just on the ellul mention, I still think he has the best distillation of what it means to be a technical society, and it's one in which man internalizes the value system of the machine, and the machine only has one value, efficiency. it's a deceptively simple reduction, but can be applied very widely (e.g. into bureaucracy and statecraft).
the into the wild fate i agree with, it does seem like the drive for some personal reconnection with nature, reality almost logically must end up there. 21st century man cannot become a collection of vagrants striking into the wilderness (at the extreme), but even on the spectrum leading up there there's many wavelengths that seem unworkable (e.g. we also cannot be cabin in the woods vagrants, and maybe all striving for some more pastoral mode de vie, that too, cannot be a shared ethos).
it's incredibly frustrating. I've been somewhat captured by the idea, that while we may not be able to rebuild a localized terroir as an ecosystem for a 21st century knowledge worker, we may be able to reclaim city life. not the degraged mechanized city experiecne of today. but think more of the paris as an outdoor palace for the bourgeois in the 19th century, or vienna as a gay and vivacious center filled with art and music in the 18th, or bruges centuries before that as a intimate verdant cradle, yet also center of world commerce. that is, find that communion again with tactile reality, not in nature, but in the most perfect expressions of the city, its arts. nature then becomes distilled, the beautiful park, the well tended garden, the bonsai tree in the living room, etc etc... the lush spacious city as a sublimation of the the wilderness, the country side.
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just on the ellul mention, I still think he has the best distillation of what it means to be a technical society, and it's one in which man internalizes the value system of the machine, and the machine only has one value, efficiency. it's a deceptively simple reduction, but can be applied very widely (e.g. into bureaucracy and statecraft).
the into the wild fate i agree with, it does seem like the drive for some personal reconnection with nature, reality almost logically must end up there. 21st century man cannot become a collection of vagrants striking into the wilderness (at the extreme), but even on the spectrum leading up there there's many wavelengths that seem unworkable (e.g. we also cannot be cabin in the woods vagrants, and maybe all striving for some more pastoral mode de vie, that too, cannot be a shared ethos).
it's incredibly frustrating. I've been somewhat captured by the idea, that while we may not be able to rebuild a localized terroir as an ecosystem for a 21st century knowledge worker, we may be able to reclaim city life. not the degraged mechanized city experiecne of today. but think more of the paris as an outdoor palace for the bourgeois in the 19th century, or vienna as a gay and vivacious center filled with art and music in the 18th, or bruges centuries before that as a intimate verdant cradle, yet also center of world commerce. that is, find that communion again with tactile reality, not in nature, but in the most perfect expressions of the city, its arts. nature then becomes distilled, the beautiful park, the well tended garden, the bonsai tree in the living room, etc etc... the lush spacious city as a sublimation of the the wilderness, the country side.