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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.
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DAY 2 : Part |
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DAY 2 : PART 4
JB:You're back with "We the People"
and we're speaking with Paolo Soleri. If you would like to
join the "We the People" organization, here's the number of
call 800-426- 1112. I'll send you some information and you
can decide for yourself. Paolo, I would like to take a few
calls from some of our listeners. Let's here from David. Your
on with Paolo Soleri.
David: Hi, and thank you for a very stimulating
couple of shows. I visited Arcosanti about, I guess, 15 years
ago or so, and was really fascinated by it and really liked
the concept of the laboratories and so forth. I guess the
main concern that comes across to me is, I realize, I'm probably
like one of the typical people you think need to change. I
like my CD player.
PS: That's right.
David: I like my computer, I like my selection
of two or three dozen different running shoes I can get.
PS: That's right.
David: I like it, and I'm not really thinking
about it too much, and I'm learning here that it's in my higher
self-interest to maybe to think maybe there is something more
important. And there is a cost attached to that that I hadn't
been previously aware of, namely, the security of my future
and that of my children.
PS: Right.
David: So, I see the utmost necessity to
make these kinds of changes that you are discussing, but where
my question and concern comes in what is the role of democracy
in this and how, I mean, if we need to make these changes,
you know, you said something earlier that, in fact I called
at the very beginning of the show and was told I had to wait
a half hour before, this was the very first quote you said,
you quoted somebody's talk about consumerism.
JB: That was me, I quoted Michael Gardner.
PS: And I liked that.
JB: "Consumerism
is a virulent form of materialism where advertising insures
the demand is created for products for which there is no need."
David: Okay, let's talk democracy here for
a minute. That's your view, and that's Michael Gardner's view,
and may be it's a more highly evolved view, but what gives
us the right and what is the role of democracy in saying to
probably the zillions of people out there that will say, hey,
get off my back, you know, I like retail. You know, I like
strolling through the shopping malls.
JB: Okay, David, let's...thank you very much
for that call. Paolo, do you have a comment on that?
PS: Yes, of all the species that inhabit
this globe there is only one that says, I do what I like,
and it is our species, and naturally, that's an indication
of the how far we've gone in evolution, but this notion that
I'm conceived, I was born, and I've been educated and I will
do what I like it's pretty, pretty difficult notion really
to digest, because as I was saying, there is nothing in nature
that ever said anything like that. We should have a Bill of
Rights, naturally, but they should be matched item by item
by a Bill of Duty, or Bill of Responsibilities. If we did
that, then we would find out that some of the things that
we say, I do them because I like to them, are out of context,
and I think the democracy cannot survive with only a Bill
of Rights without a Bill of Duties, frankly.
JB: Gregory Bateson liked to quote Saint
Paul to the Galacions where he said, "God is not mocked,"
and he related that to the ecology. The ecology is not mocked,
so there are duties, there are rules here, and this notion,
we can do whatever we want misses that point. There was another
statement that Gregory Bateson said, I want to share with
you, he said, "What is going to be required in the future
is more elegancy and less tolerance." How does that strike
you?
PS: Probably in terms of...
JB: Sloppiness, muddy thinking, wait.
PS: Okay, because tolerance is something
that we need desperately.
JB: We need tolerance at one level, but we
need intolerance at another level.
PS: Yeah, but the same thing what xenophobia
does to us, it makes us intolerant, because at the end of
any discussion on any discussion we say, yes, but...American
first, and that's xenophobia. I mean, we might not want to
see it that way, but that's what it is, because we cannot
any longer say, well, since I'm an American I'm worth ten
Chinese, or two Chinese, or fifty Africans. We can no longer
do that it's really a leftover, part of the brain that is
no longer on top of things.
JB: Yes.
PS: That might cost us quite a bit, because
we have pride, we have our history, we love our country, and
so on, but my God, we have to go beyond those things at this
point.
JB: Well, there is also a manipulation. When
caller, David, was talking about I want this, I want that,
the people do. The people, themselves, are being manipulated
at a very early age through education, through the media,
through advertising, through the structure through the way
things are organized to get these needs impeded into the mental
structure so this is not an accident, it's not like there's
one person, one vote in a primordial way here, we are living
with hundreds of billions of advertising which is allowed
to go along because we let it, but ourselves are manipulated
by it, so we are going to have to get on top of it and give
people a chance to see undermuddied by nationalism, parochialism,
or consumerism.
PS: And by the way,
speaking of democracy, we have the greatest disparity now
between the have and the have nots in this country, so, in
a way, we have the worst example of what a democratic aware
society seems should be because if democracy is based on injustice,
then I'm afraid it's falling short of what the promises were.
JB: If you go back and look at the Founders,
beside the fact they were certainly congenial to the slaughter
of the native peoples and could accept the fact, or if they
were from the South actually advocated the enslavement of
African people, there was a very, a very telling point that
John Adams made in a letter to Abigail Adams, he said, "That
in this generation we have to teach our children the arts
of war so that their children can master the arts of commerce,
so their children can master the arts porcelain, and music,
and tapestry." The idea being that by the third generation,
we will have evolved beyond war and commerce to art, but,
boy, I think it must be four or five generations after that
and we are still seem pretty mired in the first generation.
PS: () of greed are surfacing constantly
in these discussions. If we are less opportunistic in terms
of the ego, but opportunistic in terms of the species, in
the terms of the planet, which means the right opportunist,
and if you could somehow thrust into this greed that we are
all prisoners of, things would begin to be more democratic
I think.
JB: So I see we have to have a laboratory
that builds a habitat that facilities the virtues that you're
describing and de-emphasizes and marginalizes the vices that
are pandemic.
PS: But naturally that would be because of
that kind () number one would be more frugal in the sense
demanding less from the environment, demanding less from society,
and so on, because again, the suburban sprawl is the most
consumer-oriented, the most wasteful-oriented, the most pollutant-oriented,
and the most segregated of all the things we can come up with.
The scenario pretty deep in terms of having 250 million Americans
saying, I want to be a suburbanite.
JB: Well, Paolo, we have a suburbanite on
the line right now. Naomi, let's hear what you have to say
about this. Naomi, welcome. Naomi, she's not there. Well,
John, then.
John:Yes, there's a man who immigrated to
Canada, Giovanie Caparici, and he bought, I think, 667 acres,
a former city near Endlopes, and he plans, he's on it for
three years, he's trying to get it to become patterned after
the Renaissance city, I believe, in Italy called Padova, and
he's named that and he's hoping...
PS: Oh, really.
John:and he's hoping
to have arts, and crafts, and film and all sorts of things
based there, and as a Renaissance city.
JB: Paolo, have you heard of that?
PS: No, and my first reaction which should
not be a reaction because I'm too ignorant to know, but my
first reaction is that there might be some kind of utopian
notion there, because to separate the artist, so-called, from
the rest of humanity is a big mistake. The artist is part
of humanity so should be immersed in the routine life of any
community. So that is why I refuse to call Arcosanti a Center
of the Arts. I mean, that's not the intent at all.
JB: So the arts is fabricate...is buildings/
PS: It's also...
JB: That's what art means.
PS: ...living is the biggest art, and actual
living means that all part of the population, all levels of
wealth, all level of culture and learning should be intermixed,
because that's what the urban effect is suppose to be.
JB: You say the art of living, how about
the art of dying?
PS: Well, that's a very, very difficult thing
to...
JB: Do you think there can be an art of living
if we don't have an art of dying?
PS: Well, since I see it not as a pleasant
or nice thing, but something very harsh, dying is part of
the harshness of living, and that's why my moral thing says
that () going on to the end. At the end there might be a revelation
of reality which is "we are all there resurrected," in a very
special manner out of space time.
JB: What I was thinking of when you say an
artist can't be removed, but has to be engaged, and that's
an art of living, and since we're all going to be dying, that
also has to be part of the engagement.
PS: Yes, but the anguish, the basic anguish
that we all have is that this notion, number one of being
limited in our experience, in our experiment. Number two,
not knowing that we are means to something very, very important
that we might eventually enjoy, so to be able to re-build
within ourself hope and faith, and optimism, that's part of
the process of getting anguish directed toward creativity.
JB: Paolo Soleri, thank you very much. I
want to end it on that high note.
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DAY 2 : Part |
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