Dinesh's photos

Furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto -- Basho There is the old pond! Lo, into it jumps a frog: hark, water's music!

My mother once told me that the most precious Christmas gift she ever received came to her around 1920, when she received an orange, and only an orange, for Christmas, a gift from her mother, who took in washing and sewing for them to survive. This was before refrigerated trucks and trains, so for an orange to even survive the trip north was a small miracle. It was the first orange she had ever seen, and she knew that her magical gift came through great sacrifice by her mother. I think this every year when I watch ordinary people pummeling each other to get into a Wal-Mart or Costco at six A.M. on Black Friday, the onset of the celebration of the purported Prince of Peace, the onset of a materialistic frenzy that mocks his life and teaching. ~ Page 109(Why Good People Do Bad things by James Hollis PhD)

The atomistic attitude of Westerners extend to their understanding of the nature of social institutions. In their survey of the values of middle managers, Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars asked whether their respondents thought of a company as a system to organize tasks or as an organism coordinating people working together. About 75 percent of Americans chose the first definition, more than 50 percent of Canadians, Australians, British, Dutch, and Swedes chose that definition, and about a third of Japanese and Singaporese chose it. Germans, French, and Italians as a group were intermediate between the Asian and the people of British and northern European culture. Thus for the Westerners, especially the Americans and the other people of primarily northern European culture, a company is an atomistic, modular place where people perform their distinctive functions. For the Easterners, and to a lesser extent the eastern and southern Europeans, a company is an organism where the social relations are an integral part of what holds things together. ~ Excerpt: Page 84 (The Geography of Thought by Richard E. Nisbett)

Cultural microevolutionary factors can in some cases create macroevolutionary forces. For instance, the cultural preferences of influential leaders (e.g., wanting to enrich themselves and their friends) sometimes put powerful macroevolutionary constraints on a society. One example is the change in the transportation and settlement patterns that occurred in the United States in the decades before and after World War II. The most dramatic instance was the removal of the interurban rail network in Los Angeles County and its later replacement with freeways, a move promoted by automobile manufacturers and oil and rubber companies. This change was soon emulated in cities around the country, reinforced by housing developers who built suburban subdivisions connected to city centers by freeways. This process has produced the leapfrog developments we see today around most large American cities. Suburban sprawl, with its wastefulness of both energy and productive land, virtually forces people to own cars and spend hours weekly driving to and from workplaces and to shop for food and other necessities, whatever their individual proclivities. The suburban lifestyle is a microevolutionary cultural influence, originating the decisions by a relatively small number of politicians and businessmen, that became macroevolutionary because the cultural trend is unleashed greatly altered the physical (external) options of millions of Americans as well as of future generations. The spread of suburbia, for example, limited people’s movement patterns and opportunities for social contact and helped, through increasing greenhouse gas emissions from automobile use, to alter the climate, which puts external constraints of many human activities. ~ Page 160 (The Dominant Animal)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brush_Motor_Car_Company