PCAPPC

The Whole Earth Catalog, which anticipated the internet, took as its inspiration Bucky Fuller's "Spaceship Earth" and the first real photograph of the whole earth, taken from Apollo 8 by the first astronauts to orbit the Moon. We did great things then and assumed ourselves virtuous. But Fuller rode through those ambitions and prolific decades like a precocious child who asked too many questions. And though his intent was to accelerate progress, he made us stop. And think. His impatience was our conscience; his ambitions were our inhibitions; his "comprehensive anticipatory design science" was our resistance to its opposite: the realization of the ideal; the exclusive, apprehensive, prescriptive, and domesticating ideologies of power. Though Fuller wasn't an idealist, he invoked the concept of God and even prayed in a manner he associated with the purpose of prayer. He didn't believe in a God independent of and outside the universe, but he did accept ...

The question is always ahead of the answer, because the question presupposes the fact. Answers tell us nothing but what the question had already anticipated. The inquisitor is to be blamed if a negative answer leads them nowhere. Every question should anticipate every answer, which is to say that no answer should ever be dismissed. The question might not be understood, by either the interrogator or by the interrogated. If so, refine the question, expand, explain. To articulate a relevant question requires that the scholar first be educated by the curious. There are rote answers to rote questions, and there is curiosity that disturbs the serenity of ideologues. The latter requires careful diplomacy and, especially, compassion. We all were once confirmed to one state or another, and we all owe ourselves to the compassion of an inquisitor, the sympathy of an interrogator. Ask and receive. It was never know and get. It's all in the asking, the humble inquisitiveness, curiosity without...