Transcription
See in the building and three credits speed up via retailing back, but on the other hand, uh, come on, swing to get hold of your money. Battle of the van. [Music] [Music] We got a joke for you, Marshall. I intended to bring that big bundle, you know, the envelope, left at home. I had it set out right about the house, started saying, "We're not beginning yet," but I'm just uh, we're looking at an item here that says, "Device will allow blind to read type."
The device which allows blind people to read ordinary printing will be tested soon. That um, the device called an Opticon is about the size of a book; includes a camera the size of a pocket knife. Camera is placed on the reading material, and with his finger, the blind person feels what the camera sees—vibrating pins spell out the letters on the fingertip. But he said it allows the blind to read newspapers or books that have not been translated to Braille. Mr. Parker, who's visiting and taking uh a few months down at the uh Rochester, the chair—the current chair of communication—reports that at the Institute of the Deaf, there, which is rather a famous one, they report that they can teach deaf people to read and write by about up to grade 5 level by the age of 15. And in China, at the same level, can be reached by the age of seven.
Now, they don't know why, but I think we do. We know that the Chinese ideogram is much more kindly or favorable to rapid learning than the abstract visual form of the phonetic alphabet. It's a little bit like the Braille thing; that the idiomic form of reading and writing involves the senses more, and the blind people learn more quickly if they do not have to abstract all their senses and just learn with sight alone. This is a rather complicated matter, but it's it it can be explained in detail, and it relates to our own problems in our television age because the TV image is very close to to the Chinese ideogram. We have, in that connection, a visitor here tonight from Dallas, Texas, Mrs. Bray—Jane Bray, co-author of the *Telepolitics* volume—and she is a Montessori specialist and has worked a good deal in the teaching of reading and writing in the Montessori system. And she mentions this to what is perfectly plain and obvious to most Montessori people: that people learn to write before they learn to read; that children, in the order of learning—the natural order of learning—writing comes first, reading second; that uh, in terms of developing the uh development of the faculties—human faculties—the kinetic faculty of actually inscribing and tracing images comes before the recognizing of images visually.
I might add here, Marshall, an experience that I've just encountered in England: an old auntie who had gone—who has a stroke—she can write, I'm sorry, she can write, but she can't read what she writes herself. Now, the only—I I suggested to her that she learned to read again by reading out loud, because there was brain damage between the two halves of the brain, and she's learning to read again by reading out loud her own writing. So this is a another one of those strange reprocessing things that people haven't studied—putting the pieces back together again, or in some case they cut them apart—the epileptics in California that [Music] were having electric fits, and they cut the two halves of the brain apart—didn't hurt—just um, that one simple thing. We have quite a number of visitors here tonight. There's Mr. Levin, of the—Mr. Evans, you're from which division again? Oh, it's uh a committee that's concerned with what problem—they want to know what more can be done. Are they talking about hardware? Are they talking about hardware—hardware and uh, well, the number of uses—the unused uses are almost unlimited, so yeah, where do you where do you begin? It's well to catalog everything, but it's more or less trying to get a feeling—an overall public consensus—otherwise. And you're up against the situation that the ordinary public use of public media enables children to read long before they ever get to school. Nothing's ever done with those media once they get to school. The obsolescing of the classroom is has gone afar.
By the way, Marshall, there's another thing that we might look at: if anybody's had the experience of learning to read and write—the old potholes and hang hooks uh scheme that the grandmothers used before they sent the children to school. But as many children in the 18—in the 19th century—learned to read and write long before they went to school and raced through it; there was no problem. Now, this this was a pre-TV, yeah, but this was based upon an enormous amount of pleasure on a part of a lot of adults, yes, who had a lot of children on their hands—just talking to—eating. But they I don't know why there's so few adults in relation to the children of our time. There's usually the grandmothers that did this—grannies. Well, what do we do with grannies? We ditch them—we throw them away; we retire them and put them into a highlight so they're no use. This is one of the unused educational resources of our time—grandmothers. We pay the—for to have put them in a separate establishment, or they can be of no use to anybody. Now it's true the grannies and the nannies uh taught their charges to read quite early by reading aloud to them. Well, I've heard it said many times that a literate person is one who has been read aloud to when you shot—one a child—not a person who read early, but a person who has been read aloud to. This book on the nanny's horizon of all of these nineties said has a good deal on that subject, and I'm suggesting that one who learned to read and write before they went to school, you know, but really being read aloud to is more valuable than being about to read and write. The reigns of experiences vows. There was one uh before we plunge into the um literate thing uh that we promised about—there's one thing in the morning paper we're going to handle briefly about banks. It's an item that um was headlined—how it was in the Star, Marshall, yesterday, I guess, or where is it? It's trying to start um Saturday, February 3rd, and it is headlined, "Battle of the Banks." Our musty old banks come out swinging and hustle to get hold of your money. But there are two or three insights in here for those of you who are not familiar with how banks actually work, and I think the first one is: why should anybody want to hustle to get your money?
Well, this is the whole business of the switch from wholesale to retail as far as the banks are concerned. I thought the banks are originally present themselves as institutions that want to lend you money. I've never noticed the angle whereby they want to get hold of it. Well, they do it two ways, you see. I know with the one hand they are getting a hold of it as fast as possible in small quantities, and with the other hand they are after you re-borrowing it—at they borrow it, in other words, at five percent maximum, usually about three percent. And when all of a sudden they collected from you three percent, they had it back to you as retail debt right around 20. So this is good business. The difference, of course, is—well, now what is the service that they perform? Once they remove the money from you, they then perform advanced service worth 20. Well, they do two things: they lend it back to other people—other other small borrowers—for uh buying hardware, that is, for credit purchases on the on the computer, on the various consumer card deals that they have. And then because because their banks they can get another charge on this from the um from the user of the credit, that is, the retail merchant who finds it very convenient to have his collections through the bank. So they get it coming and going, as it were. And in this respect, they can always give you the illusion of getting your money for nothing by simply charging say two percent on collections from a merchant and saying to you, "If you don't have a debt with us for longer than 30 days and you don't pay anything," if you have more than 30 days, it's another equivalent one and a half percent that you pay per month—notice—per month—per month. This is really quite hard again. I think to differ a bit there uh with a credit union—I'm not talking about credit unions, I'm talking about banks—but with a bank, if they get a dollar, are they not on the basis of that permitted to loan five dollars? Oh, indeed. This is a 20 coverage, but this is this is this is compared with the cash, that is, they can multiply what I'm talking about by a factor of five. That's right, you're saying, so that actually comes to a hundred percent if you're talking earlier. Thank you. This is uh this is of course uh again, there's a margin of safety; they've got to keep enough gap in there so there's a sudden call they're covered, but then the government steps in to cover them. So, but now the bank is a service organization—service organization—and money is a service organization; the institution of money is a service environment, and you notice there's no cash in this; it's all covered by marks and ledgers. This is information now, but the money itself facilitates transactions. Without money, if you had to barter—if we had to make a dicker between those glasses and that book in exchange—it would take quite a while. Uh, so the money speeds up transactions, or the movement of things between people. So you may put your finger on it: the emphasis has changed from the money to the rate of transaction. The speed of transactions is where they want to increase the wealth; this is what actually is the process. There's another factor that is hidden behind the uh movement of money, and that's writing. Without the written word, the money would not move at all. It's all based on writing; it's all based on writing, and that writing is now replaced by the computer. In other words, an entry—still right—still right—it's right here—but a hidden factor in, for example, in the in the ancient time when usury became an abomination because they said nature does not pay five percent, therefore it is not fair to charge for the use of money because money does not breed; it is not like nature. This is Aristotle; he was wrong, and it does breed, and it breeds by accelerating transactions that could not otherwise take place at all. And writing is behind the speed of money. Money would not transact without writing behind the money. So when writing came in, then money—then you had a market going that was considerably capable of producing wealth on a great scale that was not possible before writing plus money—to media—necessary to have wealth—that is, to me, in addition to production. Aristotle protested that once you begin to produce for a market, you lose control of your own whole household and your own economy, which is true. And so the abomination of marketing is the loss of the control of what you produce and who you produce for. Market is a neutral instrument that simply doesn't care what you produce or what you sell; it'll sell anything. And uh, so the market is an iniquity; it's inhuman and non-human; it is a means of accelerating wealth processes. And this is a new form of nature, which we said was much later—by much later—the market took over from nature itself and became the homeostatic mechanism. By the time of Adam Smith, marketing had become the homeostatic ecological mechanism which had replaced nature. It's called free trade. Adam Smith has said everything is fine as long as you don't interfere with the homeostatic mechanisms of the market; they will balance off. The computer performed beautifully, and that was where the road to heaven was paved—was bad intention of high interest. The uh now in here uh there are two other little subplots in this article, and I think we can dispose of it after that. Is bigger is best—that is, the higher the tower, the better the bank must be. And so we have this these monsters being built in Toronto to show that the biggest bank must have the highest tower. And finally, as a replay of the ancient respectability, that it must be dirty in order to show that it's stable. What do you mean? The building must be black—building messages are white—that may—exactly—the building must look dirty in order to suggest stability. So that's where—though—now, therefore, having cleaned off the problem buildings recently, what are we to conclude? I think we have a full circle now back to pay dirt. You know, the legislative buildings—the three park buildings—have recently been face-lifted, and they are ghastly sights. I mean, on who and earth could have okayed that move? They had a relative dignity and and acceptability when they were dim and dark in this rather pasty-faced, really nasty tone. I don't know what would you call that color—any—we got any color expert here? There is a kind of a—yes, it's like the rear side of a chimpanzee; it's about that shade. They say that the higher the ship climbs the pole, the more you'll see if it's very round. And now you can show the cartoon that was brought from Poland by our friend over here. No, no, we'll save that; we're not going to pass around—what uh what happens to money under the conditions of computer speed? Well, we're talking about that; we've just been talking about that—you can charge 100 percent interest because of the speed. Yeah, you were talking before how an Adam Smith became a homeostatic environmental mechanism supplanting nature. Yes. Yeah. What happens to—under computer speed conditions—nature having disappeared already—while you substitute one nature after another—one kind of ecological arrangement supersedes another rapidly—you can program new natures, I think daily, on the computer. Well, then, without an increase in wealth, how come there's more and more people—starting—all right, that's nonsense; that's not true; it's only newspapers that say so. I mean, how do you say more and more—how many people can starve at once? Well, I mean our relative place among countries of keeping our babies alive. When you say starving, though, does it mean—does it mean they actually don't have enough to eat? Yeah, or they have the wrong things to eat? No, both. It—go hungry—40 percent of the population is obese. I know that doesn't count, and they're starving too, right? Most of the fat people in the world are starving too. Okay, but our—under narration—have bad health and all things that come from being too poor—I'm too rich. There was another form of starvation, but the rich—they—there too—they too are starving—physically as well as spiritually. Starvation is not view, nor is it easily cured. People don't uh necessarily feed themselves just because there's food next door—around the corner; they won't even bother to lift their hand to get it. Where do you get the idea that people that starvation or hunger is curable by by having food handy? I don't think there's any evidence that people—we have masses of unsold wheat in this country—would you be happy to give away—nobody will touch it. I know that the difference between what surpluses are—nothing to do with human justice; it has to do with what the breakdown in mechanisms of human arrangements—quite often sheer incompetence. I think Bangladesh is a rather good case that anyone could look into that a little more profoundly and see that a great deal of the food that was shipped there was the sort of thing that was non-traditional—in other words, nutritious, but people had never tasted it before. It's like sending, you know, nice Mexican um jumping beans—yeah, nice Mexican slugs—to us in case we were hungry. And if you've never eaten toasted slugs, you'd certainly not enjoy being given them the first time if you knew what they were. No, it's um—remember now—wealth creates poverty. I mean, this is a mechanism—without wealth you have only hardships; you don't have poverty—but wealth creates poverty. It is law that creates disorder; it is learning that creates ignorance. These complementarities are literally true; they're not figuratively terrible. Yeah, and white creates black. Without white people are we know colored people—and female creates males? No, that doesn't work. Well, you might as well say that male—1—females—male—3—you can't switch it around. So I had to give it to you. No, but it's not—it's not complementarity in the same pattern. Okay, why isn't it? It's polarity. Polarity is not complimentary. The child is father to the man or the woman. You know, polarity is not complementarity. Cause of negative is not the same thing as complementarity. Complementarity is a mechanism of human agency. You could say the child is mother to the woman. I mean, this is a father to the man—that's been said—we'll switch it for you, Mary. We have Mrs. Bray here, who is the co-author of *Telepolitics*, and with Fritz Wilhelmsen, and you might wish to—I have a word in that direction. Um, Miss Gray has worked with Montessori people a good deal, and as I mentioned, the uh their one of their observations or discovers in the teaching process is that writing comes before reading. You might mention just to the the situation that disagrees that where that reveals itself—how does that factor reveal itself in the actual learning process?
One of Montessori's major premises is: you never give the eye or ears more than you give the hand. So at the very beginning of the approach in like these methods, you begin to train the senses, and particularly in movement. So the children are taught—are exposed to—discrimination of different textures of fabric—of sandpaper—roughnesses, smoothnesses, thermal temperatures, weights—weights—barrack—you blindfold—barrack—child about two and a half and put just infinitesimally small variations in weight on his fingertips. Within a very short period of time, he or she can tell you, you know, which is heavier. And you try the same experiment on yourself; you find that you can't do it. But the child has such a sensory discrimination at that time—that very sensitive to all these different modalities and essential makeup. She also introduces them to smell, as I was telling back in the Queen this morning—going from one side of the room to another to pick up cylinders that will have identical smells—um, all kinds of variations of smells. But the writing—after they've had a good bit of time in this—I'd say about three to six months, depending, of course, always on the individual child—they're introduced to the sandpaper letters, which are quite large—we make them myself—and they're raised off of cardboard plaques, although they can be made any number of different ways—and they trace the form of this letter with these three fingers, because these will be the three fingers that will later hold a pencil. Another point Montessori discovered was that it's far easier to teach the cursive approach to writing than printing, because to make a straight line requires a great deal more coordination than to make a curved line. And she invited her teachers to try it out on themselves uh to discover, you know, that we really were expecting—were expecting something of the child that was more difficult rather than going from easier to hardest. Now, while they are making these movements with these three fingers—and by the way, if they are left-handed, they make them with their left hand; she didn't try to turn left-handed children into right-handed children—they also learned the sounds—not the name itself of the letter, but the sound—the genetic sound that the letter makes. And after they do this for a period of time, one day they will discover—you don't show them—they will discover—and this is a very important element in her approach—that they can combine these sounds, and they will in fact make words. And then—then there's no stopping them; they'll write all over everything—walls, toilets, paper, napkins; it doesn't matter—they'll describe—right—right—right. That's about age—how do you deal with spelling in that case? Remember what age are bearing—I'll find out—how soon can this—well, it depends on the child. I've seen it happen as early as three. I've seen it happen as early as three, but certainly if the child—the child comes to the school that we took children at 16 months, which was um we had a difficult time with the nursery school licensing people—it takes them that long—we had to declare them as a day care center, which we weren't, to—but if you get the child by two, there's no reason why this can't happen by the time it's through three and a half. And it's pure discovery for the child; it's not taught—it's not taught to the child uh that absolutely violates—violence—Montessori's idea at all. I'm not saying that it is not done in some schools that claim to be Montessori schools, but if you read her work um her entire approach—she didn't like the word *method*—her and her approach is built from the child discovering—the teacher—she didn't even like the word *teacher*; she used the word *directress*, which meant you were to be a catalyst between the child and this environment you've provided there. And as soon as you put the child in touch with this environment—in this case, the livable alphabet—you are to back out and disappear and to do the child's work like yours. And this she thought was very important: that as the child increases in competence, the teacher decreases in importance—in other words, get out of the way. But after um after the child has written for a while—and again this depends upon the individual child and whether he's a visual child or an oral child to begin with as a pattern [Music]—then—then reading will occur. And she she makes this transition—she discovered this in her first school over in the slum section of Rome—and after reading occurs, she she increases this mastery by giving them simple commands—always—which would be almost like a signal, and these simple commands they execute, and they're able to understand reading, and then they go on into reading after that. But she doesn't—she would see it all—teaching reading at the same time as writing or before, because well, she—pointed out the ordinary power of literacy which abstracts the visual from the other senses—she put all the senses back together again as part of the process—or learning process—yes, and I think—and the educators of this country—she's one of the few I've discovered who is perhaps not the only one who was quite aware of the danger of sensory extension—she was—she was quite aware that you just don't do this in the very very young—I think we've come to see that you really don't do it at any age—but she would—she would isolate the senses—she called it—in these exercises—in other words, the the tactile exercises would often be carried on blindfolded, but only if the child wanted it, but the child usually did—he found this very adventurous to perform these exercises blindfolded. In our teacher training, we didn't think of it as so adventurous until the moment somehow broke our necks, but the children—children enjoyed it very much. Well, now in our time something very strange is happening electrically: the television image is handing back the world to the viewer in a multi-sensuous form, and this has unwittingly and unintentionally complicated or upset the ordinary learning process enormously. Our schools, having for centuries—literally two centuries at least—moved in extreme abstraction and separating the senses, now we're confronted with a group of children who are familiar with the television image, which is iconic and multi-sensuous and not visual—very much—very few people realize that the TV image is a composite of all the senses in interface—just in like in a Montessori school—that uh they're learning their letters today really by rubbing process—the TV image is a mesh of experience that is not primarily visual. And the Sesame Street sort of little muppets and images—the icons on the Sesame Street thing are a very good indication of what sort of image TV really consists of: it's tactile and sculptural and iconic and very much an involving form, which of course builds into the child's viewer absolute rebellion against the whole school system, because the school system is based on the exact opposite process of extreme abstraction of the visual sense from all the other sentences aspects of the visual life, which are [Music] very specialist indeed—the black and white aspects, for example—color is not primarily visual; it's techno—but black and white is very visual, and movement is visual, and classification and blueprinting and keeping things neat and tidy—that is visual—the habit of neatness and tightness is entirely a visual habit—a place for everything and everything in its place is a visual habit. In other words, the way the desks, the rooms, every feature of our ordinary school lives are laid out is—
An extremely visual pattern, the way this room is laid out. Not as extreme, by any means, as most rooms are visual. A rectangular room with vertical and, uh, right-angle planes is visual. If there were a curved space here, there would be no visual quality in this room. And the sort of space that Mr. Perry over there is experimenting with—styrofoam and other materials—can create architectural forms which have nothing to do with visual space anymore. Visual space is literally enclosed; it has to be a matter of flat planes in rectangular, in right-angle relationships.
Now, the reason for this is very—it’s technical, but, uh, it’s Euclidean. You have only to think of Euclid if you want to know what visual consists of. Just why the visual should be Euclidean is a special history itself. But Euclid abstracted certain visual properties from the rest of the human body at the time that the alphabet was new—in the fifth century, when the phonetic alphabet was new. It had this revolutionary effect; it made possible the rise of geometry, including geometry. It made possible the rise of a systematic philosophy based on ideas, archetypes, and visual forms, which—truth, à la Aristotle, Plato—was a matching, visual matching off experience against abstract ideas and forms. These are extreme visual forms of truth—truth in quotes—and the whole rise of Greek geometry, philosophy, was based upon the abstractions of the phonetic alphabet. So naturally, the whole of Western history has been profoundly related to it.
But regardless of how noble and how important all of this is, the fact is that electrically it is disappearing and dissolving at very high speed. It’s just leaving us because the electric world is acoustic, resonant, and tactile, and iconic, and it is nothing to do with visual space anymore. I’m simply reporting—and this can be validated in many ways—that the electric thing is based upon a resonance and interval and tactility and acoustic space and is not based on visual space at all. And Einstein was merely one of many to discover that visual space—and you can use Euclidean and Newtonian geometries and physics—will not obtain under electric conditions at the speed of light, which is the electric speed. At the speed of light, all the Greek or Roman thing, all Euclidean space, and all phonetic alphabetic values disappear. Is this why more and more kids fall further and further behind their meetings? Well, it means that it becomes increasingly difficult for them to accept the forms of experience represented by the phonetic alphabet. The phonetic alphabet is a very extreme abstraction because—well, just to fill that in—but any alphabet is—the only alphabet in the world, the Greek Roman alphabet is the only alphabet in the world in which the images have no—both the sounds and the sight have no semantic meaning at all. The abacudos, from A to Z, are meaningless semantically; they have no meanings at all. All the other alphabets in the world—and there are many—have meanings; the letters have some meanings. The Greek Roman alphabet has no meanings at all.
Now, the abstraction of all meaning from these images gave them an almost computer power to translate into themselves all other cultures. There’s room for another person on the floor. This, uh—let’s say I put it another way: the Greek Roman alphabet, because of its extreme abstraction of the visual sense from all the other senses, turned the user of that alphabet into a very aggressive individual because of this ability to subdue all other forms to this form. The phonetic alphabet can tame, subdue all other cultures to itself. It is the only alpha—no, you cannot do this with the Arabic alphabet; you cannot do it with the Hebrew alphabet or any other alphabet known to man. Only the phonetic alphabet is capable of translating Chinese or any other culture into itself. Now, this—but that isn’t the reason why, but it’s one of the accompaniments—but the user of the phonetic alphabet, because of this power and because he has gotten rid of all his other senses—except psyche—develops a goal orientation. He’s a man with a vision and goal and an objective. So it started with the Greeks; it continued with the Romans; it went right on through the Renaissance; got much more intense after printing—goal orientation and extreme objectivity, objectivity and science in measurement, in conquest of nature. This became a normal accompaniment of this power to use the visual sense and abstraction from the other senses. I’m simply mentioning that today it no longer happens; that the visual sense is no longer isolated under electric conditions. The visual sense is acoustically now subdued and is moving back into relation to the other senses. So the children today are much more holistic, much more integrated, and much less goal-oriented and have very little ambition; wish to adapt as quickly as possible to the lowest level in the society around them. And this is happening at very high speed.
The—another thing, of course—a loss of identity. The phonetic alphabet created the private identity of Western man, the image of himself as a separate, private person, which is the glory of our civilized world: the intense image of self-identity and the intention of examining the conditions of one’s existence. Remember Socrates remarked: the unexamined life is not worth living. The visual man is always inspecting and analyzing and examining himself; he never stops—always criticizing his motives, his intentions, his purposes, and purifying them by abstraction. Now, this—this is all gone in the last 50 years; all of these features have disappeared with the rise of acoustic man. Acoustic man is simply a man who lives in a simultaneous world at the speed of light, where everything happens around him simultaneously—whether it’s telegraph, radio, or TV, or any other electric form—telephone. The electric world is simultaneous, and therefore—I like hearing—comes from all directions at once. Hearing is from all directions. Acoustic space is a sphere; visual space is flat, but has a third dimension, the vanishing point, but acoustic space is a sphere. And before there was literacy in the world, people thought entirely of existence as a sphere—the age, the Humpty Dumpty—and the whole idea of the sphere as the perfection of man preceded the alphabet. The sphere was banished by the alphabet, but it comes back with electricity. Humpty Dumpty has been put back together again at a very high speed, and the spirit—the sphere man—has no private identity. And this is one of the hang-ups of our time. The young today are live in a world in which they’re expected to have private identity, goals, and purposes, and they haven’t got any. Nobody told them where it went; nobody told them why they don’t have it, but you can test it for yourself. The—the goal orientation is gone, and the drives towards specialist objectives gone, as they feel they need to relate more and more to other people. The highly literate man doesn’t feel very much need to relate to people; it isn’t very important; his objectives are very egotistical, very private. But the acoustic man cannot have any private goals; he’s an ecologist. And, by the way, ecology means the end of goals; that’s what the word means; just means a total field of everything homeostatically in balance.
How many stances disappeared with the alphabet? Structural balance, in equilibrium, was not compatible with alphabetic specialism, and so it relied upon a great deal of free play. As long as there was lots of unexploited nature around, you could have this extreme specialism in which egotistic individuals exploited the—uh—surrounding nature freely. As long as there was lots of untouched nature, you could be as individualistic. Canada, of course, is a utopian paradise for egotistic individuals in terms of huge quantities of unexploited nature. I don’t suppose any place in the world that even begins to approach its utopian condition for egotism, but, uh, it is—it is an unbelievable playground for the rampages. So naturally, they’re going to come flocking from every part of the world. There’s no question they will be here before you know it. It’s like the 49ers—of your heading for the gold field. The challenger will become the new 49er territories without any doubt at all. It’s probably almost half on extreme scale. You mean there’ll be more literature than down there? I don’t know if there’s more, but they’ll certainly all try to get here somehow. Are there—are there people who are in a sort of an intermediate stage who are—yeah—who are also—Oh, yes. For example, we have people in this room from Nairobi, where literacy is new and where it coexists with extreme tribalism, and they are interested in studying the architectural problems of: how do you build spaces for people who are living simultaneously in primitive African conditions and simultaneously in Western European conditions? Because they—we now have to create all over the planet, uh, contradictory spaces and lives and careers for people who belong to multiple cultures; whose parents grew up in one culture and their children in another. This is our condition electronically. Electronically, our—our children are primitives of an extreme type; that is holistic in their multiple senselessness, and they live with parents who are extreme specialists, highly visual people called squares. A square is merely a person who is highly visual, highly literate.
Are there people though—are there some of us perhaps—maybe people are, you know, in their 20s or 30s who—who grew up with TV as well as—as reading and writing—who are both—Yeah, I think there’s a lot of straddling, a great deal of living in divided and distinguished worlds amphibiously. However, it’s—you can—you can report—you’re probably in a position to say something about that. What happens to people who are divided completely between two worlds—uh—who half of whose lives—uh—maybe are nourished by one set of conditions and half by another set of conditions? It’s—it’s probably a very confusing territory. Very confusing. It’s not so bad. I just pointed to Mary Jane, and she’s admitting it’s not so bad. I’m—you’re doing all right. No, no. What you said about the phonetic alphabet subsuming all others—No, no, not subsuming, but the acquisition of phonetic literacy, if it succeeds in splitting you up—your senses from each other—then how would you ever get them back with the other half of your brain? Well, highly literate people never do. Okay, then you couldn’t be highly literate with one side—and—No, no, no. You’d just be—however you may—as a highly literate person—confront people who are brought up in totally different conditions. Now, the ordinary impulse of a literate person is to subdue them. That is, in the schools of the blind, they teach them to act as if they have sight. That’s the literate man’s approach. In the school of the deaf, they teach them to act as if they had hearing. Now, this is a monstrous—button—but our—or left-handed people have talked to actors at their right hand. I know, in the University of Toronto, they teach you to act as if you had male logic. Sure. Well, maybe—maybe that isn’t very hard to obtain anyway. You know, the rooms are like a jungle with grapes. Why do you say male logic in Canada? You’re talking about the visual because the male—so-called—is, uh, much more of a specialist, a hunter. Traditionally, the man has tended to specialize in our historical setup. We know—we know—to be a specialist. I know. So he—he takes to literacy in that extreme form more naturally. He is a bureaucrat more naturally than women. Women prefer to diversify and to handle a variety of things, to have many jobs and many roles. Men prefer one job, one role, and at least have been taught to prepare that, and they seem to be able to put up with it more than women. But the fact is that today in our schools—Dr. Hurst is here; he can—he’s been studying the some of the results of TV on his own patients; he’s an optometrist—and he has studied some of the effects of TV in the classroom and out of the classroom, and he might—he has mentioned to me that among the learning problems in our school realms, 90 are boys, only seven or eight are girls, where there are learning problems, so-called. Anyway, as such, the percentage is about 92 to—Now, all that means is that the boys are less able to adapt—being specialists—to changing conditions—on the girls’ heart. Girls are much more rapid adapters, accommodators than boys. Boys are rigid, brittle; they crack easily. The natural superiority of women in the book by—actually monkey—simply means that biologically women are better conditioned by nature to survive under anything. I ever—what nasty heard means by the natural spirit of women is that they are biologically better able to survive under any conditions than—that any type of conditions, whether of noise or work or confusion or having babies or—no—just drowning water—anything. Women have a better chance of survival than that, and it’s because they’re less specialist in their physical makeup. I think if Mary Jane wants to drive that classification too far, we’ll have to remind her of Aristophanes, who, of course, showed that men and women were originally one person with four legs and four arms, you know, and they split in half, and they’ve been seeking to get together ever since. That’s the only thing—that’s the old sphere idea. Yeah, yeah. Now, this is happening today. Takes the foreign sexuality—who knows—or the unisex—the sphere—the—going back together of everybody into one thing is acoustically—that’s what Aristotle is talking about—but it’s an old, old idea—long thousands of years before—asked—that, uh, there originally was just one sex and, uh, one kind of being and so on. That’s right—the original god, goddesses. What’s happening with that—what do you call it? But this isn’t merely a way of trying to report that a pre-literate man was acoustic, not visual, and acoustic includes everything. However, uh, that—after all, then Dr. Hurst, uh, you might mention the some of the conditions that arise under the individual sphere, under TV conditions.
Well, one of the figures that Doctor—two mentioned—92 percent—it’s even worse than this: the latest figure is about 94—children’s hospital. Now, I find approximately 80 of my own practice, but these kids are working one grade—two classes—working at about four and a half inches away from their reading. Now, at this—at this distance, the eyes are not coordinated; in other words, there’s one eye which is turned into an exophoric or out position; the other eye continues on. There’s no—there’s no bifocal life at four and a half inches. But the mystery is: why do children insist on reading at four and a half inches into the early grades, and why will the schools not photograph this situation and report it? If it—because they won’t. It’s not new; it’s been going on for years. And the near-point distance, Doctor, has discovered, on an average, is 4.6. Right. Well, that was a great two class. Now, the strangest thing is that in—when they start out in kindergarten, it’s approximately six to seven inches. Then, as they start to try to read, they move in closer, and in grade three it moves out a bit from grade two. By the time they get to grade seven or grade eight, the distance has lengthened up to around seven, eight, or nine inches, but it never does get up to the 16 or 13-inch distance where we take all our measurements and where everything is calculated. When you speak of a near-point distance, you automatically think of either 13 or 16 inches. So all the visual processes of 13 and 16 inches are quite different; they’re exactly opposite to what they are back in the four-to-six-inch distance, which is the actual distance—which is the actual difference. In other words, all our printing, the typography, the bookmaking, the desk making—these—everything—all arrangements in the classroom are for the 12, 14, 16 inches, and there’s nothing done for the actual distance, which is six, seven—minutes. But, uh, this is the thing that amazes me in my own profession and other professions: they are still not taking into consideration that these kids are working at four to six inches. Our measurements in all my journals and so forth, they speak at the near-point distance, and all the fusion findings, the conversion findings are set up for the 16-inch distance. And by the Lord, they are going to stick with this particular type of measurement. All the means, standard deviations and so forth that we have over the last 20 years or more—we can go back to the 1930s—and this actually are set up for this 13-to-16-inch distance. But somewhere along the line we’re going to have to mount as sort of a massive investigation, and unfortunately I have tried over the last five or eight years or more to mount this, but we—we don’t seem to get the first base on it. But look, if there were an immediate public recognition of every aspect of this case, what could be done? If everybody wanted to do something, what could be done? I think it would be done. Yes. But what could be done? Oh, well, what we need is a statistical research into this—into this particular area—to validate or invalidate my findings. No, but suppose that they were validated and everybody agreed that something had to be done, what could be done? Not making them read. Well, all right. Now, uh, one of the inspectors down in the southern part of this problem—it’s a chap with the name of Peach—maybe some of you know him here—Inspector Peach down at Fonthill. I had quite a bit to do with him, uh, way back 10 or 12 years ago, and he told me a little story once where he went into one of his schoolrooms and the kids weren’t reading, so he took approximately one hour with this grade-one class and he moved him up within about five to six feet of the blackboard, and this is where he started. So I think that if we’re going to start teaching these kids to read, we have to move them back in this way. Another man, Archie McKinnon, of the former research director of the Toronto Board of Education, did a study on this in which he set children back in chairs and sort of started them a long distance reading in this—in this way. Now, whether there’s an answer in this, frankly, Doctor—and then I don’t know. Really. Well, I think it’s obviously helpful to know the situation that we’re working up with, but I doubt very much whether there is—if you consider the new environment, electric environment—I doubt whether there would be much impulse or motivation to correct it. I don’t think there is any desire on the part of the ordinary person who feels the presence of this new electric environment to correct it. This was reported in the Globe and Mail this morning—not yours specifically—with a congress or a meeting of psychologists going on right now in Toronto, I think, in which, uh, it was pointed out very clearly that people do not want to treat the big problems at all; they are simply not prepared. There was an article—did anybody see that? Right. Trivial research said to be less embarrassing than probing the world. That’s it. And it also says down here that, uh, another study showed that a child’s ability in learning to read depended more on the personality of the teacher than on the child’s IQ. The more empathy the teacher had, the better the child read. [Music] As far as modern science and research is concerned, they will nibble away at trivial problems; they will not tackle big problems. They don’t mind tackling an expressway problem, but they are not going to tackle the problem of putting people in decent living conditions. That’s Tom Kim, the instructor, scientific revolution plan. Now, I think there’s nothing new about this, but it’s something we ought to understand that the establishment of the—by way of face-saving—will tackle small problems; will not tackle big problems. Puzzles, but not basic research; nothing that will upset the assumptions. Well, I—I don’t—I—I don’t despise this. No. On the other hand, there’s very little survival value in ordinary human impulse, and all this—this habit—this habit of mind is—is, uh, suicidal. And the only disadvantage in our time is that whatever is happening is happening so fast. This is a new dimension in human experience—an activity that we may be killed by somebody else’s suicide. You mean things move at—at least a speed of light. The—everything happens at an accelerated rate, which makes previous human experience and prudence useless. The built-in habits of mankind over the centuries or over the eons are now useless to him at electric. I wonder if the Montessori people are taking that into consideration. No, no. They’re obviously idealists. On the other hand, you see what—here’s a nice example of the effect coming before the cause. The Montessori people reported the effect of the electric revolution before it came, because the effect is wholeness. Now, the strange thing is that the wholeness—the new integration of man’s spirit—destroys the old establishment, because the old establishment—to 2500 years’ duration—is based upon fragmentation and specialism. If you have 2500 years of specialism in fragmentation, suddenly confronted by man’s wholeness—wholeness is destroying us literally. It sounds—it sounds silly, but you cannot be a whole man in a fragmented world. It’s better to be a specialist of this conventional type, nibbling away at puzzles and little unreal problems rather than a serious person tackling big crumbs. I don’t understand that sort of—in view of the goal-oriented—the only implication though you will not work anymore under electric conditions—but is that why—um—No, these people are willing to tackle trivial—although—because that is—goal—that is the old package. Why are the—why are—why—I guess I don’t understand why the trivial goal is a—is a goal, but the—the big thing—that the big thing is not—that the big thing—you’ll see the total thing is never—never a point because it’s totally—it’s total—it’s a sphere—and so you cannot select any point to say I’m going there. The science—science also starts from an answer and works directly. That’s—that’s what Ken discusses and Marshall—to back up—just a minute about what you were saying about never learning from experience. There’s actually a physiological basis for that which has been discussed several times here, and that is that the body is programmed in terms of its nervous system in such a way, uh, to be unaware of what’s going on around it—to cut down awareness of stimuli coming in from the environment—because of too much stimulus—too much stimuli that comes in, the organism does—well—just when you say—if you were to terrify every movement, every sound of the environment, then you couldn’t make—make—I think we might, by the way, have a window opening there—one of the windows back there might help—that’s a basic thing. But even more than this, it means that you are only aware of a very small—I’m not sure whether that might be a little too drafty—too close—try it though—see if it bothers anybody—that window—try and see if—and then he went on to explain how the mental apparatus is set up to even further diminish the amount of stimulation that comes in. So the entire psyche is established to be unaware as much as possible of what’s going on in the environment so that you can have business as usual in spite of fires and things going on around you. This is, uh, necessary for survival in—at one level. Oh, is that why you invented the unconscious? And numbness—switching off? You see, one of the things that happens with the young today—who—under the huge floods of stimuli in a man-made environment—they switch off; they have to; they can’t take it. Same thing—we reject the unpleasant—repeat the unpleasant experience. This is a repetition compulsion; you continually repeat it. One of the advantages of repeating it is each time it’s repeated, it’s affect—or its effect—the effect of the affect—is—is cut down, so you’re lessening its impact. Yeah, but—but this is—this is an interplay between the visual and the acoustic very clearly. Yeah, but I really—I didn’t have to say—I really objected to the idea that kids today are committing suicide. I think the men are not doing that to themselves. All the kids are in a situation that’s hurting them, but as they become integrated, they have to confront a highly specialized buzzsaw called the establishment. They’re not going to be integrated; they’re going to be dead. They put glasses on. Oh, no. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the effect of TV—say—in putting their sensory organs back into relation again. This is not an advantage to them at all, but insofar as they do get together again—for example, umpteen kids today insisting on eating organically produced food and vegetarian food and living a kind of semi-slum life because they don’t want to overstrain the surrounding resources—this kind of homeostasis that the kids have instinctively taken to—the new costumes, the new hairdos and so on are part of a homeostatic mechanism working in them. They have no way of explaining it even to themselves, but it’s—
An attempt to cool things off where things have been very hot and it isn't working. Because when you bring the cool or integrated being into relation to the intensely specialized bureaucracy, which is where the jobs are, it creates absolute chaos. You bring a whole integrated person into relation to a specialized civilized world, and there's going to be absolute head-on clash. That would seem to indicate to me that the girls would have more trouble in the schools, which are the instruments of the establishment, than the boys.
Well, they do; they do in the sense that they don't really take it that seriously, the boys—the wiser ones who are tossed us on the scrap heap that they don't make it. The girls are not expected to be quite as competitive and intense. [Music] I mean, your success is not, in a sense, dependent on your success in that institution constantly. It's a good point though; your point you're raising is a good point, namely if the girls are more integral than boys, then they shouldn't be having more trouble with the establishment than the boys. They do later on, admittedly, after because of our training in the manned schools. You see, we're not allowed to learn the right things in school—how to survive. We just put in, taught earlier to type earlier for cheaper, and that's happening more and more. Women have a worse and worse position.
Yes, but if women are more adaptable, then they can take a sort of a colonizing kind of attitude in schools; that they can, they can do what needs to be done in schools, and they can do well, but it's not all that important to them, so they don't get in the schools. That's right; that's what happened to us in the schools, and then when we get out, we're absolutely untrained to survive unless we're, you know, in the specialist market.
Yeah, you survive in different ways. Yeah, and the women are more inclined to be role players, which means multiple jobs oriented. The yes, this is a hang-up; the so-called women's lib thing is temporarily caught between two worlds, and it doesn't, it feels as a huge injustice somewhere, but it's a bad time to—it's a very bad time. But, for example, we'll come back to this Afro-East-West; it's a very bad time for women to suddenly grab hold of man's world just when the man's world is about to dissolve, and the—it's like—it's like the coming back to the ear-eye thing on a big scale; the Orient, the West—eastern man is going West now by acquiring Western literacy, and the Western world is going East by going inward, changing his outer goal—aggression toward inner contemplation and inner direction. As the West goes inward electrically, and by the way, the electric thing is an inner trip—it's paradox; when you put your nervous system outside electrically, you go inward; when you specialize in literacy, you go outward. The delivered man is an extrovert, and the electric man is an introvert, or he's an inner tripper.
Now, as we go inward in the West with electric technology, the East is going outward with our old hardware. Now this is literally and pretty obvious to everybody; the Vietnam War was partly an attempt to educate the East in Western ways. I mean, all warfare is education under crash programming, so the audience was getting a crash program in Western technology, Western goals, Western techniques, and they beat us because they—we were fighting a guerrilla war with position technology; that is, we were fighting against a non-positioned enemy. Guerrilla means non-positional. Says acoustic surround everywhere; the guerrilla warfare, the guerrilla fighter is easily superior to the position fighter if he has good technology. Now the American Indian was a guerrilla fighter, not a position fighter, but his technology was not up to the problem of facing a highly specialized position fighter, which was the invading Western or European man. Today, I mean the—the—the technology of the European was okay for Montezuma, but if Montezuma had had a few Western weapons, as—the Indian had a few Western weapons, a later vintage, it would have been a completely reverse story. But today, with the whole Eastern world going West, the whole Western world going East, it's—there's going to be an awful lot of duplication of effort, isn't there? Japan is about to spend 6 billion to get rid of its ideogram and its whole cultural system in favor of phonetic alphabet. The Japanese are going to put the phonetic alphabet in place of their own culture, and they will become intensely aggressive people, and minus all the things that have made them admired by the Western world for a long time; they're going to scrub off the whole of their culture. The Chinese may do the same; they're very close to deciding to go West with our alphabet. If they do it, means that they will scrub off the whole face of their culture and become intensely specialized aggressive people, and it means that the Western world will be overrun by them in five years. The Western world doesn't have a chance of surviving against intensely specialized aggressive Japs and Chinese or Hindus; it doesn't have a chance—not that that matters either that much. But the simple fact is that we are tasting this process by our own efforts. It's just presumably the ancient Chinese—you cannot play with the Japanese with their—with their symbols and be a specialist in our visual sense; they are not a visual people—never have been. Our electric thing has evolved.
Yes, oh yeah, oh yes, and the computer uses the phonetic alphabet, but it reverses it at electric speed. Everything that is expected previously—this becomes acoustic. You see that is the—that is the paradox; at the speed of light, every—all that remains is acoustic space and acoustic relationships, which is called quantum mechanics. The quantum mechanics sees the entire universe as made up of acoustic particles resonating against each other at the speed of light. There is nothing left in human society that isn't acoustic also. So civilizing—civilized man basically got rid of the—suppressed the acoustic dominance in favor of the visual, and by pushing that up into dominance, he became an individual, private—oh well, this is—with this we have done already—acoustic electrically. Yes, there's no question. Symbolism of the 19th and 20th century kind is one of the pre—effects before electricity. Symbolism was itself an acoustic form that came before electric phenomena. In other words, Mr. Nevin and I have worked on this for a good deal of time; in any situation, the effects always come before the causes. The effects of the telephone came before the telephone, the effects of the motor car before the motor car, and the effects of electricity long before electricity. The effects come first, the causes later.
Now this—this is a something you've been observing; we all know this in the history of science—that the sort of discoveries that are made in science are usually made simultaneously by a whole lot of people. The effect, in other words, came because of—this actual discovery comes later than the effects of that discovery. But what happens if the machinery in everything is all rubbed out—which machinery—we are hardware? Yeah. Well, you see what way do you have to communicate? You have—don't you? We might as well illustrate it—exactly what happens to you. Secretary Gutenberg is with Xerox, a flip—um, Xerox, which is the electric form of Gutenberg, in which you can print your own books, makes everybody a publisher. Gutenberg made everybody a reader. What happens when everybody becomes a publisher? Any kid can publish any book he wants at once. Well, it scraps our system; that's all; it scraps our book trade and our literacy system; it's gone. The Pentagon Papers are merely scraps of our politics, and so any office boy can print the secret papers of the State Department because he has complete access to it. And so this is exactly what happens, but there are no more secrets in the State Department under electric conditions; everything is known to everybody. Did you see what happened yesterday? That Jeff Anderson's sidekick, who had been given the Indian documents that they stole when they sat in with the BIA—they stole a whole lot of very important documents, and they gave the Jack Anderson sidekick, and he went to turn them back. Now that he zeros them all, and they arrested him for possessing documents, but he said, "Here, I'm giving them back to you." Yeah, but you got all the goodies. You see, that's the other side of it. Marshall and I think we should stress this—that in a world of information, the answers no longer matter if you know what the questions are; that is, the whole thing is flipped now—questions—the main resource. If you know that an atom bomb can be made, you don't have to know the precise way of doing this; everybody knows all of them very quickly.
Can you comment on Illich a little bit? We've all been reading the schooling, you know, okay, society—maybe you might like some aspect of him you'd like to bring up, especially [Music] when the information environment goes outside the school, then you might as well close the school. Now this means if the—all the answers are outside, then why put them inside? Um, if you can find out—if there's any—nothing in school you cannot find out outside school just as easily, why spend your time in school? The answer is—to his hang-up, and he—he doesn't have answers or questions; that's his problem; he's just got a hang-up. His hang-up is that he doesn't know what the questions are, and if you want to retain your school system, you don't put the answers in the schools; you put the questions in there, and when you have the questions, then you don't have to worry about it. But the teacher doesn't know what the questions are; they only know the answer. If this is what's wrong—Illich doesn't know what profession—that's a whole trouble with specialism in every field whatever, and this is why they refuse to ask the questions. Newton asked the question, "What if there is an equal"—he didn't ask if their gun is their gravity because everyone knew there was gravity for a thousand years, but he said—Newton—Newton asked the question, "What if there is another call upward?" That's what gave him his system. The moon pool was—he didn't discover gravity—discover Levi—everybody knew about gravity, but they didn't know about—granted the platform—the Roman pole was what Newton discovered, and not the downfall of the earth; that was all stopped. And Einstein discovered that when you've got out there far, far away from the earth, there aren't any measuring rods any longer that you can imagine; they're just light rays—fields. And when you start measuring with something that doesn't stay put, then you're into acoustic space. [Music] It's very—there's no difficulty in Einsteinian physics if you abandon the visual; you just enter it acoustically, then the whole thing is perfectly simple. That's what a—in the ABC of relativity—that's what the placement also blocked out; he said, "There's nothing difficult in Einstein; all you have to do is reorganize your imaginative life; you have to require totally uniform perception; there's no—there's no problems." But most physicists and most scientists use still a visual way of probing, and that's why they go so slow; they don't have—they're unable to get rid off their visual habits of investigation. But when you're investigating a non-visual, which is the subject—you know—the sub microscopy, which is totally non-visual—visual methods are useless; they're still looking for ocular proof when there's nothing to see. [Music]
Between the information that's so readily available and the kinds of questions that we learn to ask—I'm not—I'm not—we're asking him right here, you see—about what—why should the West help the East to go West? Why should we, by fighting them, you see, if we—if peace suddenly broke out, they—the East would be left flat without any impulse; they're going westward. You know, we're going to subsidize their Western movement; that's why you need intelligent people to make the questions, and they're not easily found. It's very hard to find the people who ask the right question, and even more, you need tenacious people to follow through on the questions because you're not—for example, the little boy who said that—the little boy who said, "Daddy, in his first airplane ride, when do we start to get smaller?" Now this is a question I don't think many geo—geometers could answer. Is anybody here prepared to answer why is it that the airplane gets smaller, but the plane inside doesn't get smaller? Why does the outside get smaller, not the inside? Anybody know? That's on your front stance, on your ground. Yeah, but they're all right. What about the inside? No, but what about the inside? We know that the outside has a ground; does the inside have a ground? The answer is no; the inside is not a figure-ground relationship; therefore, it's steady; it's in limbo; there's no ground. Now very few genres know there's a bigger ground relationship in there—in there; they don't know what—for example, the ground of the geometry is the literally alphabetical figure. I'm sorry, the geometry is triggered for alphabetical, and I don't think there's a geometry alive today that—there are very few people who know anything about the origins of visual space or about the characteristics of this space—certainly no psychologist. And I think Mr. Turkey is prepared to admit that Freud had begun to get terribly suspicious about visual space and civilization and its contents. Well, that's essentially infertility; you can look at the purging critique as a psyche explained in terms of—suppose—but he didn't really understand what was wrong. Well, he understood what was wrong with that kind of organization; he understood as given, but he didn't know how he got that—fight—he didn't know that the alphabet had the power to create visual space. You know, he did realize how this—how this distorts and creates—how this distorts history; he knew what literacy did, but he didn't know the alphabet was the positive—oh, he—he wouldn't even talk about literacy. No. Well, I'm all right—he doesn't get down for many gritty—oh, John Holt said, "I will not talk about literacy." Well, it's a hot subject, but especially since it's disappearing so fast. By the way, another curious feature about electric speed is attention span gets very small at electric speed, so you can count on this—all the kids in schools have an attention span that is decreasing exponentially.
Are there particular learning problems that have developed? '48 saw the first network TV, but it didn't hit everybody—that's so partially—I need to bring up one more example here, and this answers your question here a minute ago. I was talking to Albertson of the College of Education this afternoon; he brought up the fact that they had conducted a study in the—in Toronto schools, which they trained teachers to examine for learning disability and to refer them on from there. Now, after they had gotten through with this, they found so many kids that they didn't have people to take care of them, so they dropped the whole thing. That's not incidentally though—this—um—little boy who said, "When do we start to get smaller?" The fact is visual space is static; it's the only space that is static; it's a figure without a ground, and the changes occur only with relation to ground; the re—that's where the medium of the message comes from. By the way, medium is not a figure; it's ground; the medium is not the motor car; it's the highway. Now very few people know this; very few people know what the medium of the message means; they've never—the medium is the thing that changes; the program doesn't—the content doesn't, but the medium is always changing because it is the ground itself. Now visual space has no ground; it's static. Now acoustic space has figured out, so does tactile space; all other spaces except sight have a figure-ground relationship, but the insight—there is no ground; it's a world of its own, and for some reason or—they're therefore static. You know, visual space is continuous, uniform, connected, and static. Acoustic space is discontinuous, non-uniform, and dynamic; so is tactile space, osmic space—all the other spaces. Visual space has four properties that are not possessed by any other sensory mode; therefore, when you turn kids loose into a—into a non-visual environment, which is their vacation world—summer—it's a holiday from all visual constraints and specialists—continuity, uniformity, continuity, connectedness, and status—that's all characters to give Euclidean space. What about detachment? Well, that's only one of the results of confronting visual space; then this gives you a detachment, but you are totally involved in all the other spaces; you experience only involvement, and this visual space you experience no involvement at all. This is where we use another story, Marshall; that is the story of the Indian and his—with the Western geologist—or the Canadian—let's call him the Canadian geologist—two years—two years ago up in the Canadian North Country—the geologist with his Indian guide suddenly said, "We're lost," and the Indians all started laughing and said, "We know, boss; we got lost; it's impossible for a man to get lost; only the weak one gets picked up."
If it would make any difference—are you boys—are you boys from—are you—no, no, but I think these two are all of you which is the Oise group tonight? Oh, quite a big group. Well, we haven't heard much from you; you—you're—you're playing awfully coy. [Music] In the whole song already actually. But if you see we're working on these—we're asking questions about these problems; we're not—we—we're not—we don't pretend to—we know hundreds of answers, but we don't know the answer—what are the big questions? These are the questions we're talking about; what happens to Greco-Roman man after 2,500 years, and he's suddenly thrust into a non-visual environment of electric information? That's a big problem; it's not being—what happens—we're just asking what happens. Well, it concerns the entire Western world; that is, everybody in it is involved in this, and they have no choice; that is, they—they are in it; their—their decision one way or another makes no difference; we're all in it now. What happens to us—to our institutions? Can we retain any vestiges of civilization under these conditions, or should we try? You can see that around us—most of the young people have decided to—don't bother—let it go—do what—what's this maintaining? No, the electric thing is—the machines are now electric, and they are dissolving at a fairly high speed; that is, I don't think we've got 10 years left—nothing like 10 years left to the Western world—what we call civilization—private individuals—we are civilization freaks—private—the private man equal before written laws—written laws equal before written laws—that man is disappearing at a very high speed; I'd say five years is a long, long time; it's like a thousand years 10 years ago—five years now—a thousand years 10 years ago—work—movie—we're going through hundreds of years per annum right now—hundreds of years per annum at electric speed. The speed of light doesn't know anything about time or place; it doesn't represent any very serious stand against electric things. No, so we're not really speaking—no, it's—we're not doing anything very serious about it, and we're—every time we turn on the electric light, we're helping the process along. A proposed civilization is just intense. Marshall—Patrick—Freud's argument was that there's tremendous motivation to get rid of civilization because the more civilized we become, the greater arts disservices; that is, the more neurotic individuals become—all this—so this, of course, was started in the 19th century with Rousseau. I think we should make a note here that we're using the word civilized, and that's why I use civilization freak just now in this specialist sense—people who have literary training; that is, their electorate—people worldwide specialists—okay—a high degree of visual bias, which translates into sublimation bias to summarize—are the more visual sometimes the more neurotic or the greater is the service? Yeah, and you know, with one generation or two generations being total, we're back together or whatever, then—[Music] who is the enemy of the establishment? The establishment is not whole; it's fragmented—specialist, and our thinking is conceptual, which is not all—but packaged—so that everything that in the IC that deals with concepts is trying to package existence into a form that can't hold it; the old jalopy breaks down at electric speeds, however—just a month now—the concept man is a visual literate man struggling to maintain the old-fashioned fragmented being. Now he puts it unconventionally; he's going to make it highest, but you know, at the computer speed, of course, he's merely just destroying himself. But the—all the visual factors in any setup flip at computer speed; it doesn't matter what you put into the computer; it's at that speed; it flips its form into an opposite form; it comes out garbage—or doesn't matter what you put in. Children aren't acquiring—as far as they're relating to our educational system; they're busy acquiring it, but they are outflanked by this vast environment outside the school, which is returning them to the most primitive holistic conditions. I mean, Rousseau's dream has come back with all its vengeance; I mean, everything that he ever wanted for man we now have. So what we're seeing is that the—all ground rules reverse and change, and the question is, what are the new ground rules? So there aren't any; they're processed—so in figure-ground terms, you could say the educational system has always been a figure against the ground of general indifference and general laziness and non-specialism and so on. Today the ground itself has become pure knowledge—information.
Why do children look so much like their parents in values—attitudes? I thought it was a huge gap. I—I disagree. Well, okay, how many kids you got? How many kids you got? I have some total of one—just—just watch them alternatively. I have a study of all of the secondary school children in Canada. I know—yeah, I know the studies done by a highly literate person—highly specialist goals—conceptualizing the person.