We’ll see if this guy’s any good
Barbarism…isn’t the mere opposite of civilization, but simply the refusal to communicate where communion is possible. By this definition, the modern scientific outlook is a barbarous enterprise. It tears down traditional knowledge; it dismisses subjective ways of knowing; it rejects communion with the past, except, that is, on scientific-technical terms.
Currently reading: The Unbroken Thread by Sohrab Ahmari đ
my happy place
Here’s a current installation of Kawamata’s, “Nest in Liaigre”:
Stumbled upon the work of Tadashi Kawamata, who reclaims old wooden objects and furniture for his elaborate constructions. Here’s a shot of The Nest, a large installation in Helsinki in 2022:
Naples (c. 1841) by John Ruskin:
Study of Dawn: purple Clouds (1868) by John Ruskin:
Matt Crawford, on dirt biking as an example of the “humanizing possibilities” of risk:
The feeling of exposure one has on a dirt bike recalls one to a basic truth: We are fragile, embodied beings. There is a certain risk that is inherent in moving around, by whatever means. A responsible person does everything he can to minimize this risk. Yet is risk somehow bound up with humanizing possibilities? […]
The heightened contingency of driving off-road resembles walking in the faith it enactsâthat of throwing oneself into the world with hope. The ancient Greeks had a single word to express the condition of being âwithout a road,â when the way forward is not clear: aporia. It represents a moment pregnant with the arrival of something unlooked for.
These experiences of serendipity and faith feel a bit scarce in contemporary culture, and the language for articulating them seems to be fading from common use. We have a vision of the future in which there would be little scope for such moments. The most authoritative voices in commerce and technology express a determination to eliminate contingency from life as much as possible, and replace it with machine-generated certainty. Thatâs what automation does, whatever else it may accomplish. More broadly, a need for certainty is expressed in the project to expand rational control over domains that remain intolerably wild. At times, this project comes untethered from any utility-maximizing logic and looks more like a compulsion. It reveals a metaphysical orientation that seems a bit cramped, or timid.
