The Future

I have been walking to Barnes and Nobles and reading Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and The Last Man" for free, I just jot down what page I am on a napkin and then start where I left off next time I walk down there.

If you do not know me: I am an adjunct prof at a local school, and spring break is this week so I will have more time for one week to follow blind trails of thought. My mind has been running hard, like a rodent in a loop, the thing is relentless. If I was less disciplined and educated I might have gone nuts because my brain just keeps chattering and leaping from one very involved topic to another, people who know me can attest to it because that is how I speak in conversation too.

I have started a new website that will detail the profits made from my blog and other blogs. Hopefully this will generate money, I have been doing ok with Pay Per Post, if you are interested in making money with a blog - click the square box shaped link in the upper left hand corner and sign up - its free.

I am reading the biography of Donald Coxeter. I bought that one on amazon for $2.66, you can get used books cheap on there, but they get you with high priced shipping. Still, the book is like new - I doubt anyone had even cracked it open, and it was less than half price even with the shipping included.

I am making a painting on my desk, another in Brooklyn, and I have one on the back burner (waiting for the right inspiration to finish it off or tie it together). I am working on Drawings with Jesse Albrecht and Dan Attoe, and I am making some other drawings to send to Bret in Richmond at Transmission gallery.

I am going to contribute to Zinearcade No.2, which promises to be even better than number 1.

The theme of this post though is the FUTURE, and I have gotten this seed of thought from the Fukuyama book. Kant wrote about the French Revolution, and how it may signify the end of history, by which he meant that humans might have reached the best point in government, that ideological struggles for individual freedom are pointless because everyone is reasonably free to do whatever they want. For Kant history was a narrative of freedom for each person away from government control or slavery. Hegel follows Kant, and says everything progresses and that liberal democracies are the pinnacle of human communities and that all other nations will eventually convert to liberal democracy, he was critiqued as being eurocentric because - maybe people in other parts of the world like living in theocratic dictatorships, or being sent to Stalins Gulags - it is their culture and who are we to judge them. This of course is idiotic. I have first hand knowledge on this subject having seen school aged girls going to school for the first time in thirty years in Afghanistan, all the while the media is decrying the US soldier as a savage killer and ignoring the fact that we are spreading liberal social ideas across the planet, and generally making life a lot better for people in Afghanistan.