Rick, you ask me a question that is often asked on e-mail, in the
classroom, and in the community, when I remain interested in
discussing issues I think others raise and they tell me over and over
they don't see the point.
I think there is a gap between how I see PCT and how you do. Whenever
any outsider questions the limits of a paradigm, I don't expect
insiders to be eager to spend time discussing the matter. There is,
after all, too much to be done within the paradigm, isn't there?
It is probably true that if y'all stop writing back to me I will
eventually give up and go away. Meanwhile, as I keep writing, I learn
through conflict. I seek to confront it. I am learning already, if
only about my own sense of what is happening in our discussions and my
sense of how I am failing to get it (across). Only yesterday, I was
comparing my dialogue with y'all to that my ex-genetic engineer friend
Marti Crouch was having with David Suzuki, narrator of the recent PBS
series on genetics. We concluded that her disagreement with him (she
now calls herself a bioregionalist), including the coming to mind of
left- and rightbrainedness as a metaphor for the issues she confronts
with Suzuki and I with PCT-ers, is another version of mine with you.
I think it is a moot point whether I understand PCT or you understand
me. I know I'll find new ways to think about and talk about control
from our dialogue. I presume that as long as y'all continue the
dialogue with me, you're not martyring yourselves, and may be learning
something too. That's about all there is to it. And yes, if I
felt sure I know more about you than you know about yourselves, I'd
also quit the dialogue myself. I'm not there yet, and for as long as
it lasts, I appreciate your efforts to try to communicate with dumb,
crazy me. Thanks. l&p hal