Introduction



What is this website about?
It is an invitation to face a fundamental contemporary problem of collaboration.

Adam Smith got it right when he noted that pin-making could be made more efficient by dividing the work intelligently. But what about the pen?

“The division of labour, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase in the productive power of labour” (Smith, in the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations)

Intellectual labour has been dividing and divided throughout the past five hundred years in a way that fosters isolated (and often irrelevant) specialization. Is there another way of moving foward in the search for relevant understanding, patterns of genuine progress?

That is what this website is about.

It is about a revolution. But the revolution is a quiet revolution: it is about a revolving of ideas, a way of collaborating that would recycle the ideas that contribute to progress. Every area of inquiry is unwittingly struggling towards such a revolving. The website aims at bringing unity and efficiency and light into that struggle. It points towards a collaboration that would link our efforts together so that, instead of each zone and sub-zone of inquiry tunnelling along alone, there would be a towering of significant meanings, a twister of truths, a vortext of growing understanding of human possibilities.


Can Tower
Not as a tower of Babel but as a tower of Benevolence

Pointers towards that new twist of culture can only be given slowly. Cantower I is a start: Lack in the Beingstalk is the most recent McShane effort at a context. But more elementary leads and contexts will gradually be identified.

T. Hosterman
webmaster


McShane with two Great Twentieth Century Revolutionaries:
Eamonn DeValera was the only leader of the 1916 Easter Revolution in Dublin not executed - because of his American background. The photo was taken in 1968 while he was President of Ireland.






















 This photo with Bernard Lonergan was taken in Dublin during the Summer of 1971



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