March 26, 2001

Today I came across an essay by a gentleman named Paul Lutus:


How we confuse symbols and things.

It may be not irrelevant that I discovered this in the course of my
work day; I edit high school science textbooks for a living. In any event,
reading Mr. Lutus's essay reawakened in me my "radical" sense of education
and instinct for one's proper relationship to the world.

Mr. Lutus starts with a premise--that individuals in the modern world
have been trained to systematically confuse symbols with the things they
represent--and illustrates its consequences for commerce, marriage,
government, religion, science, and education. Mr. Lutus refers to this
"educational deficit" as "a kind of conceptual totalitarianism".

It's impossible for me to agree with Mr. Lutus in all particulars, and
especially in the implicit recommendations his argument would generate.
Frankly, it's hard for me to avoid a sort of knee-jerk liberal (in the
political sense) reaction when I detect a whiff of libertarianism in the
air, which I certainly do here. But his essay is so provocative, and his
arguments are so incisive and iconoclastic (at least with respect to my
current mindset), that I believe this essay could be read with profit by
anyone. And I am quite certain that Mr. Lutus would be gratified to read
that I cannot give my unqualified assent to his argument, as long as he
knows that he has reawakened in me a vein of thought that has lain more or
less dormant for years. After all, as Mr. Lutus writes in his conclusion,
"Wisdom can't be bought--it must be acquired through personal experience."
 






Read Paul Lutus's essay, "How we confuse symbols and things".

Visit with profit Paul Lutus's website arachnoid.com, 

Home of Arachnophilia, a powerful web site workshop

Which is CareWare, a most marvelous idea.