Last weekend, I was in Philadelphia and took my daughter to the Goya exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Weird and fascinating. Our technology makes it possible for me to view and study an artist from another age and culture, not to mention take home coffee mugs with his art on them. No comment on that one. Multiply that "taken for granted" experience millions of times.

Rightly understood and experienced, our culture makes us richer than Solomon. Or more wretched than Solomon (aficionados of the Old Testament will understand the duality), depending on our spirit towards "stuff".

This weekend, I took my daughter and younger sons to the local "Dairy Fest." Besides getting to watch souped-up lawn tractors drag 6,000 pound sleds (never saw THAT when we lived in Paris), we could take a chance on Cow Plop Bingo. Yes, Elsie wanders a checkerboard square and, depending on wherever and whenever you-know-what descends, you could be the winner. I never win these things.

But most interesting of all (will he ever get to the point? Hey, this is an OT thread!) was the exhibit on our county's dairy world of "yesteryear".

Even today, we are the largest supplier of milk to NY state, I believe, and this is nothing compared to what used to be the case (milk and butter throughout NY, NJ and eastern PA). We viewed a fascinating film made in 1919 on the spot we were holding the "Fest" which showed how milk and butter were processed back then when we had 5,000 farms in the county (today: < 350 farms).

My wife most enjoyed the "doggie butter churn". This is where folks built a kind of treadmill contraption. While Fido ran the treadmill, panting heavily, the churn was happily moving up and down. Meanwhile, Ma sat nearby with her crochet. "Technology" did the rest.

I enjoyed watching how the big guys ran the creamery. So clean, apparently, that you could eat off the floor. Huge, mechanical machinery combined with lots of then "tricks of the trade" to receive, process and deliver milk products, given the technology of the day. People came from Europe to bid on livestock.

The moral? Must I have one? Okay, it will be something quite familiar to most of us: we can't really go back, as Senator Bennett pointed out last year. A "10", God forbid", will be a 25 to 50 year disaster.

Some of the know-how of yesterday could be mimicked fairly quickly (folks in town can make treadmills for dogs), but we don't have the old-fashioned heavy mechanical machines, the skills (really) or the ability to MAKE those old-fashioned creamery machines in a "10" scenario.

Unfortunately, SAYING we can't go back doesn't remediate the technology we've got.

Y2K's biggest invitation to us as a culture was/is to consider the fragility as well as the redundancies in our "world system". To date, we haven't RSVPed the invitation. Instead, we have made a sucker's bet on the redundancy side (sucker's bet because it was made unintelligently, not necessarily because it was wrong. We'll see soon enough about that).

Ironically, if Y2K turns out to be a bump, much though I wish that, it won't alter the facts that the system is fragile as well as redundant. Cyberterrorism and other threats make the possibility of regional or national infrastructure collapse real for the next several decades, I suspect. In a bump, we will have learned nothing, except maybe to exhibit even more complacency towards the "works of man's hands."

OTOH, will we learn much from a Y2K collapse either? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Only a fool wishes for such a collapse. With five children and looking forward to grandchildren, I am not that fool.

But I do wish for a culture that had the integrity to face up to a crisis like Y2K and use it as an opportunity to consider the long-term trade-offs of short-term technical decisions, like the ones that created the crisis in the first place. Y2K remediation has largely mimicked the exact same model of "problem-solving" that got us to this pass. THAT bodes worse for our safe future than anything else.

What have I really GI-ed about?

I have "gotten it" about the sleepwalk that our culture is engaged in, drugged (both literally and figuratively) by a consumer, entertainment and media-manipulated consensual hallucination run amok. Take a look at Goya's paintings and, especially, his satirical sketches sometime. Things weren't so different back then, either. Our forebears were not morally superior or inferior to us. They simply lacked the technical means to make the hallucination work consistently.

I wonder whether our technical ability to do so represents progress or regress .....

-- BigDog (BigDog@duffer.com), June 14, 1999

Answers

"Our forebears were not morally superior or inferior to us. They simply lacked the technical means to make the hallucination work consistently."

Astonishing, BigDog. What a fantastic way to put it. Bravo!

-- Lisa (lisa@work.now), June 14, 1999.

Excellent BD, right on! I'm hoping to see the return of "true grit" and the pride once taken in one's "personal code of ethics", which was never the same for *all*, but lived by and defended by those determined enough to create them in the first place!

-- Will continue (farming@home.com), June 14, 1999.

"Our forebears were not morally superior or inferior to us. They simply lacked the technical means to make the hallucination work consistently." I disagree and suggest you spend a few more years studying the past. Just how much time have you spent comparing the past with the present. The past meaning last century and before. Big mouth opinion from a big dog is noise.

-- Disagree (abc@thryu.com), June 14, 1999.

Disagree --- This post was, of course, just my opinion. But I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with?

Given that this century has featured WWI, Spanish-American War, WWII, the Holocaust, Russian Gulags, Hiroshima, Maoist genocide, Cambodian genocide, abortion as birth control and, currently, ethnic "cleansings" in multiple countries, I thought I was being quite generous to the twentieth century in saying WE are not inferior morally to our forebears.

... given the hundreds of millions dead in these creative, modern and, often, "technical" ways, I could be wrong, of course.

-- BigDog (BigDog@duffer.com), June 14, 1999.

Big Dog -- and people wonder why, with millions of habitable planets in the galaxy, nobody's ever come to visit us. Or if they have, they've kept their distance.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), June 14, 1999.

Big Dog,

Disagree (above) is a DGI. Nothing much you can do about that. And explaining with details doesn't seem to help either. I liked your post.

-- Gordon (gpconnolly@aol.com), June 14, 1999.

"Mass hypnosis" is my term for it.

Things that exist only by social agreement and have little or no physical or other underpinning in reality outside of social agreement.

Why, in just ten minutes of throwing a tennis ball for my dog in our back yard after reading BD's post, I thought of at least ten of my favorite examples of it in our "modern" era.

And if you think I'm gonna miss more of that rare NW sunshine sitting inside here typing them for you all right now, you're hallucinating! (but I'll bet you know 'em all already)

-- jor-el (jor-el@krypton.uni), June 14, 1999.

Big Dog,

I never heard of Cow Plop Bingo before. I almost jumped right out of my chair when I read that. I'm going to try to get our local county fair to put in a Plop Board. Sounds like "loads" of fun.

-- Gordon (gpconnolly@aol.com), June 14, 1999.