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A
"WE THE PEOPLE"
interview with
Paolo Soleri
and
Jerry Brown |
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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 |
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2 | 3 |
4 |
DAY 2 : Part |
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2 | 3 |
4 | |
DAY 2 : Part 2
JB:Your back with
"We the People." I'm Jerry Brown and talking to Paolo Soleri,
an architect, a creator, a designer, an inventor, poetic.
We're talking about the omega seed, the stages of determinism,
opportunism, probablism, and love. Incredible. Incredible,
that is super incredible, if that the direction that we are
tending toward. Obviously it's a choice, because there is
a lot of non-love or hate in the world.
PS: Matter, the cosmos is pretty large, so
we are infinitesimally small, so the mind door is very powerful,
it's still a very exaltic kind of phenomenon.
JB: Do you have any sense of other minds
being somewhere else in the universe, or is that really beyond
your thinking?
PS: Number one, I'm very ignorant. Number
two, science itself has made a decision about that. There
is a big question mark.
JB: Has not been able to make a decision.
PS: Yeah, has not been able...
JB: Just leave it up in the air. All right,
so now you take this force of love, now we apply that to the
city of future, and because there is something very practical
about this. We're in a context that is certainly not driven
by love or frugality...
PS: That's right.
JB: ...or elegance or miniaturization or
even mind, it's more mindlessness, materialistic, hyperconsumerism
consumption. So now I want to focus this force of love on
the creation of the city of the future.
PS: Okay, we have to be equitable with us
and realize among the horrendous things we have been doing
for, say, a million years, we also did something very grand
and beautiful. So we have been moving from a () into something
which is of a higher order, but still we are prisoners of
this very strong drive the ego, so how we go about the matching
our ego, the demand, to the demand of compassion. So that's
the battle that has been going on for quite some time, and
sometimes it seems we are winning, and sometimes it seems
we are losing. I think we are on some kind of a losing streak.
So, we should pause, try to recapitulate our history and then
find out what's the possible steps that might make this life
more coherent, and more loving and compassionate.
JB: So the city has to be a school of compassion.
PS: The city is the largest physical entity
that we, as humans, need, I mean shelter, habitat. That's
not only very, very large in dimension, it's also very demanding
in resources, and naturally it's always a question of how
logistically we can have this habitat so that you can move
around, we can reach people physically, and we can combine
our energy to develop what we call a civilization. And that's
where the compactness, which miniaturization ultimately becomes
again very, very essential. And we are in a phase now where
miniaturization is all over the place, including the computer
field. The computer is battling to get to a point where the
microchip becomes invisible, non-existent. The only information
it can deliver is interesting to us, not the container. That
means miniaturization is essential for the computer's technology
to go beyond the limits in which it is now. And the city is
part of this phenomenon of gathering things, getting them
closer together so you generate more and more complexity,
and by generating more and more complexity naturally you're
to miniaturize the system. This is a physical law, we can
only say that.
JB: So, the more
complexity, the more miniaturization.
PS: Yes.
JB: And when you put human beings into that,
you have to have the more compassion, more love.
PS: That should be almost extruded by this
combination.
JB: So you think that love and friendship
will show up out of the miniaturization. Some people might
see it as an ant hill, but your compacting everybody into
this highly dense urban space, and they say, wait a minute,
I've got to have some elbow room here.
PS: Yes, we need to have a () historically
also, which means that we cannot go from zero to a hundred
in one short week. We start from zero, one, two, three, and
so on, so that means that a million years from now we will
not exist as we are now. Hopefully the mind going to think
this, and maybe () will contain the mind, but it might be
very different than what we are now, so we should start now
to realize the importance of cutting into the gigantic system
that we have been building. And suburbia is the most gigantic,
Los Angeles, about 2000 miles, or something like that. That's
a gigantic vulture, really gigantic and it's too big to be
able to work. And why is it too big? Because it's so spread
out, so tenuously inhabited that communication becomes very
difficult, transportation becomes almost horrendously impossible,
and we are getting ourselves into a condition where more and
more we need to surround ourselves with what consumers are
going to give us and slowly we are suffocating within it,
and at the same time we are destroying the environment.
JB: So you have the sprawl and the spread
out, and that then links into the hyperconsumer, the buying,
the collecting, the waste, and it also then facilitates the
inequality, the gross gaps in material accumulation between
one human being and another.
PS: Yeah, and we seem to be forgetting that
the greatness of the human spirit is interiorization. I mean,
what we are able to generate within ourselves, which is the
working of the mind, and that goes from any kind of inventiveness,
any kind of activity, any kind of dueling and making. With
that fundamental notion in mind that the more we build up
within ourselves, the more we are becoming a great expression
of the mind and of life.
JB: Do you think we can build on that interiorization?
I mean, Plato certainly had a powerful interior life, his
mind, we can read the products of that mind, and here we are
twenty-five hundred years later, we've got a lot of minds,
5.7 billions of them, if you can use the word mind in that
way, and are we standing on his shoulders or are we still
having to climb up and even approach where he's at.
PS: Well, this kind of evolution into different
reality is very, very difficult, so we should keep in mind
that any kind of exercise that we are developing into, this
groping into more complexity is a very slow process and very
demanding, and sometimes it alters and also fails. So we should
be again a little more generous with ourselves even though
the history of the human species is quite violent, we have
to recognize also the beauty and the astonishing things that
are coming out from the mind. So, a mixture of humility, and
the joy of being alive and doing things should be the right
mixture. () to kill them.
JB: So you are really
looking at materialism as a major obstacle. Certainly thee
major obstacle standing in the way of greater interiorization...
PS: Huh, huh.
JB: ...and the city then has to promote this
non-material way of being.
PS: And why, because if the bulk of what
we do is directed in the wrong direction, it's going to be
very difficult to do very much with it, but the wrong thing.
My newest slogan that says, that we tend to do wrong things
better and better. Naturally, the best example is the gun.
The gun was a pipe, then you shoot some lead through the pipe,
and that was already a very questionable kind of instrument.
Now we have the super gun, and so we made of this primitive
instrument better and better design and object, and now we
are here 250 million guns or 250 Americans, the most grievous
arming of a population against itself, and that's doing better
and better the wrong thing. Suburbia is the same. We started
with the suburban device which was pretty grim at the end
of the Second World War in Levettown.
JB: Levettown began it all. People were very
happy to move into Levettown.
PS: But then we glamorized Levettown, and
Frank Lloyd Wright unfortunately was part of it the big city.
JB: I guess...go ahead.
PS: We glamorize the Levettown and now we
are stuck with this monster that is devouring so much of us
and over the planet.
JB: Well this power of glamorizing Levettown,
it seems to be just an extension of this glamour, I don't
know, this last five hundred years of Western expansion, and
today it's going on in the jungles...
PS: That's right.
JB: ...of Ecuador and New Guinea, all over
the place, where people who've lived a certain way for thousands
of years...
PS: That's right.
JB: ...are, when they see the magic of the
gadget.
PS: Yeah, it's the magic.
JB: That magic is
so powerful that they jump at it and they give up the structure
of their traditional ways, and then they go insane. At least
most of them and resort to alcohol and some kind of very passive,
non-active, non-vibrant kind of way, and then we think they're
somehow indolent or deficient because their world view has
been destroyed because of the power of our own magic.
PS: Yeah, and they become receivers instead
of being generators. Civilizations has to generate within.
JB: In some ways we're like the natives in
the face of our own magic that's being generated around us.
PS: Yes, at the same time I think we should
appreciate the value of the magic because it is an incredible
faculty that we have homophaber, between the hand and the
brain, we are...
JB: Homophaber in Latin means the builder,
the man as builder.
PS: The maker, yes.
JB: The maker.
PS: And that's a faculty that is only...unique
to the human.
JB: For some reason we don't make the right
stuff most of the time.
PS:That's right, and that's because of the
magic, because to work out things, to solve little problems
it's a wonderful way of spending your time, but fortunately
when the technology becomes such to be able to reproduce endlessly,
we end up with the shopping planter which is inedible, phenomenon
of mindlessness in many ways.
JB: All right, now if we are going to move
back this shopping center, we're going to have to have some
models here, some examples, some places. Now, what...describe
for me some examples, some steps away back from this suburban
nightmare.
PS: Number one, if we are...if you believe
in the notion of the family of man, we should always try to
do things that might become available to all man. Now, evidently,
if we go into the shopping center syndrome, or for ten millions
of people, we are selfish storing. So on a certain point we
should look at the shopping center and say, do we need fifty
thousand kinds of things, or could we do very well with five
thousand, or...
JB: Probably the average store, the average
grocery store, medium size, has about twenty thousand separate
units available for purchase.
PS: Yeah, and can you imagine taking a Indian
from an Indian village and putting this person in the middle
of the grocery store, and there is no way that this person
can remain sane. It's an incredible experience, so the magic
is really magical. The thing is to see what's black magic
and what's good magic, and that's a subject we haven't been
getting into as yet, and it's very, very difficult to be able
to guide ourselves and remain in a way sane.
JB: Well, what your saying is that we've
had greed all this time, but now we have the planet as a player
and saying that the greed when combined with modern technology
and the increased population...
PS: That's right.
JB: ...is going to destroy the whole human
species. So, now we've got an extra reason to get off it.
PS: Yeah, we don't have any longer future
that you can say, well, it doesn't happen on this generation,
it can happen next time.
JB: Next time.
PS: No, that's no longer true.
JB: Hold on there, Paolo, we'll be right
back. You're listening to "We the People."
Next
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DAY 2 : Part |
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