I just watched a very nice speech by one of my favorite actors, Kevin Spacey, on the importance of public funding for the arts. Spacey was speaking as part of Arts Advocacy day.
In the speech he used a metaphor, taught to him by Jack Lemmon, about “sending the elevator back down” to help new people enter your profession, whether it be the arts or anything else.
I think that’s a brilliant summation of an attitude that more of us should share.
From John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology by Larry A. Hickman
“What, in Dewey’s view, constitutes responsible technology? This book is an attempt to suggest some answers to that question. By way of review and conclusion, it may be said that Dewey rejected what I have called “straight-line instrumentalism,” or the view that neutral tools are brought to bear on ends that are valued for reasons external to the situations within which those tools have been developed.
Cognition in Practice, by Jean Lave, 1998
“So far I have described a series of dichotomously polarized issues that have sustained limitations on debate between paradigms and disciplines over a considerable period of time. I have yet to describe the sources of the coherence with which the issues reinforce on another. They take their shape, the great divides formed, in terms of a positivist epistemology which specifies a series of assumptions on which they are based: rationality exists as the ideal canon of thought; experimentation can be thought of as the embodiment of this ideal in scientific practice; science is the value-free collection of factual knowledge about the world; factual knowledge about the world is the basis for the formation of scientific theory, not the other way around; science is the opposite of history, the one nomothetic the other ideographic; cognitive processes are general and fundamental, psychology, correspondingly, a nomothetic discipline; society and culture shape the particularities of cognition and give it content, thus sociocultural context is specific, its study ideographic; general laws of human behavior, therefore, must be dissected away from the historical and social obfuscations which give them particularity.
A quotation:
From the movie My Dinner with Andre
ANDRE: Well, I think that’s right! You know, it may be, Wally, that one of the reasons that we don’t know what’s going on is that when we’re there at a party, we’re all too busy performing.
WALLY: Un-hunh.
ANDRE: You know, that was one of the reasons that Grotowski gave up the theater. He just felt that people in their lives now were performing so well that performance in the theater was sort of superfluous, and in a way obscene.
People will laugh at me? Not the people I respect; they haven’t yet and they’re not going to start now. Someone has done it before? Honey, it’s all been done before. Nothing’s really original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself. I have nothing to say? An irrelevant fear. We all have something to say. Plus, you’re panicking too soon. If the dancers don’t walk out on you, chances are the audience won’t either.
I heard two workers say, "This chaos Will soon be ended." This chaos will not be ended, The red and the blue house blended, Not ended, never and never ended, The weak man mended, The man that is poor at night Attended Like the man that is rich and right. The great men will not be blended... I am the poorest of all. I know that I can not be mended, Out of the clouds, pomp of the air, By which at least I am befriended.
The silent litany of the workmen goes on – Speed, speed, we are the makers of speed. We make the flying, crying motors, Clutches, brakes, and axles, Gears, ignitions, accelerators, Spokes and springs and shock absorbers. The silent litany of the workmen goes on – Speed, speed, we are the makers of speed; Axles, clutches, levers, shovels, We make signals and lay the way – Speed, speed. The trees come down to our tools, We carve the wood to the wanted shape.
Henry Gould wrote the following it about the radical nature of democracy.:
But the question got me thinking. Perhaps democracy is only realistic as a radical commitment. By that I mean one must be - thoroughly - a committed believer in popular sovereignty and the intelligence of the common person and ordinary opinion - radically so, despite the debilitating processes & events so conducive to despair & cynicism. Because only such a commitment is strong enough to say nay to the centuries - millennia - of elite thinking on politics (from before Plato, to Plato, to Macchiavelli, etc.
Yesterday was a cold day here in Minnesota. The radio, as I drove to work, was full of stories about living with the cold and hourly updates on the descent of the thermometer. Minnesotans have a well-deserved fascination with the weather. The extremes of summer and winter hit us much harder than the rest of the nation, than most of the rest of the world. Such is the beauty of living in the middle of a continent.