Thursday, December 2, 2010

everything is connected

everything is connected - a corny concept, perhaps somewhat discredited by blatant overuse by the new age crowd. Nevertheless, if you have an active mind, you can connect everything and anything with anything else.
So in short order, I have managed to connect the Russian Aleut accordion player with another Russian accordion player with coppicing with boat building with new age thought.
Anyway, the idea of connectedness was not invented by new age thinkers, it was simply revived by them. The central concept is animism, I think, that everything has spirit which is the substrate that connects all things. So there we go. Animism is still the major explanatory concept throughout most of the world, much more popular than materialism which is what drives industrial cultures.
I don't know if this is a valid connection, but it seems that where materialism is the intellectual substrate of industrialism, animism is the intellectual/spiritual substrate of pre and possibly post industrial societies.
So here is my proposal for the day: animism is the driving force of post-apocalyptic boat building.

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