| |
A
"WE THE PEOPLE"
interview with
Paolo Soleri
and
Jerry Brown |
|
The following transcript is of a two
day interview of Paolo Soleri broadcast on Jerry Brown's nationally
syndicated talkshow, "We the People." The program aired on
12/9/95 and 12/11/95. An open and closed parenthesis,(), indicates
a loss of information in the process of transcribing the interview.
DAY 1 : Part |
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 |
DAY 2 : Part |
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 | |
DAY 1 : PART 2
JB: We're back with
"We the People," I'm Jerry Brown. We're speaking with Paolo
Soleri. We're discussing the suburban home as ideal and perversion.
You mentioned two points, Paolo, I just want to repeat those
again. Would you say them again. The suburban home is a box
that declares two things: one for materialism and hedonism.
Did I say that wrong? I want you to phrase that again.
PS: Well, we were talking about the boxing
in our lives because of reason of sheltering, and I said,
depending on the choice in this boxing in, we are going to
our future or we might not have a future, and I picked up
on suburbia. I said that of all the ways of sheltering people
and societies, this suburban way is the most consuming, the
most demanding, the most wasteful, the most pollutant, and
the most segregational.
JB: We didn't even mention the point that
what this does to the spirit to be isolated and entertained
in that box called the suburban house.
PS: Yes, because the more we surround ourselves
with the gadgetry that we feel we need and some of those gadgetry
we really need, the more we do that the more we tend to generate
a condition that we said that the mental processes are not
very interesting, not very necessary, and what's more necessary
is to have fun and to have pleasure of playing with gadgetries
and dedicate ourselves to activities that are at the end not
very fulfilling.
JB: And then the less fulfilling they are
then the more hyperconsumption we have to engage in that cover
up the whole of our own emptiness.
PS: That's right. There is a socket there
that demands to be filled, and we are filling it with more
things which are enlarging the socket.
JB: What an incredible idea. The more we
fill up our own hole, the larger and deeper it gets.
PS: I'm afraid, yes. It's part of the increasing
expectation that it's built in ourselves evidently, biologically
almost. We feel in order to have security, in order to have
fulfillment, in order to have pleasure out of our experience,
we need to surround ourselves with more and more physical
elements, and naturally technology is a fantastic instrument
introducing those things. In fact, the know how it's very
much what we excel, especially in this country. We have a
tremendous ability to invent, to generate things and then
make them popular and create a market for them, and this is
very nice and important, but it's not at the real core of
what we might be here for.
JB: Yeah, it's almost like we've been cursed.
PS:
I tend to believe, yes.
JB: That someone has imposed a curse and
that the greatest skill is, I guess in some respects, it's
creating the need for the stuff that our second greatest skill
can produce, which by the reducing of intimacy and friendship
and spiritual reality, then forces us to even want more inhuman
needs and artificial needs, which then we create stuff, physical
elements to satisfy, and this just escalates and cascades
until...until what?
PS: That's really what the consequences are.
If a child is told from the moment he gets up from bed to
the moment when he gets into bed, let's say twenty hours a
day, he's told that the purchasing of an object is part of
it's own right and it's own happiness, that child is going
to be very faithful to his dogma. And so we end up by having
this almost this persecution notion that unless we partake
in the market cycle, we aren't good Americans. And the politician
tells us that, and the corporate person tells us that. Even
the theologian tells us that. Academia tells us that, so we
are really are in some kind of a fix. We are really leading
some kind of a utopian dream that its very, very dangerous.
JB: Yeah, that's very interesting. Even the
religions, because the religions will define distributive
justice or communitive justices as Thomas Aquinas talked about
it, but now it is being applied to a totally different world
where unless all these physical elements, these toys, these
gadgets, the stuff, isn't divided around more equally, that's
morally wrong. So the theologian will set out an imperative
for an equal distribution of stuff that's not needed, and
which when obtained, will destroy the whole basis for human
community and religion itself.
PS: Yeah, I mean if you will think for a
moment what a shopping center presents us, really try to penetrate
the superficial impressions, and then take an Indian or a
Chinese person for whom this incredible place of fantasy,
and we look at the department store and whatever is in part
of the shopping center, then we begin to wonder where are
we wandering with our minds.
JB: I remember when I was growing up, I was
born in 1938 and I was probably six or seven by the time I
went to a department store in downtown San Francisco, and
it was probably the only occasion for the first few years
was around Christmas time, and the top floor of this particular
department store, the Emporium, was just a toyland. It was
so exciting. I mean, I can't describe the rush that I had
in going there, but it was just available during Christmas.
That was like maybe 1946, or something. Now it's Christmas
everyday.
PS: Yeah, that's the beautiful or the exception
that it makes for this excitement, and now it's becoming almost
boring, so that the little child with the mother that cannot
afford even to make a living, which is human, the child goes
into the marketplace, into the department store, into the
shopping center, and he asks the mother to buy this, and this,
and this, and the mother has to say, yes, I will do my best
in order to satisfy you. If I cannot satisfy you, evidently
you're a second class citizen, evidently you're not worthy
of the American dream. So, your a bad mother and you better
go to work, and the more you work the less you are available
for your child, and the more he will then feel the need to
get you to buy him stuff which will require to have you work
even harder and be away from him even more, so that he will
even need more stuff. And everywhere you look you see almost
cycles of perverse incentives that feed on themselves. Yeah,
it's harsh talk, but I'm afraid it's real. Your saying what's
going on, and that's not only unfortunate, that's quite tragic
indeed.
JB: Now, you've seen this for a long, long
time, so you have been grappling with it, not just like yesterday,
but for the last, what, forty or fifty years?
PS: Don't make me that...thats super old.
JB: Your not super
old, but you started thinking about this when you were twenty.
How old are you?
PS: Oh, seventy-six.
JB: All right then, I'm not too far off.
PS: It doesn't take that much. If you think
a little what's going on, and now, as I was saying, we are
presented with this demographic explosion, and this demand
that we feel we have the right for what is going to be fulfillment,
then by necessity we are presented ourselves with a very limited
future, and a very critical one, and possibly a very bloody
one.
JB: Okay. We've been looking at the darkside
here. You've been looking at it a long time. What's the other
side? I mean, what's the vision of the city that doesn't fall
into this dark and deep and infinity abyss, but starts things
on a different basis? And because it was the human evolution,
the creation of the human mind can't be to fall into this
trap, there must be, I don't believe the universe is that
perverse. I don't think God would have put this kind of a
hex on us. We must be missing something.
PS: We wouldn't touch upon that for the moment.
Yes, there is a history that tells us that there are other
ways of fulfillment, and the history, I was saying, is practically
the history of communities which tend to be not just very
small, but tend to be very large, because through numbers
we are able to afford things that we are otherwise unable
to afford. At the same time the city or the town presents
an environment that by necessity is more frugal. Think again
to the houses. Instead of having a large house, I might have
a very small unit, and I cannot fill that unit with as many
things as I can fill the big house. So we have to see if we
can re-vamp our mindset in such a way as to recognize that
perhaps excellence and worthiness is not geared to the amount
of ownership that we can carry around.
JB: As you are speaking, I see in my eye
here my visit to Japan, and I visited in 1960 and also I visited
just a few years ago, and the Japanese room which was so small
and would often have since they would knell on the floor and
they would have a futon they can roll-up and use the same
room for sleeping, or the same room for eating, or reading,
or whatever, now we've taught them, in fact there are even
negotiations based on the premise that Japan is doing something
wrong. They're exporting stuff rather than creating domestic
demand in the form of furniture, and beds, and bigger houses,
and actually in discussions between the United States and
Japan the premise is made that the Japanese are hurting world
trade because they're not consuming enough domestically. So
what you've just described as a virtue has already been defined
as a central vice of the modern economic trading system.
PS: That seems to
me to indicate that the kind of utopian thinking that we are
carrying on, because again, the difference between the domesday
of pastime and the domesday that we tend to preach in the
present is that the presence of the planet now which is very
critically, clearly in terms of limitations. So, what in the
past could have been a pleasure in anticipating terrible things,
now it's a real menace because of this contest between a number
of people, the consumption that we are beginning to feel is
imperative, and the fact that the planet cannot deliver.
JB: Okay, so there's the misfit. The pattern
of consumption and the number of people.
PS: That's right, and the limitations of
the planet.
JB: And the limitation, the biology.
PS: Yeah. But then overlaying that is the
fact of values and the notion of what's the virtue of this
species we call the human species, and what might be the future
of this human phenomena. Which might in fact be far more telling
and far more profound than the fact that we tend to be materialistically
oriented, hedonistically happy, so on and on.
JB: Yeah, well obviously since the human
species can't go down the same road increasing numbers, increasing
consumption, the laws of biology say no at some point, then
there must be built into our structure...
PS: That's right.
JB: ...some other vision, some other outlet.
It can't be that what destroys us is what we need.
PS: Yeah, and I think this other agency is
interiorization, you know. To make reality into a more and
more an inner reality where such ideas are filtered by our
minds and it's made human and very, very fulfilling.
JB: Hold on just a moment, Paolo, we're going
to take a thirty second break. You are listening to "We the
People." I'm talking to Paolo Soleri. We'll be right back.
Next
DAY 1 : Part |
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 |
DAY 2 : Part |
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 | |
|
