Page 9 - Introducing The Gratitudes

plicated landscapes of all kinds in which we find ourselves in modern times. Especially as the internal landscape of ideas, emo- tions, attitudes and motivations is becoming more important to the definition of our character.
Field Guides, like Ordinance Surveys and Almanacs, are storied and treasured navigational tools from another era, and might ap- pear antique and inappropriate to our modern, sophisticated world. In fact, the intention we had of creating a guide for our in- ternal, elevated landscape is completely appropriate. The land- scape we explore in these guides is as much about the past, the “old ways” of doing, and being , as the whole insistent, insatiable world of right now that eats its inevitable way into our entropic soul.
■ Awakening to Nightmares
In his 1906 play The Doctor’s Dilemma, the great English play- wright and social philosopher George Bernard Shaw remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the common folk. He meant that those who belong to elite trades – physicians, lawyers, professors, politicians, theologians, and scientists – protect their special status by creating vocabularies that are incomprehensi- ble to the general public. This process prevents outsiders from understanding what the profession is doing
and why – and protects the insiders from
close examination and criticism. The pro-
fessions, in other words, build forbidding
walls of technical gobbledegook over which
the prying and alien eye cannot see.
Anyone who has studied the history of
science and technology knows that techno-
logical change is always a Faustian bargain:
it gives and takes away, and not always in
equal measure. A new technology some-
times creates more than it destroys. Some-
times, it destroys more than it creates. But
it is never one-sided, and it behooves us to
pay attention to, and guard against, the consequences of change, no matter how benign it may appear at first blush.
The invention of the printing press is a perfect example. Print- ing fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration. Printing cre- ated prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of ex- pression. Printing made modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into an exercise in superstition. Printing as- sisted in the growth of the nation-state but, in so doing, made pa- triotism into a sordid if not a murderous emotion.
Johann Gutenberg was by all accounts a devoted Christian who would have been horrified to hear Martin Luther, the accursed heretic, declare that printing is “God’s highest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.” Gutenberg thought his invention would advance the cause of the Holy Ro-
9
INTRODUCING
THE GRATITUDES
Field Guides to Learning and Living Everyday Values
Printing created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression.
Printing made modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into an exercise in supersti- tion.