10. Dead Week

March 13 March 15:

Democracy as Creativity

Quotes for Class Nineteen

The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and cooperation.  And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men.  Above our modern socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must persist and evolve that higher individualism which the centres of culture protect; there must come a loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself and the world about it; that seeks a freedom for expansion and self-development; that will love and hate and labor in its own way, untrammeled alike by old and new.  Such souls aforetime have inspired and guided worlds, and if we be not wholly bewitched by our Rhinegold, they shall again.  Herein the longing of black men must have respect: the rich and bitter depth of their experience, the unknown treasures of their inner life, the strange rendings of nature they have seen, may give the world new points of view and make their loving, living, and doing precious to all human hearts.  And to themselves in these the days that try their souls, the chance to soar in the dim blue air above the smoke is to their finer spirits boon and guerdon for what they lose on earth by being black.
-- W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

For the first time, [real network] cooperation is plausible.  Decision making in future years will be increasingly decentralized, as computer links lead to networks of aligned, self-determining teams, acting to mutual purpose within a larger corporate structure.  . . . If the industrial infrastructure does not move to such an approach, it cannot sustain itself.  But imagine what it would take to move there -- in human terms.  Executives would have to think about goals that do not immediately accrue profits to shareholders.  Companies would have to become leaders: presenting a picture of life in the next millennium to citizens who have no reason to trust corporations but who have been waiting for someone to credibly present that picture.  Companies would also have to be open and responsive enough, internally and externally, to live up to the trust that consumers then place in them.  Gradually, companies would give up their previous source of security: the control they had over production.
-- Art Kleiner, The Age of Heretics (1996)

Infinite Creation

Quotes for Class Twenty

The discoveries of recent decades in particle physics have led us to place great emphasis on the concept of broken symmetry.  The development of the universe from its earliest beginnings is regarded as a succession of symmetry-breakings.  As it emerges from the moment of creation in the Big Bang, the universe is completely symmetrical and featureless.  As it cools to lower and lower temperatures, it breaks one symmetry after another, allowing more and more diversity of structure to come into existence.  The phenomenon of life also fits naturally into this picture.  Life too is symmetry-breaking.  . . . Every time a symmetry is broken, new levels of diversity and creativity become possible.  It may be that the nature of our universe and the nature of life are such that this process of diversification will have no end.
-- Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions (1988).

Review, Rewind, Looking Ahead