Another Chapter Two segment, with some inserts [mine] for clarity. I
think this foreshadows the core of the romantic/classic ideas
presented in ZMM. As John mentions, there is also a dialogue relating
to Native Indian values versus European values (although
interestingly Northrop traces the 'waves' of European influences in
Mexico through Spain and France (and latter Russia), while the
primary U.S. influences have been German, British and Dutch. So you
have the same Indian/European dynamic, but with very different
flavors in Mexico versus U.S.
"Moreover, because the concern in the West with the theoretical and
the technological and the doctrinal [classic], it represents a value
which the Anglo-Saxon and logically Latin cultures [romatic] need.
But the present and the future as well as the past are on [the
native, spontaneous expression of Mexican cutlure's] side. Rooted as
it is, through Spain, in the Arabs of the Near East, and in the
Buddha beyond them in the Far East, the course of world events
bringing about a merging of the Orient and the Occident is also in
its favor. We may be reasonably sure, therefore, as Justino Fernandez
insists, that Jose Orozco has given expression to an aesthetically
and emotionally ultimate, intuitively given component in the nature
of man and of things, which deserves to be cherished not merely by
Mexico but also by the rest of the world.
But this is not the whole truth nor the end of the story. For one
cannot be impressed with Orozco's values [romantic] without being
reminded of Rivera's also [classic]. The latter tells us with equal
certainty and appeal that scientific knowledge through universal
democratic education, freeing the minds of men to accept a more
correct theoretical conception of the nature of things, and freeing
their bodies from disease and drudgery by means of its technology
applied to the nation's resources, is also one of the highest and
most perfect human values. [Mexico's youth] have not been misled by
Jose Orozco's unjustified, negative thesis that science and
theoretical reflection destroy the human soul, any more than the
Mexican's generally have not been misled by Diego Rivera's equally
unjustified, negative suggestion that the aesthetic and religious
interests of the colonial period are entirely evil.
Other considerations support their verdict. There is no
incompatibility whatever between the intuitive, passionate,
immediately apprehended aesthetic values which Jose Orozco conveys
and the postulated, theoretical, and attendant technological,
scientific values which Diego Rivera portrays with equal artistic and
human appeal. The ancient Indian culture showed the Mexicans, as it
now shows us, how a geometrically informed, aesthetically vivid,
astronomically oriented art, religion, and agriculture can function
together harmoniously and with human appeal.
The true relation between intuitive, aesthetic, and religious feeling
and scientific doctrine is one of mutual supplementation." (Northrop)
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