The poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) was a kind of uncommon seers able to bending their gaze previous the horizon of their tradition’s givens. He wrote presciently about consciousness, our search for meaning, and ChatGPT 30 years before ChatGPT. He challenged the blind spots of Western medication together with his empirically examined religion in the healing power of nature. And as he was dying, he wrote poignantly about the measure of a life fully lived.
An epoch earlier than the civilizational cult of More metastasized within the grim golden age of Large Information and megaeverything, lowering human beings to information factors in an immense scatterplot of company revenue, Dr. Sacks thought of what it might take to save lots of humanity from itself.
When asked about his key idea for the close to future, he solutions in his heat English accent, New York Botanical Backyard t-shirt, and passionate conviction:
In two phrases… human scale.
I feel we have now to protect the human scale — in life, in constructing, in structure, in expertise. The human scale doesn’t imply we will’t have grand visions of the universe, it doesn’t preclude the event of physics and cosmology, but it surely does imply one shouldn’t be an nameless particular person — an nameless non-person, certainly one of a thousand non-people — in a skyscraper.
I feel the problem is how can one protect the human scale in nice cities, in megalopolis, in companies, in excessive expertise… however, my God, we should achieve this — or there might be genocide, atomic bombs, and we’ll all perish and take the planet with us. Human scale is the factor that can save us.
Complement with the poetic naturalist Henry Beston on the sacredness of the small scale, then revisit Oliver Sacks on the three essential elements of creativity, the building blocks of personhood, and the power of music.
