It seems more and more these days that knowing one's history is really the most we can ask of people. Maybe an open mind, most of all, and human compassion, but those are hard to define, and more and more seem to be subjective entities, the more I consider them.
It seems the world has a real problem on its hands anymore, this division between Islam and the West, or Islam and Christianity/Judaism. The difficulty seems to be that nobody can define where the problem resides: politics, religion, power mongering, natural resource attainment, etc. The heart of the problem-conflict cannot be efficiently defined, it's far too decentralized, something Lyotard tags as a symptom of our current postmodern condition.
What I try to do these days is look at this conflict as a specific example or symptom of something else. That "something else" is hard to define, but I am working on it. I find myself having to do two things: 1. Keep going back further and further in history to look for patterns of human activity, and 2. sort of keep stepping back to see things from a broader perspective (which may be the same thing as #1, they seem to go hand in hand). I think what it is coming down to, as a topic, is historic human activity (in terms of power or political expansionism because this is the dominant goal of Western human activity) and the role that media has played in terms of how its been used within the power as the power gains influence and eventually looses it. Harold Innis has been on my mind a lot lately. He did a lot of work on this in the early (first half) of the 20th Century at the University of Toronto. He started as an economist mapping out a contemporary history of Canada and how it evolved based on the fur trade, migration of the beaver, etc., the natural landscape, and, as a result, the relations between the indigenous people and the incoming Europeans. He got as far as looking at the manufacture of paper as one of these staples and then went off on a tangent of how the newspaper came about and morphed into what it was at the time. Then he looked for relationships between the effects or role of the newspaper and Canada's position concerning British influence. Empire and Communications examines, among other things, how more permanent media used in the Roman and Byzantine empires like clay and stone aligned with characteristics such as oral communication, and a bias of time; less permanent media, like paper and electronic are aligned with written communication, and a bias of space. What is necessary for a successful political project is a balance of the two. Of course, there is a lot more to it. But that's the YouTube version.
I've come to the conclusion that the world today has more than enough bias toward space, we can reach all around the world by glancing at a page or screen, but not enough of a bias for time, meaning, people generally don't have enough understanding of their historic place. It's conflicting because it is technology that allows us to reach around the world (newspaper, internet, planes, cars all built in factories), but it is technology (factories, newspaper, internet, trains, cars) that broke up the clan, the tribe, the extended family living together which emphasized the embedded history lesson in life. I think this understanding is essential to healthy populations and individuals.
