Nov 17, 2022
Repairing Repair and Disrupting Despair
Just one of the super synergistic ingredients of The 7th Pie Peace
If you’re like me, you might be wondering if it should be called The 7th Pie Peace — or The 7th Pie Piece. If you’re even more like me, you might be a little annoyed in hearing that either work and are okay. Stu and Allie (shown above) claim both. They’re even considering “Peece”.
I don’t know though, because someone I kinda like kinda doesn’t like “Peece,” since the majority of the word is “pee”. Bonus info: one stupidly early morning I woke up and immediately thought about this and wondered if “pee” didn’t start out as a euphemism, initially (get it?!) for “piss,” which seemed like maybe an onomatopoeia for…going.
Apparently that’s the case! Peeing was originally pissing! Makes sense! Of course, in the last several years we’ve added effing to our biologically-based common lexicon. And in the last few years it’s only us tender and somehow cowardly souls that bother with the euphemism for either. I remember as a kid in the 70’s when exemplifying this “honesty” and “comfort” with language and “authentic and actual meanings” became a sort of badge of the latest enlightenment. So bold. So we were told.
But just like with The Enlightenment of old, things turn out to be a lot more complicated than the first sort of open-minded explorers imagined.
Sort of open-minded. So-called open-mindedness, like so-called enlightenment, and please don’t take this the wrong way, seems to be only unblindered on half the face. A truly open-minded explorer is open to complex interactions in language, emotions, recursive repercussions, personal relationships, etc., beyond the solely left or right field of vision. Know what I mean? (This is not about virtue or ethics.)
To put it another way, searching for something and exploring are not really the same thing. Okay, they can be, sort of, but there’s at least a subtle difference. Maybe we could say that searching is a more left-brain thing, narrowly purpose-driven, agenda-driven, whereas exploring is a more right-brain thing — open to information outside of a given purpose.
What the Hell Does This Have To Do With Pie Of Any Kind?
When I was a kid, using Hell instead of heck was pretty extreme. See how much I’ve grown? Okay, here’s the point, which will hopefully make some sense and not be too unpopular here. Based on the feed I get from Medium, it seems like this might be foolishly beyond the pale of postmodern orthodoxy, but I can explain why I’m out here — out here implying something, which is all most of our explorations give us if we’re even open to them.
A surprising amount of human existence, even mammalian existence, is about restraint of first or even later impulses. And the practice of restraint, like with anything, leads to deeper understanding of the practice of anything — and apart from inherited connotations, pro or con.
Ostensibly, since the 60’s or 70’s, the enlightenment has been about a narrow understanding of the word freedom and casting off restraint. (My reason for using ostensibly there would make this too long and go even further away from relevance to Pie and the nerdy cartoon characters up there.)
That is, as with the relatively simplistic relationships that were assumed (by some) to drive everything in the Enlightenment of old, we’ve learned that complexities, overlooked interactions, unanticipated synergistic effects, and more, pretty much make a mockery of simple cause-and-effect models of real life. This applies to almost everything under the sun, even under rocks and shells, and to us.
Oh, and that reminds of one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite bands. Ironically, it’s not my favorite video, it’s a little silly I think, and that’s okay, but anyway it’s the video I was thinking of as I was writing that last paragraph. You’ll probably see why at the very beginning and very end.
The lyrics go pretty well with all this too, even though most people would attach them to Left/Libertarian thought, and I’m not really advocating for that position (or any other I guess, since that’s really about governance, not that some won’t make expanded associations). Here’s that link, then I promise to end with a relevant closing paragraph that ties in everything more succinctly than I tend to.
Saint Simon by The Shins. Qualifiers: 1) Apathy is mentioned, but I think that’s mostly more of a linguistic and maybe emotional shell. 2) Songs like these tend to hint at a new sort of Rationalism, which is great, but the memes they use remind me of the “throw off the shackles” mentality of cynics, Gnostics, and Romanticists, whereas I think cognitive science is pointing us back to Socrates and Plato as the way to deal with biological/social complexity. 3) Again, if you’re like me, whether you like James Mercers’ style or not, you’ll be looking up Henri de Saint-Simon and others and are unlikely to return here. Happy travels. Thanks for reading up to this point.
Relevant Closing Paragraph
I haven’t run across any better explanation of the role that repair, literally, can play in our enjoyment of life, not to mention enhancement of our environment in multiple ways, than Matthew Crawford’s books, starting with Shop Class as Soul Craft back in 2010. But it’s not like everyone has to do it. Maybe everyone would benefit, idk, but there are plenty of societal and individual benefits for that fraction than does and can engage in it, full or part-time. I don’t mean this as an ethic nor just as an individual’s practice. It’s bigger than that, just like how regenerative ag and the food movement are/were bigger than individuals doing gardening and cooking.
Weirdly maybe, that’s the intellectual and emotional entry point to 7th Pie thinking, and that creates a new piece in the American Pie, at least new in the last hundred years, since the Stralfs stepped up their campaign, according to Bug Stu.
Thanks for reading.
Tim
