Replying to LO26815 --
Dear Organlearners,
Don Dwiggins <d.l.dwiggins@computer.org> writes:
>On another list, I sae the following from one Alex Martelli:
>> Sure -- I'll start. The same argument as was made
>> by many in the Church when the novel and troublesome
>> idea of teaching higher culture to laymen first surfaced
>> (a bit less than 1,000 years ago, in Bologna -- accidentally
>> my hometown). "If we let just EVERYBODY have this
>> [knowledge/programming-power], they'll just do WHATEVER
>> they want without our wise guidance for their good!".
>> This is clearly unacceptable and MUST be squelched.
Greetings dear Dwig,
You have got me hooked solidly with this one.
Here in our country (like on Internet ;-) information on the emergence of
the universities some eight hundred years ago are as scarce as chicken
teeth.
I had the graceful opportunity to study a work of Roger Bacon
(1200?-1300?) who was closely associated with the emergence of the
University of Oxford. In that work he focussed not on the laymen as
learners, but on the teachers who sold them on the marketplace called the
"university" a lot of crap. For this book he got jailed many years.
A friend of mine, not a regular subscriber to "learning-org.com", studied
my contribution "Burn all except the one" intently. He hopped and skipped
from library to library to get information to check on the facts in that
contribution. Two days ago he said to me: "While finding and contemplating
the information which I could find, a curious idea took shape in me. The
Biblioteca had to be burnt so that humankind could become aware the Law of
Requisite Complexity. Just as one book cannot say it all, one word cannot
say all which it means. The rich meaning of a word for a person is forever
related to the complexity of the spirituality of that person."
This brings us to your conclusion:
>I'm hardly Solomon, but I'll hazard an observation:
>I think the Law of Requisite Complexity would lead
>us to be very careful when trying to draw lines
>between the good and the bad, the beautiful and
>the ugly.
Dwig, is it not fantastic -- you and this person live worlds apart. Yet
you two are thinking in the same direction because you both are aware that
you live in one universe. This awareness is like what is happening outside
right at this very moment.
A lunar eclipse is over us -- the first one I have ever seen. I should
have been outside experiencing it all. I have been a couple of minutes
out. Almost three quaters of the sun has been "eaten up" by the moon. Yet
the remaining part of the sun makes the day still bright, although I felt
the icy winter which usually happens only at night. The winter of
fragmentation is icy, but the light of wholeness is worth it all.
Local occultists claim that every lunar eclipse brings untold diseases
over us. Yet in the year 29 AC a lunar eclipse moved from west to east
over the Mediteranean, signalling that finally a breaktrhough in peace has
been made.
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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