Back to Start Page
This is the question that all webmistresses/webmasters must ask themselves at some stage. My answers ecompass the prosaic, the profound, and the - possibly - pretentious.
Creativity is at the core of this enterprise: I have realised in the past few months that I really, really want to write, and I have been dedicating myself to this. This website is an outgrowth of the creative explosion that has followed, wherein I have found that there are so many words, stories, and essays inside my head that I need to get them out into the world before my brain goes 'phut!'. So this site is both a tangible, evolving representation of my creative urges and a practical way of exploring some new technology.
The title of the site - Deep Time and Constant Change - is a phrase (paraphrase?) stolen from the biologist/evolutionary commentator Stephen Jay Gould, and refers to one of the central paradoxes and fascinations of evolution: how species/organisms retain their same basic shapes but change over time: this reflects my interest in the long-term trends of history and my contention that we are surrounded by, influenced by, and acted upon by a vast array of forces, whilst at the same time having a - quite astonishingly creative and independent - capacity for choice and change: we can think our way around practical, personal, and moral problems, and we are not merely the prisoners of our biological inheritance, whatever some evolutionary biologists would have us believe. Evolutionary biology can suggest that hopelessness, lassitude, and resignation to the status quo are reasonable responses to the world, but the doctrines of contemporary evolutionary theory can equally be read to suggest that we are the architects of the kind of environments and world we want to live in: we are not the passive recipients of the influences of external forces - we push back and shape the environment that helps to shape us.
Hmm. This is really about my Weltanschaung. The Net seems a splendid metaphor for the way that many of us live now: isolated, available to only a relative (and relatively prosperous) few, and capable of so much richer things. To me, the connectedness of life, and particularly of the historical influences that come to bear on us all, is a continually fascinating theme - the Web is a (pehaps clumsy) metaphor for this as well: how everything is linked: sometimes meaningfully, sometimes meaninglessly; sometimes randomly, sometimes deliberately; sometimes profoundly, often trivially. We are all at the nexus of history, history as it as happened up to this point: the forces that act upon us are complex, as are our reactions, our behaviours, and the effects that we have on others. We do, however, have the capacity of choice: to act well or badly, to make an effort, to make a difference.
That is what this site is ultimately about: reflecting my residual faith in the Enlightenment ideal that, by knowing more about the world, we can improve it; that, for example, by understanding and deconstructing prejudice, we can overcome it; that by overcoming our conditioning and social/cultural influences, we can build a better community by sharing and understanding; that it is possible to reject and overcome the orthodoxies of selfishness, profit-centeredness, and the 'inevitability' of economic and social life developing along the lines that we see in the capitalist world. A study of history suggests to me that everything is mutable, everything can be changed, and that the world can be made a better place as well as a worse one. The barriers are immense, but they can be penetrated and undermined. This site is part of my own struggle to work out how to make a difference, to make a mark, and to make a start on building a 'Jerusalem' that William Blake, Gerrard Winstanley, and William Morris et al might all be comfortable living in. Thank you, and good-night...
Back to Start Page