On 4/5/11 12:10 PM, "Dan Glover" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Do you have any evidence for this? There may indeed have been some > atheistic thinking going on but I seriously doubt the Victorians > accorded anyone a great deal of freedom to do so. [Dave] Whether you take the "Word" as that of the narrator, Phaedrus, or Pirsig, one must be careful not to take it as gospel. [http://www.victorianweb.org/vn/victor4.html] "In religion, the Victorians experienced a great age of doubt, the first that called into question institutional Christianity on such a large scale. In literature and the other arts, the Victorians attempted to combine Romantic emphases upon self, emotion, and imagination with Neoclassical ones upon the public role of art and a corollary responsibility of the artist. In ideology, politics, and society, the Victorians created astonishing innovation and change: democracy, feminism, unionization of workers, socialism, Marxism, and other modern movements took form. In fact, this age of Darwin, Marx, and Freud appears to be not only the first that experienced modern problems but also the first that attempted modern solutions. Victorian, in other words, can be taken to mean parent of the modern -- and like most powerful parents, it provoked a powerful reaction against itself." [Dave] The dogma that sons always rebel against their fathers seems to play itself out in Pirsig's take on the Victorians. Even though most of the ideas he develops in Lila are rooted in Victorians such as Darwin, James, Marx he still bad mouths that society as a whole. His take is shallow and typical of those write off the whole period out of hand with little understanding of it. [http://www.victorianweb.org/vn/victor4.html] "For much of the last century the term Victorian, which literally describes things and events in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), conveyed connotations of "prudish," "repressed," and "old fashioned." Although such associations have some basis in fact, they do not adequately indicate the nature of this complex, paradoxical age that was a second English Renaissance." For those who might be interested this site seems have a more balanced approach to the era. Dave 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/md/archives.html
