July 2007

"Is the voyage worth making that does not enhance awareness of our shared humanity?"

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Staff Biographies

"Giving well is the best revenge."
  --Douglas Milburn.

In the Shallows
Further Notes on Neo-speciation
and the Possible Order Behind the Current Chaos

Douglas Milburn

The slowness of transmigration from water to land means we spend a lot of time splashing about in the shallows. Which is where we are now.

The meretricious and expedient (in all fields: politics, religion, science, philosophy, the arts), for all their posing and shouting about the rightness of water—especially deep water—and the wrongness of land—especially hot, grainy beaches, do a lot of harm but are, in the long, migratory run, irrelevant.

Funny thing is, they are, in their terms and for their reality, right. They belong in, are built for, water and the deeper the better. Their fear and their moral conviction are, again in their terms, soundly reasoned. Land-based existence for them is both frightening and fatal. For that lot, it is in fact incomprehensible. They have neither the physical nor the psychic wherewithal to survive above the water line.

Explorers' splashing in the shallows only adds to the confusion of the old denizens lurking comfortably at the edges of the deep. "Foolishness!" they shout. Or: "Heresy!" "Unpatriotic!" In their myopic terms, they are right.

For those struggling, at considerable cost, toward land, the shouters are exactly and dangerously wrong. For the strugglers there is no going back. Once gills begin to give way to lungs, once the sweet air is tasted and new, distant, solid horizons are glimpsed there is no going back.

Of course dangers, manifold, unguessed-at dangers, abound in the unknown ahead. They are nothing compared to the dangers that lie in retreat: For young lungs, to go back is to drown.

So the gill-laden elders mutter and scheme, plot and pander, arm and fight. Death throes in the shallows, where they, for all their miniature, short-term victories, cannot win. Oh, to be sure, with their ancient guilt and weapons, they can wreak much, much havoc. But doomed to their prison to which they must nightly retreat, the day will come when the strugglers are beyond their reach, pulling themselves painfully, gasping, onto the beach above at last the water line.
                                                                                                       June 30, 2007

END

Addenda:
a. The conflict is not only between those who can know only the sea. It is also within individuals in the shallows who are torn between the comfort and security of the known deeps, and the lure of new hope on the unknown land.

b. There are those who reach sandbars and reside there with some scurity and contentment. We call some of these great novelists and painters. Others reach the beach where some sing. We call these poets and composers. Some also dance, with utters and new abandon. We don't have a name for these.

c. Breeding choices, once out of the jungle and safely away from the battles of the plains, rest mostly with the women. If consciousness-based speciation is slowly happening, it is being directed by their patience and forward-looking wisdom.

d. Identifying traits of the old ones:
    I. For them, life is intolerable without the assumed existence of an omnipotent, omnisvient father.
    II. For them, certitude is essential.
    III. For them, appearance is all.
    IV. For them, herd behavior validates.
    V. For them, might makes right.

e. Continuation of the Idea That Culture and Technology
Are Externalizations of Both Physical and Psychic Reality
First came the hardware = externalization of:
   1. Body.
Then came the software.
   2. Bios = externalization of:
Instinct.
   3. The operating system = externalization of:
The id.
   4. The applications = externalization of:
The superego.
   5. The Internet = externalization of:
Massively linked consciousnesses.
What we haven’t externalized yet:
   6. The operator.
   7. Movement beyond body-space and mind-time.
   8. The massively linked worlds of dreams.
   9. Pain.
   10. Pleasure.

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