“For these people, the concrete has become an asylum, a hideout, salvation. Cedar- well, that’s something concrete; so is asphalt. You can speak out about the concrete and express yourself as freely as you like. The great thing about the concrete is that it has restricted armed frontiers with warning bells. When a mind immersed in the concrete begins to approach that border, the bells warn that the field of treacherous general ideas, undesirable ideas, and synthesis lies beyond. At the sound of this signal, the cautious mind recoils and dives back into concrete. We can see the whole process in the face of our interlocutor. He might go along, chirping, quoting numbers, percentages, names, and dates. We can see how firmly he is anchored in the concrete, like a rider in the saddle. Then we ask: ‘That’s all well and good, but why are people, in some way, shall we say, imperfectly satisfied?’ At this point, we can see how his face changes. The alarm bells have gone off: Attention! You are about to cross the border of the concrete! He looks desperately for a way out—which is, of course, to retreat into the concrete”.
This quote made my day. It is beautiful, And you thought it was about some self-important pragmatist in the Digital Humanities. Apart from that, I am sorry to tell you you are wrong. It is about that nice bloke, the Shah of Iran, and the intellectual landscape (if you can call it that) under his dictatorship. It is from Ryszard Kapuscinski’s excellent book ‘Shah of Shahs’.
I always thought that English practicality was hiding something underneath. I still don’t get it. I struggle with it; it seems more extreme here than anywhere else. I suppose all class-based societies, including mine, need their practical mythologies. Practicality is just an ideology, like any other. It is the people censoring themselves against imagining anything better.
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