Jason: perhaps the answer to your question is: Yes?

Waldemar A Schmidt, PhD, MD
(Perseveret et Percipiunt)
503.631.8044

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. (A Einstein)






> On Sep 14, 2018, at 4:28 PM, nysa71 <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hmmmm,
> 
> Is America getting more stupid? Or is it getting smarter, and the stupid is just more noticeable? 
> 
> ~ Jason
> On Friday, September 14, 2018, 10:42:30 AM EDT, Mark Stahlman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> 
> Gregg:
> 
> Three cheers for good old "billions-and-billions" Carl!  Jodie Foster  
> was pretty good in his 1997 novel-adapted movie "Contact," as I recall  
> . . . <g>
> 
> Excellent description of the now-obsolete TELEVISION *paradigm* --  
> which is not the world in which we live today but rather what Marshall  
> McLuhan described as "We see the world through the rear-view mirror.  
> We march backwards into the future."
> 
> For people like Sagan (i.e. academics of the old-school before  
> "post-modernism" took over, including most involved in the  
> "humanities"), there was a sentimentality for the PRINT paradigm that  
> was pushed aside in the 19th-century (but persisted until the  
> 1950s/60s) -- remembered nostalgically (but not accurately) as period  
> of "rationality," which had banished "superstition" (as he calls it  
> out, giving away his sympathies.)
> 
> This was what McLuhan called the "Gutenberg Galaxy" (the name of his  
> 1961 work on the topic, which Sagan likely read.) That paradigm  
> disappeared with the telegraph and Samuel Morse's 1844 "What Hath God  
> Wrought . . . " (taken from Numbers 23:23) . . . !!
> 
> Another who took this approach was Neil Postman -- who took the phrase  
> "media ecology" from McLuhan and built a career on it.  His version of  
> Sagan's complaint was "Amusing Ourselves to Death" but the point was  
> the same.
> 
> Another nostalgic view is the recent Steven Pinker "Enlightenment  
> Now!" book, which tries to recount all the advances we made since the  
> 17th-century and then makes the obvious mistake of "projecting" even  
> more to come.  No, that's not how it works.
> 
> As best I can tell, Sagan, Postman, Pinker (and thousands of others)  
> haven't figured out why *any* of this happened (which requires  
> Aristotle's "formal cause," as interpreted by McLuhan) -- so they have  
> no capability to "anticipate" what will come next or, more to the  
> point, even understand where we are today . . . <g>
> 
> Mark
> 
> Quoting "Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx" <[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>>:
> 
> > Saw this clipped out and posted from Carl Sagan...seems apropos to  
> > today's world even more!
> >
> > [cid:image001.jpg@01D44C12.99400920 <mailto:[log in to unmask]>]
> >
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