[John] We just need this minimal shell and the fact that we don't have it anymore makes us all at least a little insane.
[Arlo] Agree. But you can't lose something you value... to my next point... [John] But how does that interact and create change in a real world? Where is the interface of modern culture with metaphysical shifts? Two places I can think of, Academia and MediaWorld. I have no hope in either. [Arlo] And if we are examining the loss of community, where do we look as something that spread this devalue? I can tell you in my life exactly when it became noticable, and it was not in the 70s. The devaluing of community, even if you see it as a "final nail", was part and parcel of the rhetoric of "rugged individualism" of the 80s, the outright demonizing and ridicule of any of the "commun-" words, not just communism, but communal, community... We started having it beaten into our skulls that caring about one's neighbors, thinking about community, acting in any communal way, was un-patriotic, anti-freedom and outright evil. The greed of the 80s decade, the "yuppie" thing, all the focus of the glories of selfishness, this was the drumbeat of the new patriotism. As I said, you don't lose something you value, when society valued community it held onto it strongly. Somewhere, someone, it devalued it. And you place the blame on "Academia"? Hell, if anything "academia" is continually assaulted for even the most remotest considerations or valuations of "community". Most of the "academics" have been pointing, with sadness, at the erosion of neighborhoods and community for decades. Still, many academic disciplines contributed, and many adopted a non-social, isolationist view of the human condition. I don't deny this. Joseph Campbell talks about this from a de-mything of culture, lamenting that social humans need an "effective general mythology", a shared set of symbols by which they can orient their understandings of the world, through which they can be part of a larger thing than just their own lives. He attributes (if I understand him) the high rates of psychoses in modern life to the void created when western culture abandoned all "myth" and scientific rationality was the only thing offered in replacement. I think this maps accurately onto Pirsig, another post though. I'm not sure the level of blame to place of the "media", other than its role in promoting via advertising the crass consumerism and selfish behavior of people. Certainly if you look at all the books, movies, music, magazines, etc of these decades you will find a large segment of the media that resisted the loss of community. But overall a dollar had to be made, and making one's fortune was(is) the only thing that mattered. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
