Process - Part 5

“And many decided that doing was more fun than thinking, so they up and did.  And they made strong alloys by adding a weak metal to a weaker metal…and that didn’t make any sense, but who cared as long as it worked?  And they designed the Holy Roman Empire, which wasn’t holy or Roman or an empire, but who cared because it almost worked?  And they made marvelous machines to describe the movement of the planets around the earth…which they don’t, but somebody with a lot of TRADITION behind them said they did, so the machines ground on by God, and over anybody who said otherwise, and it worked for a while.  And they made the calculus, and discovered oxygen, and invented telescopes, and understood physics, and defined Greenwich Mean Time, and created Divine Kings, ‘demonic parliaments,’ and cities, agricultural farming, marriage, books and libraries to hold them, schools, the 24-hour day, hospitals, divorce, representative democracy and a republic to hold it, circuit judges, compulsory education, trade unions, unemployment insurance, Presbyterians, kindergartens, social security, sit-ins, and some revolutions and lots of special and separate TRADITIONS all of which were absolutely true because they worked for those who made them.

“And religion (another of their inventions) became the defender of TRADITION which frequently thereafter forbade them to make any more inventions – which is funny, but so are they.  A whole bunch of religions were started in the desert by chauvinist goatherds and camel drivers.  The God they made told them that Mother Nature was to be subdued and conquered so most of their inventions went in that direction.  The decided to conquer the hostile old bitch and build and build and build.  They built lightning rods, stoves, and bifocals (to see both inductively and deductively).  They fabricated,

            ‘Box-cars, clocks, steam-shovels, churns, pistons, boilers, scissors’ and

            ‘Steel barb-wire around The Works.

            ‘Steel guns in the holsters of the guards at the gates of The Works,’

“And they made corporations, and designed the first duties of the day, or so they were called – the really real TRADITIONS of:

            ‘Wealth, order, travel, shelter, products, plenty,’

“And summed these up in one all pervading symbol – the Cadillac Seville, to be earned in the…

            ‘Stormy, husky, brawling…

Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,’

"…which came to epitomize the unfathomable accident called, Industrialized Human."

           

Pardon me Professor, but if I may say, it doesn’t seem that you’re too big on tradition.

Oh, quite to the contrary.  Some traditions are wonderful, it’s the adherence to TRADITION for the sake of TRADITION that gets me riled.  We’re creatures of habit, yes?  And, we get comfortable doing things in certain ways.  We follow routines in how we act, how we communicate, and how we think.  Call it socialization or indoctrination, it all makes for an orderly and functional system.  But what happens when the following of these routines, these TRADITIONS, leads us to do, say, or think in ways that don’t make sense any more?  Well, by damned, some would have us put on the blinders and forge ahead.  Others might question such behaviors and ways of thinking and be ostracized for breaking with TRADITION.

I see.  Alright, what about the statement, “The God they made…”  

What is it about the statement that you’d like to discuss?

I’m not sure, don’t you believe in God?

I think that the point of this discussion, the point of the work we’re discussing, is that I believe in Process.  The question as to how or why Process was initiated is one that troubles many people, but not me.  I find no particular value to belaboring the point.  It simply is.  That’s not to say I am not awestruck by the elegance of a blade of grass, the purity of a rain drop, or the unfathomable depths of the cosmos.  But I see no particular reason to attribute responsibility for our existence or what happens to us to an entity other than that which we are all a part - Process.  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.  We'll get back to this at the end.  Shall we continue?

Please do.