Thanks for writing this piece!

The thought then occurs that those Front Porch Aboriginals such as myself who rail on about the current era’s Technocratic Sunbeams for Leviathan might simply be dimwitted nostalgics, following some romantic and episodic eccentric urge rendered baseless by current circumstances. But then, we confront the current reminisces over the Moon launch and recall the pride, wonder and awe of this monumental marriage of America’s technological acumen with our love of challenge and exploration. The event was simultaneously mystical and coldly rational. Via camera, we walked with the explorer through the dusty antiquity of the blasted lunar landscape as though Columbus might have had an embedded reporter aboard the Santa Maria. We looked back homeward, with the astronauts at a small blue orb of watery life that is our home, rendered almost fragile as it floated in the dark vacuum of Space. At this moment of triumph when we were given our first look at the small orb of life alone in the black void, one would have thought that a union of Faith and Reason might have borne real advances. Unfortunately, while we might have felt the possibility, the mania for the modern continued it’s confident march and the May Day Parade of the Victorious Technocrat proceeded apace.

Crawford’s book speaks of the need to temper Technology with Tradition and reinvigorate the love and liberty inherent to craftsmanship. This is not so much a submission to a fear or blind obedience of authority as it is an embrace of the love for a stewarding authority. In one direction lies consigned surrender and in the other lies that marvelous combination of memory and possibility released by the formidable trinity of the mind, hand and spirit.

Aboriginal urges notwithstanding, painted up in white zig-zags and concentric circles while girding for the Jaguar Dance, I enjoy an occasional plane ride in that lounge chair at 35,000 feet as much as the next guy. Don’t ask me to chose between dirt and a silicon wafer because this is a specious choice made for a vacuum that is not favored with this tiny blue orb, hurtling through space.

Thank you for an excellent summary of Polanyi as well as offering this most useful lens for reading Crawford. The importance, even priority, of practice you note in both writers was also recently underlined by the “mastery takes 10,000 hours of practice” research rehearsed in Gladwell’s “Outliers.” Your summary also draws much-needed (in our reflexively autonomous culture) attention to the necessary and legitimate role of authority and submission to it as part of membership in a vital tradition or community.

In the early 70′s, filled with that era’s ethos of “distrust all authority,” I began the practice of a martial art where, with that attitude, I quickly ran into the brick wall of real authority, mastery, people doing things I couldn’t even SEE much less do without humbly opening my eyes, doing what I was shown and told, in short, submitting to both practice and authority. All necessary before I could even begin to “know” much less do any of the things I came to learn. You make it wonderfully clear how both Crawford and Polanyi are very good teachers about such experience and why these lessons are so important. Again, my thanks.