At,
As always your message is grave, and thoughtful, and patient.
I must confess to you that I am probably hopeless: I cannot grasp why you
hold on to what you hold on to, why you find that it unconceals, reveals,
the forms and direction of our work and joy and organizations and lives.
Like many, I lead life on several levels.
I work, I play. I go to the grocery store and buy carrots. I wonder about
how to do my work better, who to vote for, what position to take on health
insurance and tax reform and EU and Bosnia.
In none of the zones of life in which I am involved do I find that I am
enlightened or helped by certain formulas, metaphor, proverbs.
For instance: your deep belief that "to learn is to create."
Well, I guess so. And, of course, I can maintain the reverse is equally
true: "to create is to learn."
But after thinking about learning and creating in that kind of verbal way,
I come back to the questions facing me: how do I feel about school reform?
Do I favor "privatizing" the Internet? Should the US withdraw from the UN,
or pay its back dues? Do I favor compulsory health insurance? What necktie
goes with this shirt and suit?
And I find that any formulas like yours do not help me: help me to learn
my way to solutions, help me to create solutions.
More fundamentally, you believe profoundly that "entropy" is a key to all
the mysteries of the human condition:
>Entropy production is necessary to create additional entropy for the
>universe, entropy needed to maintain future organisations when they
>present themsleves. The future is forever before us so that we better
>have to care much for it. By now it should be obvious that "entropy
>production" is our link to the future.
By now, At, is obvious to me that "entropy" is not our link to the future.
When we believed that "entropy" meant that the physical universe was like
an automobile with a finite amount of fuel in its gas tank that would
evenutally give out, we "knew" that life on this planet would eventually
be extinguished when our sun's energy was dissipated.
Now we don't even believe that.
And the notion that "entropy" offers us advice on how to improve relations
between South Africa and the US, or whether to buy Microsoft stock, or how
to improve education in the formerly Third World--that notion doesn't
connect with anything that I can recognize.
Your Seven Essentialities are what some call a "totalizing general
theory," what C. Wright Mills called a "Grand Theory", what Lyotard calls
a "metanarrative."
Such theories have this in common with I Ching and Nostradamus and
Biblical prophecy: after the fact, they can be shown to have predicted
those facts--indeed an American author has just written a book called The
Biblical Code, or something like that, which demonstrates that the Old
Testament predicted everything that has occurred.
Long may you weave, At.
Steve Eskow
Dr. Steve Eskow
President, The Electronic University Network
288 Stone Island Road
Enterprise, Florida 32725
Phone: 407-321-8770; Fax: 407-321-4861
email: dreskow@magicnet.net
[...snip by your host...]
--"Dr. Steve Eskow" <dreskow@magicnet.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>