This is my first post to the Wisdom Seeker blog. Since this is a beginning, I think I am going to start at the beginning. In the late 1970's there was a "universal spectacular" on the NBC network titled "Centennial". It was based upon the book Centennial by the Pulitzer prize winning author James Michener. Centennial was written to commemorate the U.S. bicentennial, and it is the chronicle of the growth of a fictitious town on the prairie in Colorado named Centennial, which was supposedly founded in 1876. Many of James Michener's books are fiction loosely based on historical events that took place at a particular location, such as Texas, Alaska, Poland, South Africa, etc. Anyway, I can remember watching this mini-series on TV with my family, even though I was a few years old. In 1979, my dad had some surgery done, and he was off of work for a few weeks. During that time, he read the book, and he read parts of the book to me. There an early chapter of Centennial titled "The Inhabitants", and it has animal stories about dinosaurs, rattlesnakes, horses, buffalo, beaver, and other animals that inhabited the region. This illustrates the depth to which Michener treated the history of the area. My dad read me stories from this chapter. When I became able to read well enough, I read Centennial as my first novel.
After graduation from high school, I enrolled in an engineering program at a college near my home town. I have read Centennial many times over, and I enjoyed every word of the book, but in adulthood a certain few pages jumped out at me. Those few pages were the "Clovis Point Story". It takes place in the chapter after "The Inhabitants", "The Many Coups of Lame Beaver", which is obviously about the culture of the plains indians. I think that the Clovis Point Story succinctly sumarizes the evolution of man since ancient times, and gives me pause about our potential as a species. I agree with Michener's analysis that the intellectual effort for ancient man to develop the process of clovis point creation is of an order of magnitude that maybe can only be rivaled in recent modern times. The principles of that ancient process, such as artisanship, concentration, daring, proportion, and calculation are still entirely relevent today, and perhaps more so in an age of mass production and mass commercialization. The key element is that such work takes time - time for beauty, time for apprenticeship, time for worship. Time flowed differently in ancient times, and not to the rhythms of machines. As an engineering student I had a great love of machines, but also the insight from other readings to know that that love must be tempered with reason. Humans must come first.
The story of the Clovis Point inspires me to create a work of beauty AND utility. The work I have begun is called the Wisdom Seeker IDE, and it is an open source software project hosted by sourceforge.net (see link under blog title). The creation of this project is also an invitation of others to join in a great venture, an effort to recapture the spirit of the clovis point. In many, but not all, parts of the United States and the industrialized world people do not live on a subsistence basis, unlike the people of ancient times. Over one billion people, however, throughout the world are still on the brink of starvation. Starvation is to the underdeveloped world is a different beast to kill, one often resulting from governmental indifference or oppression. And in all parts of the world we have nuclear proliferation and environmental degradation. Just as a spear with a clovis point attached to it was a mighty weapon to kill great beasts such as the mammoth, an actual wisdom seeking software application would be a sharp instrument to attack and slay "abstract mammoths" and other nefarious beasts of the human reality. What the Wisdom Seeker IDE project needs right now is the aid of human will and imagination and a lot of it. Without artisanship, concentration, daring, proportion, and calculation it may end up just another machine, and possibly one that does not serve human purposes. Please read the story of the clovis point and visit the Wisdom Seeker IDE project web site AND write me emails about what you think. I will be incorporating some of those emails into this blog in the future, as well as responses to them.
