The Spins of the FATHERS

LOCAL FOOD

 

 

Strategic Planning for
Both Rigor and Innovation 
 
All news comes out of noise.
All information: from scanning
the random.
 
Need we argue?
 
How to Welcome Inn Chaos & Anarchy
to our Procrustean Beds and yet leave
no child a  behind?
 
Something like that would be
The Liberal Art (as opposed to
the liberal arts one majors and
minors it)
 
         Analogical Process
 
THIS, my mad repetition & redundancy,
(noisome & presumptuous indulgence
of our Faculty L) is more or less (I say)
LIKE hand-cuffing myself to a  massive
generator in South Carolina slowly making
its way toward the Duke Power grid—mere
protest-gesture: Stop. Look &  Listen, I say,
& maybe put IT in play…
 
Or (I tell  myself): heading off again and
again to Georgia & what was the School
of Americas so as “to cross the  line”  and
maybe get arrested, spend a night in jail &
write the book that helps transform a sub-
continent or less. Start a swell. Squeeze the
universe into a ball. Roll it toward some
overwhelming questions.  . 
 
I don’t expect others to see it my way—
bottom line-differences eclipsing the
structural similarities of mild anarchy
and system self-correction; nor will IT
get credit as Community Service [my
contribution to the Meta Sustainability
concerns of a Ray Anderson (Toward
a Sustainable Enterprise) & a  Keith
Sawyer  (collaborative genius) though
my unswerving devotion to Community
drives compulsion & obsession—an
occupational hazard that  inhabits the
Reading of  Great Books..   
 
Claude Bernard in the late 19^th century
discovered what later came to be called
the homeostasis of the body. He observed
that the milieu interne—the internal
environment—was balanced or self-
correcting.
 
              ********
 
There is a deep gulf between statements
 about an identified individual and statements
about a class (group, aggregate).
 
Such statements are of a different logical type,
and prediction from one to the other is always
 unsure.
 
The statement “the liquid is boiling” is of a
different logical type from the statement
“that molecule will be the first to go’’
 
(Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: a
Necessary Unity.)
 
Similarly: talk about Obama “this” and “that”
is not on the same level of logical type as talk
of the Government "This" or "That" or Congress
"This" and "That". To confuse the 2 levels is to
think what’s-going-on-what’s-going-on is
Obama’s fault or credit.
 
Wholes are more than sum of parts
Classes, more than the participants.
Teams & Bands: more than players
and any particular player, and a
college is always way more than
sum of its  constituent components,
& strategic plans by the players
can easily occlude a sensitivity to
the emergent properties and values
that we are always generating. .  
 
In the transmission of human culture,
people always attempt to replicate,
to pass on to the next generation the
skills and values of the parents; but
the attempt always and inevitably fails
because cultural transmission is geared
to learning, not to DNA
  
Learning.
 
What do we talk about when
we talk about learning?  
 
The Spins of the Fathers?
 
Every receiving alma matrix,
even a language or a
tautological network of
propositions (The Plan)
will  have its formal
characteristics which will
in principle be distorting
the phenomenon to be
mapped onto it.
 
Procrustean: in whose inn every
traveler has to fit the beds on pain
of amputation of  elongation of legs. 
 
(More Bateson, reformatted to fit
my screed)
 
Can we be factoring inn always the
ongoing liabilities to Our Best Laid
Plans?  No, seriously: keeping them in
play? That would be awesome.

Improve my terms.

xxxooo, Presbyter