Title : 77 Enlarging The Nervous System The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
link : 77 Enlarging The Nervous System The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
77 Enlarging The Nervous System The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Enlarging The Nervous System
There is a legend that in lost Atlantis once stood a great university in the form of an
immense flat-topped pyramid from which star observations were made. In this university,
most of the arts and sciences of the present world were contained. Putting aside that
pleasant fancy which we can find clearly reflected on the obverse of our American Great
Seal, almost any early Utopia holds a profusion of inside information about things to
come. In 1641 Bishop John Wilkins, a founder of the Royal Society, wrote his own
Utopia, Mercury: or the Secret and Swift Messenger. Every single invention Wilkins
imagined has come about: "a flying chariot," "a trunk or hollow pipe that shall preserve
the voice entirely," a code for communicating by means of noise-makers, etc. Giphantia,
by de la Roche, unmistakably envisions the telephone, the radio, television, and
dehydrated foods and drinks. Even the mechanisms suggested to make these things work
are very like the actual ones eventually employed.
Marshall McLuhan once called on us to notice that all machines are merely extensions of
the human nervous system, artifices which improve on natural apparatus, each a
utopianization of some physical function. Once you understand the trick, Utopian
prophecy isn't so impressive. Equally important, says McLuhan, the use of machinery
causes its natural flesh and blood counterpart to atrophy, hence the lifeless quality of the
Utopias. Machines dehumanize, according to McLuhan, wherever they are used and
however sensible their use appears. In a correctly conceived demonology, the Devil
would be perceived as a machine, I think. Yet the powerful, pervasive influence of
Utopian reform thinking on the design of modern states has brought Utopian
mechanization of all human functions into the councils of statecraft and into the
curriculum of state schooling.
An important part of the virulent, sustained attack launched against family life in the
United States, starting about 150 years ago, arose from the impulse to escape fleshly
reality. Interestingly enough, the overwhelming number of prominent social reformers
since Plato have been childless, usually childless men, in a dramatic illustration of
escape-discipline employed in a living tableau.
Producing Artificial Wants
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