When The Recent Past Fails To Teach

A few years ago, a friend at work had a problem while driving. He heard a noise, probably from the front end of his vehicle. Since he was driving a 60-foot articulated passenger coach packed to the gills with commuters, this could have been a real problem. It was. Though he didn't notice anything at first, when he made a simple lane change he noticed the coach didn't respond to his steering wheel like it used to, instead becoming sluggish in turns. He dropped his speed and made for a turn-off from the freeway to inspect outside the seat. Probably a front blow-out. It wasn't.

He notified control about the weirdness and just took it slow to town, then drove the bus to the garage and notified the mechanics about the weird. ( The next day, all hell broke loose. )

Addendum, November 15, 2013: The Archdruid has some salient thoughts on the sequential processes both growing people and growing civilizations use to understand their worlds relevant to the above post:

It’s not merely that the government of every major industrial nation is trying to achieve economic growth by following policies that are supposed to bring growth in theory, but have never once done so in practice; it’s not merely that the populace of every major industrial society eagerly forgets all the lessons of each speculative bubble and bust as soon as the next one comes along, and makes all the same mistakes with the same dismal results as the previous time; it’s not even that allegedly sane and sensible people have somehow managed to convince themselves that limitless supplies of fossil fuels can somehow be extracted at ever-increasing rates from the insides of a finite planet: it’s that only a handful of people out on the furthest fringes of contemporary culture ever notice that there’s anything at all odd about these stunningly self-defeating patterns of behavior.

It’s at this stage of history that reflection becomes necessary. It’s only by thinking about thinking, by learning to pay attention to the way we transform the raw data of the senses into figurations and abstractions, that it becomes possible to notice what’s being excluded from awareness in the course of turning sensation into figurations and sorting out figurations into cascading levels of abstraction.

X-Posted to talk_politics.