity and Laughter
--------------------

One of the first things likely to strike you about most any Camphill
community (there are more than ninety of them worldwide, from Ireland to
Botswana to India) is the beauty and craftsmanship evident in the
buildings and their furnishings.  Much of the craft work issues from shops
where the villagers are employed -- there are facilities for weaving,
pottery-making, woodworking, candle-dripping, bookbinding, and jewelry-
making, as well as dairies, bakeries, and gardens.  At Camphill Copake a
seed-saving venture has recently gotten under way, together with an herb
garden and a laboratory for the preparation of herbal remedies and salves.
There is plenty of healthy and fulfilling work to satisfy the villagers'
strong need to contribute something worthwhile to society.

Camphill villages spring from the same roots as Waldorf education, and
they share the Waldorf emphasis upon an artistically shaped life.  This
emphasis extends from the long, beautifully carved, wooden tables in many
of the living units (where the resident villagers eat regular meals with
their house parents and any children who live there), to the celebration
of seasonal festivals, to the frequent gathering for artistic performances
in an auditorium that is typically the architectural crown of the village.
(In Copake, pianists Andre Watts and Peter Serkin are among those who
donate their time to perform for the villagers and staff.)  Drama, dance,
dramatic speech, music -- there is always something to bring the community
together in consciousness of the spiritual background of life in which we
all are united.  As a Camphill worker in Great Britain, Sybille Alexander,
has put it:

   The atmosphere in the villages is determined by the recognition of the
   dignity of each human being, the inner, spiritual work done by the
   leaders -- and, of course, humor, without which the community life
   would be unbearable.

I can vouch for the place of humor.  A few years ago, on a slushy winter
day, we took a visiting friend for a walk through the wooded village in
Copake.  Loafing along a muddy path, we were overtaken by two of the
villagers, women of older middle age securely bundled up against the
weather and walking to their jobs in the bakery.  As they passed us, they
caught sight of our sneakered feet and broke into a fit of hilarity.  "You
forgot to put your boots on!" they exclaimed, pointing and laughing.  We
acknowledged our folly and joined in the merriment.  After a brief
exchange they passed on ahead, still laughing and chattering gaily.  We
cracked up, too, as we reconstructed their conversation for ourselves:

   "Imagine letting people like that in here!"

   "Yeah, don't have sense enough to wear boots in the mud.  I bet they
   wouldn't even come in out of the rain!"

   "If you ask me, they're an ace or two short of a full deck."



Trying to Communicate
---------------------

More recently, I had a rather different encounter in the village.  The
staff had invited me to come speak on technology as part of a lecture
series they were putting together.  Knowing how deeply Camphill workers
were in the habit of thinking about social issues and the human being, I
put together an ambitious and fairly abstract talk.  But when I arrived at
the appointed hour in Fountain Hall, with its high-arching wooden beams
and stained glass windows, I was disturbed to find the auditorium seats
full of villagers.

I expressed my concern to the organizer, explaining that I had expected to
speak only with staff and had not prepared anything appropriate for the
villagers.   (Not that I would have known how to prepare even if I had
been forewarned.)  She quietly replied:  "Just speak your real concerns
out of heart-felt conviction.  That is what they need.  They will hear
what is important".

"What is important?" I wondered as I sat down to await my introduction.
Then, at the podium, gripped by self-doubt, I proceeded to deliver the
hour-long talk I had prepared.  "At least", I thought, "only the staff
will be in any position to ask questions afterward".  But when the time
came, it was the villagers who thrust their hands eagerly skyward.

I called first on a lean, intense-looking gentleman in a suit and tie.
Upon being recognized, Robert (whose name I learned later) stood up and
began to speak earnestly while vigorously gesturing with arms, face, and
body.  But nothing came out of his mouth.  There was only the sound of
muffled struggle as inchoate words, trapped somewhere in the man's throat,
tumbled over each other on their way into some deep, internal void.

Yet he spoke with all the vivid force of a hellfire-and-brimstone
preacher, and he began to move from his place as if carried along by the
momentum of his own gestures.  He traversed his row to the aisle and,
still gesticulating with a message urgently demanding expression, began to
approach the podium.  Alarmed by the man's almost violent and growing
intensity, I began to wonder whether I might be in some physical danger --
a puzzling sort of question to ask while you're looking out over an
audience that seems as serene and undisturbed as ever.

In the actual event, someone rose easily to meet Robert's advance and
gently ushered him back to his seat -- a guidance he did not resist.
Apparently, it seemed natural to everyone that he should have had his say.

Of course, I owed Robert a reply.  So I told him that I envied his ability
to speak with such force and passion, since my own great limitation lay in
my inability to do so.  And it was true.  Robert's force of conviction was
fully on display, while his words remained bottled up inside him.  My own
intellectual work is in fact driven by great passion and conviction, but I
learned long ago to choke off any outward expression of feeling.  My words
flow freely enough, but their passage into the outer world is cut off from
the furnace of their forging.

Other questions and comments came.  One villager told of enjoying a game
of computer solitaire when she visited a relative's home.  Another
confided to me afterward that the questions I raised were so gravely
important that he would carry them into his nightly bedtime meditation.
Some other comments I could scarcely understand -- perhaps because I was
not as attuned to what is important as my audience had been.


Gift-Bearers
------------

Karl Koenig, founder of the Camphill movement, once wrote that

   I can help my brother only if I see the helper in him, [and] the
   receiver of help in me.

You will find throughout the Camphill movement a strong sense that people
with special needs bring special gifts to the planet -- perhaps exactly the
needful gifts in our time.  These folks can teach us the virtues our
culture has largely disregarded -- for example, the virtue of attending
fully to the person immediately in front of us.  Rose Edwards, a former
Camphill worker, once told me,

   I worked for eighteen years with extremely disabled children, and to
   this day I can recommend it as a tremendous background for life.
   Everything had to be exaggerated:  you have to speak more slowly, be
   more patient, plan more carefully, be more present in the moment.

Her own manner of deliberate, thoughtful speech gave uncommon emphasis to
her testimony.  Hearing her words, I couldn't help thinking of the
contemporary habit (often proclaimed a virtue) of divided attention.  I
also thought of the fabled ethic of Silicon Valley, with its pride in raw
efficiency, in supreme technical ability, and in "don't get in my way or
I'll run you down" aggressiveness.  At Camphill the whole point is to
allow the other person to get in our way.  That's how we begin to see him
for who he is, and thereby discover something about who we are --
something other than what our preferred mirrors tell us.

When you create an environment like that, remarkable things begin to
happen.  What often catches people's attention about Camphill is the
extraordinary and unanticipated development their loved ones undergo
there.  Part of this is owing to the special gifts the villagers bring
with them.  Koenig has remarked that, while we can often gain efficiency
and speed by ignoring those with special needs, in some matters they may
possess a speed and ability far surpassing our own.  As a writer at the
Camphill in Botton Village, U.K., has put it:

   All kinds of issues can be discussed with far more grasp by people who
   are normal, yet the generosity of nature, the power of commitment to
   ideals, the capacity of forgiveness in those with special needs can be
   disconcerting to say the least.  In the end, living with people with
   special needs is living with people and this is a symphonic task
   in which, at any time, any instrument can soar upwards and lead the
   melody to the accompaniment of all the other instruments in the
   orchestra.



Serving the Other
-----------------

A great deal depends on an environment that supports, believes in, and
encourages individual gifts and individual development.  Koenig describes
the "College Meetings" at Camphills for children, where every week the
staff of a house or entire facility come together to discuss a particular
child:

   The child's case history is read, and then the teachers, helpers and
   nurses give their reports and impressions of the child in question.
   Many symptoms, signs and features are collected until -- usually under
   the guidance of one of the doctors -- the image of the child arises.
   His habits, achievements, faults and failures are laid out in such a
   way that gradually a complete picture of his individuality appears.

In this picture the staff find guidance that enables them to clear a path
for the child's continued growth.

All this echoes the way children are assessed in Waldorf schools, where
the College of Teachers will often hold meetings to discuss the problems
and opportunities facing a particular student.  The contrast with the
mentality behind standardized testing could hardly be greater.  Certainly
teachers must assess student performance -- and in the most profound and
intimate way possible.  The problem with standardized testing is that it
avoids any such rigorous assessment.  It is a hopelessly crude tool, a
means of studied ignorance rather than deep understanding.  And, as a side
effect, it removes all flexibility, the living qualities, from classroom
engagement.  When you know in advance exactly what knowledge the
student-container is supposed to hold, there's not much incentive to
attend to the particular gifts and developmental needs, or the consuming
interests, of the individual learner.  Standardized testing is not student
assessment; it is the refusal to assess.

No student's needs and timing and achievement and potential can be
assessed in exactly the same terms as another student's.  I suspect that,
where teachers willingly acquiesce in the demand for standardized testing,
two factors at work are laziness and fear.  It can be both difficult and
disturbing to confront what lives deeply in another human being.  This, of
course, is exactly the burden that Camphill workers take upon themselves.
But the principle of the distinctive character of the individual is hardly
less important in mainline schools.


Of Accident and Destiny
-----------------------

Whether it accords with our philosophical disposition or not, most of us
have had some sort of an experience of destiny -- for example, we have
(perhaps unwillingly) felt that a horrific accident or dramatic change in
fortune or a significant personal encounter was somehow "prepared" for us.
What we met on these occasions was ourselves, or something that belonged
to us.  The events were "fated", answering as if by some hidden intention
to a need or potential of ours.

In other words, the accidents were not really accidents; they were
integral to our lives.  But, at the same time, we could not feel ourselves
reduced to these strokes of destiny, for we also stood apart from them; it
was we who chose how to make them into material for further development.
If they were part of us, it was because they presented us with the
opportunity to exercise exactly the capacities that needed strengthening.
All such events shape us, but they do so most crucially by giving us the
opportunity to transcend them.

Of course, the prevailing, scientifically informed culture leaves little
room for any very significant reading of these unusually freighted
experiences.  Nevertheless, given that the purpose of sound science is to
elucidate experience and not merely to dismiss it, our inattention to
these inklings of destiny is much more problematic than the effort to
bring them into greater clarity.

But my purpose now is not to argue such matters either way.  Rather, it is
merely to point out that, without a strong sense of human destinies,
Camphills would not exist.  What is true of the "external" events of our
lives, Camphill workers will tell you, is also true of your and my bodies
as physical instruments for the expression of our selves:  the instrument
of my earthly existence is not an accident; it belongs to me.  But at the
same time, I am not just the instrument.  There are many ways I can use
it, and in the using I can to one degree or another grow beyond its
limitations -- grow by means of its limitations.

It is not hard for us to realize that the crushing, outward circumstances
of life may have kept hidden from us some of the most powerful, ingenious,
and significant personalities ever to inhabit the earth -- a Mozart,
perhaps, who never laid hands on a piano, a Gandhi whose crippling
accident and unenlightened society left him in institutional darkness.

What you will find among many Camphill workers is a sense that this same
truth applies to those individuals coping with the severe constraints of a
defective physical organism.  The self whose destiny it is to wrestle with
such daunting limitations may be a self whose hidden resources and powers
of development far exceed those of its helpers.  The close connection
between genius and the breakdown of normal function is well known.  We are
not just our handicaps.  We are not just our symptoms.


A Parent's Disconcerting Revelation
-----------------------------------

Carlo Pietzner, who helped found the Camphill movement in America, has
spoken of the experience, both striking and shattering, when parents
realize their child is more than his symptoms.  They suddenly find
themselves utterly alone in a society unable to appreciate their
revelation.  No one is prepared

   to help them understand why there is more in the child than the
   symptoms of stammering, stuttering, not being able to learn to read,
   not being able to walk, not being able to feed themselves, to complete
   toilet training.  Surely, yes, these are the describable symptoms, the
   incapacity of the instrument.  And yet they can see and feel that there
   is more to it; there is the player to it.  And if there is a player to
   it, it cannot be only an accident.  This player must have the
   possibility of finding a way to play his sonata, however hollow the
   instrument may sound, or however many notes may be missing.  (From
   Questions of Destiny.  Slightly paraphrased.)

Whose life is not a broken song?  Camphills are a testimony to the
conviction that even the most troubled songs need singing -- and more,
that these may be, in their own way, songs of genius, giving voice to some
of the most critical melodies and counterpoints in the sung destiny of
earth itself.

As I say, I am attempting no explicit justification of such a view, remote
as it is from conventional understanding.  But Camphills are real places
of practical effectiveness -- remarkable sites of healing and inspiration
exactly where the surrounding society would be least inclined to look for
anything of much importance.  My own inclination, in trying to glimpse a
tolerable social future, would be to look at least as hard at what is
going on in a Camphill village as to look at the excitements of Silicon
Valley.


                          ---------------------

For further information about the Camphill movement, see www.camphill.org.
Also, you can contact the Camphill Association of North America, Triform
Camphill Community, 20 Triform Road, Hudson NY 12534.  Their email address
is info@camphillassociation.org.  For information about volunteer
opportunities, see http://camphillassociation.org/opportunities.html.

Related articles:

** "The Many Voices of Destiny" in NF #102.  A review and commentary on
   Martha Beck's remarkable book, Expecting Adam, about giving birth to a
   Down Syndrome child at Harvard.

** "Can Technology Make the Handicapped Whole?" in NF #92.


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==========================================================================

                              CORRESPONDENCE


NetFuture Gives Me Hope
-----------------------

From:  Johan Eriksson (f98joer@dd.chalmers.se)

Dear Steve,

I am a Swedish engineering student who discovered NetFuture a few months
ago.  I can hardly describe the impact it has had on my view of the world
since then.  It is not often I encounter something that so brilliantly and
powerfully challenges my thinking and gives me such hope for the future.
It has given me much joy and sparked a mental revolution the like of which
I haven't experienced before.

Regarding the recent comment from a reader in issue #115 (and your own
comment "In many ways I feel I have failed with NetFuture") about
NetFuture's supposed negativity, let me just say that I haven't felt that
NetFuture is negative.  While it often does point to events and trends
that are negative and even destructive, I never fail to come away from it
with great optimism and enthusiasm.  As for reaching a broader public, I
have no really good suggestions.  All I can say is that I am trying to
introduce my friends and the people around me to the thoughts expressed in
NetFuture.  I doubt that there is any better way.  I also don't think that
five years is very long considering that your message goes right against
"mainstream culture".


How Important Is Suffering?
---------------------------

Response to:  "Factory-farmed Pigs: Further Thoughts" (NF-116)
From:  Phil Walsh (philw@microware.com)

[Douglas Sloan wrote:]

   A pall of suffering of living, feeling creatures hangs over our modern
   culture, and most of us are complicit in it, if only through willful
   ignorance of what is taking place.

This is simply too much.  Is our vision so blurred?  Is our hearing so
deadened?  Do the butchery and barbarity man has inflicted on man for
millennia no longer register on our senses?

The human suffering going an all over the world will, in the time it takes
me to write this note, create a thicker "pall of suffering" than 10,000
years of factory farms could ever produce.

Willful ignorance of the life of a pig?  Would that it were true that that
sin was the one worthiest of our pain.

Phil Walsh
Des Moines, Iowa


                          ---------------------

Phil --

In a way, I'd say that the feature article in this issue is a fair
response to your concern.  If the destinies of the "greatest" of us are
inextricably linked to the destinies of the "least", may not this truth
extend, in the appropriate degree, to all living things?

As I'm sure you realize, nothing in Douglas Sloan's words implied a
devaluation of human suffering.  But I'm not sure what else one can say to
your complaint.  The thought that comes immediately to mind is, "How far
we've come from any sense of a "Great Chain of Being"!  And how far from
the Native American's often profound sense of respectful connection to the
deer that fed and clothed him, and the ash tree that supplied his bow".

Whether we should retain anything of such sentiments is, of course,
something you might dispute.  In any case, I take it to be part of Sloan's
contention that a coarsened attitude toward the other creatures with whom
we share the pulsings of life will lead inevitably to coarsened relations
with our fellow humans.  Cruel and disrespectful impulses toward living
beings cannot easily be quarantined within one compartment of the psyche.

To be a little provocative:  I do not know any philosophical perspective
justifying the conclusion that pigs are of no account that does not also
force the conclusion that persons are of no account.  (Yes, I am well
aware of claims to the contrary.  And, yes, as I indicated before, I
occasionally eat pork.)

Steve


Do We Need Less Modesty, or More Self-understanding?
----------------------------------------------------

Response to:  "The Dangers of Undue Modesty" (NF-116)
From:  Van Wishard (vwishard@worldnet.att.net)

Steve:

"We are as gods and might as well get good at it."  In my judgment, what
Kevin Kelly is revealing is not that we are as gods, but that we have
assumed a certain "god-almightiness" or hubris.  For the Kelly who calls
for us to "learn to be responsible" for our god-like capacities is the
same Kelly who sees himself (and all of us) as living in "the great vacuum
of meaning, in the silence of unspoken values, in the vacancy of something
large to stand for, something bigger than oneself."  (New Rules for the
New Economy, by Kevin Kelly, p. 160).  Is this a description of a god-
like context of life?  One could ask, "What is the substance of
`responsibility' in such a nihilistic context?"  It is one thing to
celebrate the powers of the gods that we are assuming, but quite another
to subject oneself to the restraint and wisdom of the gods.

It seems as if our greatest need is still the age-old search for self-
understanding, self-control and for some self-limitation on the power
complex that beguiles us into believing we are as gods.  And lest some
suggest the phrase "power complex" is extreme, consider the story that
appeared in The Washington Post (4.5.99) about a Carnegie Mellon computer
science professor who had been hired as a researcher by Microsoft.  The
good professor noted, "Teaching steals from research time."  At Microsoft,
however, the professor said, "To me, this corporation is my power tool.
It's the tool I wield to allow my ideas to shape the world."  My power
tool.  Does such a statement not suggest the presence of ego-inflation?

Freeman Dyson recognized this temptation when, in the documentary film
"The Day After Trinity," he said, "The glitter of nuclear weapons.  It is
irresistible if you come to them as a scientist.  To feel it's there in
your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your
bidding.  To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into
the sky.  It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable
power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles -- this,
what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they
see what they can do with their minds."

Jacob Bronowski understood this lure and expressed our need:  "We have to
cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.  It is not
the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral
imagination -- what we are as ethical creatures -- because without that man
and beliefs and science will perish together" (The Ascent of Man).

Van Wishard
WorldTrends Research


As Gods, We Are Powerless and Confused
--------------------------------------

Response to:  "The Dangers of Undue Modesty" (NF-116)
From:  Michael Goldhaber (mgoldh@well.com)

Kevin, I very much doubt that most people feel at all godlike; rather, I
think they feel often overwhelmed and confused by the rapid onrush of the
current world.  And each one of us is in fact far more acted upon than
acting, no matter how creative and inventive we may try to be or even
succeed in being.  Were there some way to bring democratic reflection to
bear on the directions we -- inevitably collectively -- choose, then we
might feel some ability to act with godlike power and responsibility.  As
it is, I think, as Langdon Winner illustrates, too many of us choose false
and destructive power, as in video games, because real, effective and
constructive power is so glaringly absent.

Best,
Michael


Response to Goldhaber and Wishard
---------------------------------

From:  Kevin Kelly (kevin@wired.com)

I agree fully with Michael Goldhaber.  And this was in fact my point.  We
need the education, training, tools, and perspective to become good gods.

I also agree with Van Wishard's comments that our greatest need is a
search for meaning.  Now that we have god-like power, what are we going to
do with it?  It is an awesome, frightening responsibility, with few
answers supplied by science, and only some answers supplied by religion.
My main point was only that we have to acknowledge our godhood, rather
than deny it.

--kk

Kevin Kelly     kevin@wired.com     Editor-At-Large, Wired magazine
149 Amapola Ave, Pacifica, CA   94044  USA       www.well.com/user/kk
+1-650-355-3660 home   +1-650-359-9701 fax


John Gage, Computers, and Malaria
---------------------------------

Response to:  "Bill Gates' New Concerns" (NF-115)
From:  Ed Arnold (era@ucar.edu)

I've watched John Gage many times on the Sunergy broadcasts.  He is, of
course, the consummate single-focus technologist, though not nearly as
colorful as Scott McNealy, Sun's president.

I let him know how I feel (below) ... perhaps input from a few other
NetFuture readers would dislodge his mind a bit from its single-track
focus.  Sun has gotten so large, though, that I doubt that their
bureaucracy can see beyond their focus of promoting Sun computers and
trying to bring down Microsoft's Evil Empire.


                          ---------------------

Mr. Gage:

I understand you made the following comment at a conference on computers
and the third world:

   After listening to three days of serious analysis and work [at a
   conference on computers and the Third World, where Gates spoke], and
   then to have Gates rather flippantly say, "You've got to have clean
   water and food" -- that wasn't exactly furthering the point of the
   entire meeting.

That raises some questions:

** If you are attempting to wire 3rd-world countries before they've gotten
rid of malnutrition, diarrhea, malaria, etc., does the meeting have
any point?

** Is your point that the computer is the solution to every problem, and
you (and Sun?) are simply unable and unwilling to provide solutions that
are not directly related to your economic interest, i.e. solutions that do
not depend on computer technology?

** If, as the Alliance for Childhood has documented, computers in schools
are not significantly improving the educational experience while
introducing negatives, then why is NetDay's purpose singularly to wire
schools, and ignore the provision of educational assistance in categories
that don't directly involve computers?

My concern, basically, is that highly-placed people like yourself live so
high on the food chain, and have such a narrow focus of interest, that
they have not the emotional intelligence to figure out what's really
needed at the bottom.

Lest you conclude that I'm some sort of wild-eyed radical, I think about
these issues every day because I parent a child with cerebral palsy and
other disabilities, who will never be able to work at the likes of Sun or
Microsoft.  She will be part of the (largely invisible) group of persons
with severe disabilities in this country, who live in near-poverty, a
group which has benefitted not at all from the economic boom of the 1990s.
Perhaps Mr. Gates (whose products, by the way, I find inferior to Sun's)
has figured out that the word "charity" ought to apply to the least among
us, and not to those who are wealthy and powerful, or well on their way to
being so?

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==========================================================================

                          ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

Copyright 2001 by The Nature Institute.  You may redistribute this
newsletter for noncommercial purposes.  You may also redistribute
individual articles in their entirety, provided the NetFuture url and this
paragraph are attached.

NetFuture is supported by freely given reader contributions, and could not
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http://netfuture.org/support.html .

Current and past issues of NetFuture are available on the Web:

    http://netfuture.org/

To subscribe or unsubscribe to NetFuture:
    http://netfuture.org/subscribe.html.

Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #117 :: February 1, 2001

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