This month I read or finished reading:
1) Mrs Fyttons Country Life- Mavis Cheek
2) My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands- Chelsea Handler
3) In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life- Robert Kegan
4) The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millenium
5) Sarah's Cottage- D.E. Stevenson
6) This Civilization is Finished: Conversations on the End of Empire and What Lies Beyond- Rupert Read
7) Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet- Tim Jackson
8) Nudge: Improving Decision About Health, Wealth, and Happiness- Richard Thaler
9) Les Parents Terribles- Jean Cocteau
10) Don't Do Stuff You Suck At: Roadmap to your Front Seat Life for Entrepreneurs, Direct Sellers, and Others That Want to Change the World- Jessica Butts
11) Living in the Long Emergency: Global Crisis, the Failure of the Futurists, and the Early Adapters Who Are Showing Us the Way Forward- James Kunstler
12) Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilization- Samuel Alexander
13) Tools for Conviviality- Ivan Illich
14) Gender- Ivan Illich
I also started or continued reading a good many other books this month, including "Utopia or Oblivion" by Buckminster Fuller. One thing that struck me was that "The Evolving Self" and "In Over Our Heads" which were both published in 1994, both seemed more old-fashioned to me than Fuller's and Illich's works which were published back in the 60s/70s. All of these books were very good, but the earlier ones had more of the zing of prescient retro to me; maybe because written from a juncture where more options seemed possible?
For instance, the last paragraph from "Gender":
I have no strategy to offer. I refuse to speculate on the probabilities of any cure. I shall not allow the shadow of the future to fall on the concepts with which I try to grasp what is and what has been. As the ascetic and the poet meditate on death and thus gratefully enjoy the exquisite aliveness of the present, so we must gratefully face the sad loss of gender. I strongly suspect that a contemporary art of living can be recovered, so long as our austere and clear-sighted acceptance of the double ghetto of economic neuters then moves us to renounce the comforts of economic sex. The hope for such a life rests upon the rejection of sentimentality and on openness to surprise.
Kegan and Illich write from quite different perspectives. Kegan being very much embedded within the professional educational institution towards Level 4 functioning, and Illich being in radical favor of tearing this institution back down to human scale. I read an essay comparing Illich's thought to Jordan Peterson's, but this seems like a superficial misreading of his brilliance. I would place him more at the level of Taleb.
Fuller's writing was also interesting because he was an early adopter of the rational optimist technophile philosophy. He writes about his grandfather telling him that when humans used to believe the world was flat, this implied endless possibilities at the unexplored horizon, but those who have fully comprehended the reality of the finite globe understand that resources are limited and if you want a decent life for yourself and your family, you must accept as natural and unavoidable that there are 500 other humans who will be losing as you win. So, to the young Fuller, the prospect that technology and innovation might transcend this grim pseudo-Darwinian tooth-and-claw competion with the rest of humanity as described by family patriarch, was a wonderful thing. I found this description interesting because it adds one more level to this dialectic, because the notion of the ancient flat world order implying endless resources hadn't occurred to me.
Anyways, one thought that emerged for me from these various readings was that if, as Illich argues, the modern educational institutions are the same sort of structural technology as the highway system, and these same systems have as their primary goal the achievement of "professionalism" which, as Kegan suggests, is a clear hallmark of Level 4 functioning, then isn't it more likely than not that Level 4 functioning is less a level of lifetime development of the individual, and more a level of human integration with the machine oriented hive-mind of a highly technological/bureaucratic/gender-neutered/culture-bleached modern environment?
As further evidence of this, it occurred to me that the earliest novel with a "modern voice" I can think of is "Tristram Shandy" and the very first humorous incident in the narrator's biography has to do with how his conception was correlated with his father's habit of winding the clocks and engaging in coitus on the same day each month.
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Unfortunately, I remain unable to make plans for my future beyond extending my reading list due to Covid vulnerability and excruciatingly slow healing of injuries due to what was either intestinal version of covid or some other ghastly infection. My mother is also hospitalized in ICU with several serious problems, but my sisters are doing all the necessary tasks. Since I am rather accustomed to oldest sister role, the fact that I am too incapacitated myself to help at all makes me feel rather like a character from Kafka.
Bright note would be that my BF and I seem to be getting along rather well in captivity. He was recently called back to work in his office a couple days/week which neither of us is thrilled about, but he is hyper-alert to his physical surroundings type, and he has his own office with door, so I'm not fretting too much because I am too invalid to go solo anyways. IOW, my outlook is more fatalistic than optimistic.
