Thought Machines

As an appendix to J.M.Greer's recent translation of Giordano Bruno's De Umbris Idearum (1582), Greer included an essay of his own, 'Working Bruno's Magic', which for me was worth the price of the book in itself.

Greer has been involved in several translations to date of fairly obscure works, and for each he writes prefaces & appendices (sometimes fairly short) that always seem to include some key to unlocking the significance of the text that might otherwise elude the reader.

For me, so far for this translation, the part that's brought the most insight is Greer's discussion of the background to Bruno's thought, the currents in European intellectual life that were woven together in Bruno's system. (I think Greer describes himself as an historian of ideas, so this is right in his wheelhouse.)

De Umbris Idearum, or 'On the Shadows of the Ideas', was one of Bruno's first writings, which outlines some of the details of his memory system. In part, he draws from the practice of ars memorativa, the art of memory, a tradition which linked together a lot of mnemonic techniques, but most prominently the visualization of images associated with the content one wanted to remember, arranged in some sort of sequence, often imagined throughout a physical space like one's home or a familiar building.

The book contains many images of wheels of letters, sometimes two or more concentric layers of these wheels. I had seen these before, and though they are very pretty & mysterious to look at, it was hard to understand how they could be used practically in any kind of mental technique. Greer explains that the other field of practice that Bruno was drawing from was the ars combinatoria, the combinatorial art, stemming from the thought of the 13th Century Spanish mystic & philosopher, Ramon Llull.

Llull wrote over 200 works in several languages, and was extremely influential in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He experienced a series of visions that lead him to create a religious/philosophical system that became known as the Ars Magna, the Great Art. (They seemed to really enjoy creating various arts of in those times!)

I don't know much about it, but from what I understand, Llull's art involved setting out some basic aspects of The Divine (qualities like greatness, goodness, virtue, truth, wisdom, etc.), then assigning letters to represent these qualities and placing them on circle or wheel. Contemplating the combinations of these qualities with other principles was, I think, supposed to lead one to higher truths.

Again, I had trouble understanding how this system would be of much practical use. I thought maybe it was a sort of contemplative system, where the adherent would meditate on the bare concepts like 'goodness' or 'greatness' in sequence, with the visualization of the wheels maybe added to help sharpen the faculties & devotion of the mind. (I'm not sure if the art worked like this, I have a feeling it didn't, but that was my assumption.)

Greer points out that, over time, various people became intrigued with this idea of combining concepts, adapting the practice in various ways.  And somewhat surprisingly, one application the art has is extending the breadth and depth of ones thinking on any topic in a fairly straightforward way.

Instead of contemplating the idea of goodness, say, what if we ask the question, "What good is it? What good things does it bring or produce?"

Likewise, instead of the contemplation of greatness, what if the question was, "How great is this, what is its size?" (in any sort of dimension that it would make sense to ask about the topic at hand.)

So, Greer writes that any "set of suitably basic concepts, combined and analyzed using the methods like the one Lull used, gives rise to an effective framework for learning that one can be applied freely to any subject of study." (p.161)

Greer proposes a sample system of 22 concepts to get us started. He bases this one on the Tarot, which makes some sense to me, since the Tarot originated not as a divination system, but as the tarocchi cards of Renaissance Italy, a sort of pictoral game that illustrated aspects of the hermetic philosophy popular at the time, the same milieu from which Bruno emerged. (The artist Robert M. Place makes a powerful case for this - if anyone wants to dive down into that particular rabbit-hole of art history & forgotten philosophy, I would recommend the podcast interviews that have been done with Place.)

Liebniz's copy of the I Ching

Greer notes that the symbols of divination systems, like the I Ching or the the figures of Geomancy, would work well for creating combinatorial systems, as they tend to have well-defined set of figures to describe the various processes that we experience in our lives. (I remember that Confucius organized his philosophy of a well-ordered society around the figures of the I Ching. Interesting too that the German philosopher Gottfried Liebniz, who discovered calculus and laid down the groundwork for computer science & information theory, was very influenced by both the art of Ramon Llull and the I Ching.)

So, some of the letter/concept/questions from Greer's sample combinatorial system:

On the Shadows of the Ideas, 'Working Bruno's Magic", pg. 163

The idea would be to ask these questions in combination, from AA, to AB, AC... ZZ (which adds up to 484 combinations). So, lets say my topic was democracy, and I was on letter P, I would ask:

- PA: Does democracy have limits? 
(eg. Yes)

- PB: What are these limits?  
(eg. limitations on voting systems, uninformed electorate, unresponsive representatives, inefficient decision making...)

- PC: What is the context for these limits?
(eg. technology for polling/voting, the economic situation of the media, interests of power to prevent/influence democracy...)

- PD: What are the origin of these limits?
(it depends on how you had answered the previous questions, but for example, you could look into the origins of our ideas about democracy, maybe back to Athens or maybe to public relations-type thinkers of the 20th Century like Walter Lippmann, or maybe investigate the evolutionary psychology relating to group dynamics in social primates...)

What interested me was the mechanics of the system. I have no doubt that, with a little practice, the mind would have no trouble circling through these questions, without any external aid. Experimenting with various art of memory techniques, I've found that once you've become familiar with the system (which can seem a little cumbersome at first), before you know it, with only a little practice, you can right away perform a mental operation that would've been very difficult before learning the system. Learning the 22 concept/questions took me probably a few hours altogether, writing them out a few times & testing my recall. Now the 484 questions are fairly easy to generate, though they would've been quite difficult to remember if I'd tried to remember them in sequence without a technique.

In an interview, Scott Gosnell, another recent translator of Bruno's works, mentioned that Bruno and Llull were fixated on circles because of their symbolism (connoting, perhaps, wholeness, infinity, the sun, etc.), whereas a modern person would probably lay these in a grid, A - Z on the horizontal and vertical axes, and filling out all the answers in the columns/rows.

That could well be true, but trying the system out, I think I found a more practical reason for rotating wheels. It would be very hard to visualize full, complete sets of spinning lettered wheels (like the ones in the images above), but there is really no need to do that. In your mind all you need to picture is the letter you're working on, with the letters the you're combining it with moving on top of it, all dialing along in alphabetical order. Which, if you don't have paper or a computer on hand, or if you're sitting on a park bench or lying in bed, is much easier to bring to mind's eye than a 400+ box table.

Greer's description of the results of becoming versed in using combinatorial systems:

Experienced practitioners [...] don't have to plod step by step through such a listing of concepts and questions. When they encounter a set of ideas or engage in debate, they can speed through the familiar relationships and spot at a glance the concepts that haven't been taken into account and the questions that haven't been asked. When they work out their own arguments or ideas, they can look at each point from a galaxy of different perspectives that might never come to mind without the help of the combinatorial system and the mental training it provides. Like the Lullian adepts of the Renaissance, they supplemented the natural capacities of their minds with the systematic practices of the combinatorial art. This, in turn, the art of memory seeks to do with the natural capacities of the human memory. 

De Umbris Idearum, 'Working Bruno's Magic', p. 164

Beyond the mechanics of the system though, I really appreciate these concept/questions. They explode the dichotomy of for/against thinking, as the wheel prompts considerations of context, cooperative and oppositional forces, size, limits, duration, closure, assessment, and the combinations of all these.

The concept/questions seem to incline the thinker towards things that our culture tends to avoid in thought, things like limits (of both the things we like and the things we fear), context, subordination to larger factors & fields of interaction. I wonder too if these questions, emphasizing context and connections, might lead one towards a systems thinking type approach to the topics at hand?

They also tend to cool the passions. Once you've moved through these 'galaxies' of perspectives, its almost hard to remember the passionate for/against feelings you had for a thing at the outset. Not that emotions leave the process entirely, but instead of strong, polarized storms, for me they become more subtle moods hovering around various aspects of the topic.

I do have some doubts about these utility of these systems though. Trying out Greer's sample system, it is a huge number of questions to ask about a topic, which may be alright if you are intending a deep-dive into a subject, but less so if you don't have the time or interest level to sustain that for everything you want to think about. Also, the questions seem to become very strange after awhile, asking you things like, "To what is the uncertainty/confusion of X? What is the uncertainty around X aimed towards?" Not that I couldn't come up with some sort of answer to that, but I'm just not certain that is a great use of one's time spent thinking.

These doubts could be due to me being a beginner at these systems, sometimes the use of things like these only unfolds & becomes clear once you've become really familiar with the basic components. Also, Greer proposed this as a sample system; perhaps practitioners could come up with some some smaller sets of concept/questions systems? I'm thinking around 5 - 7 concepts for a total of 25 - 49 combinatorial questions generated?

For now, for the purposes of self-experimentation, I think it would be a good idea to at least ask the 22 basic questions of various topics, i.e. just one wheel of letters, without necessarily combining them. That way I could broaden my thought at least a little, and become very familiar with applying these concepts, and if the combinatorial system did appear to be a useful endeavor, it would be easy to do that being familiar with using the basic set of concepts.

* * * * *

A while back, Greer mentioned on his blog a thought exercise that was a part of the early 20th C. training program of the Druid organization of which he'd taken on the leadership for a term. The idea was to find in the daily newspaper nine examples of binaries, where people had generally taken on two opposing views, and then try to come up with a third perspective that would be outside that opposition, creating a ternary.

The newspaper exercise reminded me right away of a thinking exercise from the author & psychologist Edward de Bono, that he called the PMI. Short for "plus, minus, interesting," it is a very simple procedure: for a given proposal, one spends a minute each thinking about positives, negatives, and then what is interesting about the idea, what one would be interested to see if it was adopted & put into practice. It has a very similar structure to Greer's exercise: become familiar with a binary, then move off in directions not held within the polarity between those two.

I was again reminded of de Bono's books (which I hadn't thought of in long time) trying out the combinatorial systems. The system that de Bono is probably best known for is the 'Six Thinking Hats'. In short, the six coloured hats are cues for a person or group to think about a topic in a series of specific ways, one at a time:

• White: information, data, facts
• Red: emotion, feelings, intuitions
• Yellow: positives, benefits
• Black: negatives, costs, dangers
• Green: creative alternatives, interesting aspects
• Blue: an overview & review of the thinking process

It is a much simpler exercise than the combinatorial wheels, but it struck me as similar: both break down the thinking process into a set of discrete, distinct aspects, and our attention is directed to a specific focus area of focus in sequence. One might think this would limit creativity, but in some ways increases it, as you are enabled to let your mind generate thought around many more specific points than if you were to think in a free-form manner about the topic all at once (not that this replaces daydream-style sessions of thought.) But focal points concentrate power: as Archimedes said, "Give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."

I'll save discussion of de Bono for a future post, I just wanted to make the connection here, which got me to wonder: are there structured methods that can aid, extend, and balance our natural abilities for thinking, similar to how the art of memory relates to our abilities of recollection? And could these scattered techniques be brought together and connected somewhat, could they function together as a cohesive toolkit?

* * * * *

I think we (in North America) are living within a fading empire, and that this is bound to cause our thought process to go awry. I think we can sense the slow erosion of the economic base that we had habitually relied on, but the world being so complex and so replete with vested interests, we can't really come to any conscious consensus on why this is happening. And so we feel these changes as a vague pressure, within our society and on our lives. This pressure can trigger our emotions, and that can distort our perceptions and thought, especially within groups.

In uncertain times, independent thought becomes even more essential, to guide one's way through a shifting environment, and to avoid being swept up in faulty narratives that cycle through popular culture.  And not only that, but in generating ideas for adapting to the predicaments we face, and in sifting through the proposals that arise, the more individuals using their own unique perspective & capacities to think through our situation, the better. I'm also interested in anything that a person can do, can take up as a practice and integrate into their lives, that help shore up our own capacities and lessen our dependence on institutions external to ourselves.

* * * * *

Continuing this series on memory and thinking, some areas I'd like look into:

• Logic & the study of argument: I think this can be over-emphasized, as if 'critical thinking' was the whole of our ability to think. As Edward de Bono pointed out, breaks are necessary to a functioning vehicle, but of course not sufficient. That said, the ability to articulate an argument, to isolate the premises and how they fit together, is important, as is the ability to identify the basic logical fallacies (maybe a good way to do this is to practice coming up with examples. 
  
  • David Fleming's Lean Logic: A Dictionary of the Future and How To Survive It, includes entries on many argument fallacies, including many that are not strictly logic-based, but more bad-faith tricks that we use to cloud the thought of others and ourselves. Outlined in: How to Cheat in an Argument (or ,even better, how to catch yourself doing it)
    
  • Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly seems to explore many psychological distortions that affect thinking.

• Edward de Bono's thinking techniques: in particular his book Teach Yourself to Think, which he lays out a method that includes many of his earlier techniques, including the Six Thinking Hats, the 'CoRT' techniques (like the PMI, APC, etc.) as well as his books like Mechanism of Mind that lays out the theories behind the techniques he created.
  
• Discursive Meditation: Greer often emphasizes that this form of meditation was once quite common in Western culture (and I do know of examples of it in Eastern techniques as well), that involves meditating on a theme, and developing it in meditation along slow, clear steps of thought, bringing many of the benefits of meditation along with improving one's ability to think. Greer's least esoteric explanation of this method is in his The Mystery Teachings of the Living Earth.
  
  
  
  

The Art of Memory and the Conservation of Culture

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An interesting aspect of the idea of an "ecotechnic renaissance", as it's presented by Greer, is that he avoids believing in either continual technological progress as a solution to our civilization's problems, or in the need for a complete regression to some past stage of material existence.

Industrialism may have brought us into a period of diminishing returns, where accessing nature's resources is becoming increasingly difficult, where topsoils are becoming depleted, and where the byproducts of our activities, especially carbon we've released into the atmosphere, are set to affect our environment in ways that make our lives increasingly difficult. At the same time, we have learned a lot in the past few centuries, through the industrial and scientific revolutions. Who knows what could emerge if the principles discovered through the industrial age could be re-purposed, and applied to our livelihoods in sustainable and regenerative ways? 

Augustin Mouchot’s Solar Concentrator, Paris, 1878.

Is innovation, however, the only way forward? We have also forgotten a lot. There is so much to be learned from traditional cultures, who I'm sure nearly always operated with a subtle wisdom that can be hard to apprehend from the heights of consumer culture. Our history also contains many innovative avenues that were opened, but were abandoned as inexpensive fossil fuels crowded out technologies that relied on other energy sources. Greer often mentions the array of solar-thermal devices from the late 19^th century, esp. in France, that couldn't quite compete against the combustion of coal and petroleum products. Or windjammers: a type of modern, large sail cargo ships that were popular at the (previous) turn of the century, which could carry large amounts of bulk cargo long distances entirely by windpower. They competed economically all through the era of coal-powered steam, but, again, were edged out by diesel-powered freight ships. (I would like to work carefully through his book The Retro Future: Looking to the Past to Reinvent the Future in this blog, which is replete with examples like these two.)
 

A windjammer in Gustaf Erikson's fleet

Slide Rule

Another interesting point Greer makes in The Retro Future and elsewhere is  that the technologies & practices that could comprise an ecotechnic culture are not solely physical devices, that mental skills have a role to play in the toolkit of appropriate technology + culture. As something of a hybrid of a mental skill aided by a simple physical device, Greer often uses the example of the slide-rule, which can be made from wood or metal fairly easily, that allows for rapid, complex computations, without needing computers or electricity. Along those lines, I think that the practice of the Chinese/Japanese abacus, the suan pan/soroban, might be an ecotechnic hobby for interested people to keep alive in various communities (though the complexity of the mathematics would be less than the slide rule, I still think it would be a good intellectual exercise, promoting the use of these elegant designs.)

A collection of Japanese soroban.

It also wouldn't be a bad idea for a few local woodworkers to be able to build slide-rules and abacuses. Not that I think that these are going to be vitally important to us any time soon, (though there is always the remote-but-real possibility of an intense solar flare, like the Carrington Event of 1859, or an EMP attack, that could disrupt or destroy our electronics and electrical systems.) If, however, somewhere things like these devices are to be vital to a civilization in decline, someone has to carry the knowledge of them through the period in which they are generally irrelevant.

A great way to accomplish that is for local craftspeople to make things like these as beautiful (and functional) novelties. Patrons can buy pieces like these to support local economies and help foster the development of these types of skills in people near-by. And, when that craftsperson knows how to make these well and has built up a slow market for them, if they can find at least one other to pass the skill onto, we could develop the teacher-apprentice lineages that can help weather hard times.

Another example that combines conceptual tools and practical mental skills is double-entry bookkeeping. I'm not sure how true this is, but Greer (whose wife is a bookkeeper) asserts that, with the dominance of computer accounting programs, is becoming a rare traditional skill among accountants. My ignorance of this is near total, but I found an old textbook on pre-computer accounting and added it to my bookshelf, just in case.

To me, however, the most interesting mental skill Greer regularly encourages is the art of memory. This practice has gotten a lot of press in recent years, through Tony Buzan's books and memory competitions, the multitude of youtube videos that teach the basic techniques, and Joshua Foer's bestselling book, Moonwalking with Einstein. The Art of Memory can refer to a range of memory techniques, but in general it refers to the practice of creating mental images to associate with things you'd like to remember, and then organizing them throughout a familiar physical space, like the rooms of your house or workplace, or any other familiar building or outdoors route that you'd take on foot.

So, for an example, let's say you were working to memorize the anatomy of the ear, and we'll take the terms malleus, incus, stapes, and cochlea.

Malleus: you might imagine, in your front foyer, some workers banging with mallets on anvils. To flesh out the image, I might make the mallet some type of metal I liked, maybe brass or cast iron, imagine its weight & feel, and while we're at it, why not imagine this strange mallet in the shape of the malleus bone? I would imagine the sound it would make, and maybe make up a little reason why these people happened to be using mallets in this area.





 
 
Incus: in, say, an office area to the right, I would pick something that reminded me of this word. If I knew something about the Incas I might use art from their civilization as decor in the room, or maybe imagine a giant vial of dark black ink (again, why not a large glass vial in the shape of the incus bone?) Maybe some figure is writing with it using a fancy quill, or maybe the vial is cracked and ink is dripping into the white carpet.

Stapes: moving past the office to a kitchen, I might imagine something being stapled with very large staples, or maybe garlic scapes growing up through cracks in the tiled floor, and maybe someone hammering wooden stakes down through that nice kitchen floor, hearing the cracks of that expensive floor being damaged. Those three words, for me, would help me triangulate that third word I was trying to recall. 

 

Cochlea: and moving through the kitchen into the dining room, an obvious image is a shell, maybe I would visualize someone riding on a back of a snail, absurdly slow, maybe seated in a lotus posture and blowing a conch shell, keeping focused on the spiral shape of the anatomical structure. To ensure recall, you could include a pun, the snail rider could be holding a bottle of Coke in their other hand, and it could be a famous “Lea” (let's pick Lea Thompson), so that we have Coke+Lea = cochlea. And maybe the mallet-eers in the foyer were keeping time for this conch-shell trumpet...

And so on... it seems like a lot of work, and it is, but like anything else it becomes easier and faster as you practice, and as you become familiar with the kind of images & associations that work well with your memory, the possibilities for the technique open up. I've definitely not mastered the practice myself (though I think maybe I've moved from novice into intermediate stages) but I can see for myself this practice can keep a lot of information very easily in your memory for quite a long time. I've found the difficulty with it is not really recall, so much as deciding exactly what it is you want to memorize and putting in the work to collect up some memory journeys and create the mnemonic images you want to use.

I  also don't think that this technique is for everyone, I could see it irritating many people as an unnecessary step in learning. It's obviously not the only method of memory improvement: simple, straightforward memorization of information, through organization, repetition, and understand might be the better path for many. I also think there is a lot to be said for the traditional practice of memorizing poetry and scripture. Likewise, there is a place for memory exercises that do not include encoding systems and visual reminders, such as a daily recollection of the day's events, which I also think would be good for practitioners of the art of memory to include. There are other exercises as well, which I'd like to come back to in this series of posts.

But, for the kind of person who is intrigued by puzzles, projects, codes, cryptic/emblematic art, or even just imagery & daydreaming, it can be a way to harness that sort of an inclination to a powerful system of learning and knowledge. It provides a clear method for learning: instead of wondering, “How am I going to get all this information to stick?”, you can start straight-away organizing & editing down the points you want to remember, picking a space for a memory journey route, and coming up with images for associating to the content at hand. And, instead of the information fading as soon as the exam is done, you can set up a schedule of recall (even going through your journey once a month/a few times a year,) and keep the information in your mind indefinitely, should you want to.

How, though, does this have any relevance to an ecotechnic society? It doesn't seem nearly as an important thing to spend time on as, say, gardening, canning, fermenting, setting up a compost bin, improving the insulation in your house. To be honest, it probably isn't as important as any of these, and is never going to as popular as any of these either, and rightly so.

In his book The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, Greer introduces the concept of prosthetic culture. A prosthetic device, say a wooden leg, eyeglasses, or a hearing aid, are very useful when a person has lost entirely or in part some normal function of the human body. But in a consumerist, industrial society, a lot of what were normal capacities throughout history come to be replaced with technologies and consumer technologies (as well as a lot of social relations). Instead of getting our exercise from walking long distances, planes, trains and automobiles get us from A to B. Microwave meals and take-out food edge out home cooked meals, while pop music and Netflix supplant folk music traditions on simple instruments and storytelling, in general our abilities to entertain ourselves.

I'm not sure how far I would take this concept. Greer himself notes that there is a fine line between a tool and a unnecessary prosthesis, and of course it could be argued that these technologies, even where they supplant our capacities & skills, save us a lot of time, and allow us to have experiences we otherwise would not have had: maybe one does not get St. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club and Thriller from traditional folk music, or Mad Men & Breaking Bad from campfire stories. And of course there are tons of people engaging in home cooking, knitting clothes and making quilts, learning musical instruments and exercising their physical capacities. 

 

I think the point stands though, our consumer culture has disrupted a lot of our traditional capacities and skills, and has often replaced them with time-consuming distractions. Many of the technologies that enable this require a lot of energy and dwindling resources to produce, and result in a lot of pollution by the end of their short lifespans. As the conditions that support these begin to fade, it could be helpful to have in our communities people who have taken on themselves development of their innate capacities. If nothing else, it tends to build the kind of resourceful, nimble, wise minds that can deal with the challenges of industrial descent.

I have a feeling though that the art of memory leads us into something much deeper, relating to how cultures continue to exist over time. In much of the past, in so many various ways, cultures had to be economical regarding what they valued, preserved and passed on. There was no option for creating, storing & transmitting a universe of articles, books, postings, and oral presentations to record our experiences and expressions. Cultures, through the elders that understood them and worked to preserve them, had to be promulgated down through the generations using the simplest methods, with myth, stories, ritual and art preserving as much practical knowledge, spiritual tradition, and cultural cohesion as they could be used to contain.

In her fascinating recent book, The Memory Code, Australian science writer Lynne Kelly makes this connection between the techniques of the art of memory and they methods by which oral cultures preserve and pass on knowledge to future generation. She came to the topic by way of studying the natural history of Australia, particularly crocodiles. In her research, coming across the very detailed and accurate information about different species and their behaviours possessed by the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, she wondered, how is it that this knowledge is maintained and preserved? Within literate societies, we often have the vague supposition that, in the absence of the written word to store information, that knowledge transmission is just a matter of personal experience, being passed along around the campfire or through the course of the day, from parents & grandparents to the young, by word of mouth.

It became clear to Kelly, though, that the size and specificity of these oral knowledge systems required a system much beyond casual conversation between individuals. I would like go through this book carefully, there is a wealth of detail here to learn from, but in general she found, in both the present day cultures she studied and also in the history of Neolithic peoples, that there was a  systematic encoding of information related to survival and culture. The knowledge was often protected, and granted only after initiation ceremony. It was embedded in myth, associated with specific places in the landscape, connected to ritual, dance, drama and art. It encompassed things like the histories and stories of that people, their treaties & relations to other peoples, navigation routes, techniques and timings for hunting, gathering, the use of plants, and horticulture. It included information passed down for events that may never have occurred in the memory of any living person in that culture, such unusual foods to eat in the event of an extreme drought.

Lukasa memory boards used by the Luba of The Democratic Republic of Congo.

For me, Kelly has brought something to the literature of the art of memory that I haven't seen before, outside the allusions in Greer's work, about the connection of memory systems to how cultures can be learned & absorbed by an individual, and to how cultures can centred around the survival of a people, and to maintenance of a society that's worth living within. It's a difficult point to get at, but considering our current moment in history, we rely heavily on external sources like the internet to store information, and many have raised concerns about the precarious state of electronic data over the long run (see Richard Heinberg's article, Our Evanescent Culture and the Awesome Duty of Librarians). The figure of an initiated member of an oral culture, carrying within themselves vast amounts of organized information related to survival and to their culture, integrated within their daily lives and their worldview, seems like something important to contemplate as we head into industrial decline.

Cicero wrote on memory training and was
known for his mastery of the art

I'm interested in tracing how memory systems have been used in literate cultures as well. It's common to follow the art of memory back to classical Greece and Rome, where it was used primarily by orators to plan and memorize long speeches, and I think there are lessons here related to the place of reason and rhetoric in political culture. (When the classical methods of learning were codified into the seven liberal arts – the three ways of the trivium, grammar, logic and rhetoric, plus the four ways of the quadrivium, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy -- the art of memory often had its place as an aspect of rhetoric.) 

 

Nalanda Monastery

I've also heard (I think) examples of “memory palaces” being employed at the height of Buddhist culture in India, as a method organizing the wide range of arts and sciences that were developed at the Nalanda monastery (an ancient site of cosmopolitan learning that, to me, parallels in many ways the Library of Alexandria in Egypt,) possibly playing a role in the preservation of Buddhist culture during times of foreign invasions of India.

Mary Carruthers has two interesting books on the role of memory training in medieval cultures that I would like to unpack, (her description of St. Thomas Aquinas' use of memory techniques is really  fascinating). I would like to look at the methods of itinerant renaissance scholars, who I think used the art to store up information when access to valuable books was often rare and brief.

I've been collecting books and information about memory training for around twenty years now, and have practiced it here and there over that time. It's only in the last few years that I've gotten it to work more usefully, mostly due to learning a system to memorize numbers accurately. Over a series of posts on this topic, I'd like to share some of these findings, and what I've found works well for me in daily life. There is a lot of teaching out there related to competing in memory competitions, but I'm interested to see if memory training could be made to be a skill useful for ordinary, practical endeavors, especially in helping learn new skills and fields of knowledge. More on this to come.

*  *  *  *  *

I thought that a post in a series on memory training might be a good place to start this blog, leaning a little more towards the software of a society than the hardware. I am interested in technologies that can provide for our basic needs: water, food, shelter, heat, etc., and I hope to write posts about these sorts of topics. I'm also interested as well, though, in cultural aspects of resilience.

What sort of a culture is well adapted to surviving a time of decline?  What sort of values incline us towards conserving worthwhile aspects of the cultures we've inherited, and to avoid as much as possible damaging the ecosystems we live in, to preserve a space for the generations (of humans and other species) to come as close as thriving in as is possible for now?

I have a sense that, supposing we arrived at solutions to all our physical problems with various technologies (e.g. solar technologies, smart grids, carbon taxes, etc.), if we don't at the same time make deep changes to our economic systems and our culture as a whole, we will only be delaying the moment of reckoning. Physical infrastructure is vitally important, but it can't exempt us from arranging intelligent economic reforms. And a sensible economic order can't take the place of a healthy culture, in all its social, artistic, and social dimensions.

David Fleming, the late author of Lean Logic: A Dictionary of the Future and How to Survive It, as well as a founding member of the UK Green Party, and a source inspiration for the Transition Towns movement, (along with David Holmgren and Richard Heinberg), being asked what one could do to help make communities more resilient and prepared for peak oil, once said, (after a long pause)...

"Join the choir."