Reply With Quote
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics, by Christopher Lasch.
The Great Relearning by Tom Wolfe.
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics, by Christopher Lasch.
Progressives can go themselves. I will do whatever I can to not contribute to their cause.
You seem to be more of a destroyer than a builder. It takes all kinds, to make a world.
BTW, where are you keeping FN1, LockBeard and Free_Mason? They never post anymore since you started.
I'm not a great mind who can come up with the Great Twenty-First Century Ideology. I doubt any Westerner really has the werewithal.
Apparently our choices are going to be:
1) Leftism, flavor A: Europe is Awesome, So Let's Repeat Everything the Europeans Tried After World War II, That Ended Up Being Totally Unsustainable.
2) Leftism, flavor B: Everything Everyone Tried Before Us Was Wrong and Oppressive, and Since We Are Smarter and More Enlightened Than Anyone Before Us, Let's Blow It All Up and Finally Experience True Liberation.
3) Leftism, flavor C: We Cannot Subject People to the Tyranny of Their Own Choices; They Need Someone Wise to Watch Over Them and Guide Them.
3) Conservatism, flavor A: Everything New Is Bad and We Are Afraid of It, So Let's Use the Coercive Power of the State to Create a Cocoon of the 1950's Where We Feel Safe and Our Beliefs Aren't Challenged.
4) Conservatism, flavor B: F*** You, I've Got Mine.
5) Conservatism, flavor C: Everything Will Be Fine Once We Make the Rest of the World Just Like Us, By Force if Necessary.
I'm going to leave the numbering wrong up there. It adds a little dystopian flavor.
As I've already stated, I get tired of names easily here. Thanks for caring though brah.You seem to be more of a destroyer than a builder. It takes all kinds, to make a world.
BTW, where are you keeping FN1, LockBeard and Free_Mason? They never post anymore since you started.
A destroyer? No, I just have no need nor want no purpose to BUILD someone else's life.
I view progressives of American in a far worse light than any other enemy America has in this world.
#4 has been tacit philosophy in America for a long time, but really, 1-5 are all contemporary.
Once upon a time, the communitarian aspect of American society was simply taken for granted. People were involved in the lives of those around them to advance the general welfare. It had nothing to do with the government. Civil involvement was simply part of personal virtue.
Today the radical individualism inherent in the American spirit has overwhelmed and dissolved the spirit of community. We are left with two camps: one that can only see community through the eyes of government, and another that places little to no value on the group whatsoever. The end of this can be only totalitarianism or chaos.
+1 billion.
Community is the only way to survive, and not the government type. Welfare? that, communities should take care of their own, they at least know who are the lazy asses and who just fell on hard times. Kids acting up, vandalizing? Community should handle that before the law ever even thinks about it. Kid having trouble in school? Friends and family should help out. All these things that there are government programs for now should be done close to home, by those who are around you.
Individualism is great as long as there is still a community, when we lose that, the only choice is for the gov't to step in, and they ing suck at trying to replicate what communities do. We all can't be the Lone Ranger or there will be no one to grow the grain to feed Silver.
Cultures are impossible to tame, though. People have to learn the hard way, which means either totalitarianism or chaos is coming soon.
Oh, they will learn. I will punch them in the head until they learn
What has caused the (on-going) shift? Or was it ever the (possibly) romanticized "community" you describe?
I tend to agree with your premise (from an admittedly white-middle-class perspective). I'm 41, and growing up, my parent's family felt more a part of a community than mine does now; with the church, with the neighborhood, etc....
The conservative explanation? The government has become everyone's surrogate for doling out "general welfare" - while the liberal would blame, simply, and acceleration and celebration of the ac ulation of wealth (greed).
There's probably truth in both (and potentially a chicken and egg conundrum as well).
I would say that the migration happened thanks in part to the continuous hunt for jobs. All life is based off of our relationships with others, and the constant moving has broken down those relationships, creating short term friendships where it doesn't matter if you don't see each other in a year. The mass migrations from agricultural jobs to industrial broke a lot of that community up, as did the instant access to information. Back when, you had to go talk to people to get information, now, its available instantly.
Also, I think the easy access to entertainment has caused further fracturing. Instead of going to a pub, or down to the store and hanging out, people watch TV, play video games, talk politics on sports forums with random strangers. While you get some relationship building like that, face to face contact is still the most effective way to make friends that actually care about you.
Why not both? One underwrites the other.
People used to know their neighbors. Civic clubs used to be a regular part of the social fabric. It was that way even just twenty to thirty years ago. That we even have to ask whether it was once so shows just how fleeting our history is.
Once upon a time, if man chose to be an island, he perished. Life was difficult, and people had to stick together to survive. Now, in modern life, man can create the illusion of self-sufficiency. He can close himself in his abode with his modern gadgets and his packaged food and sundries, and hardly talk to a soul except when he needs to scratch his social itch. And now, we have ways to interact socially without really having to deal with real people: TV and the internet.
The time people used to spend talking to their neighbors they spend watching TV or playing on the internet. Those are the two great subs utes for real life. Government did not cause it, nor can it solve it.
It takes a village to raise a village idiot.
Thanks, Im busy at work and now on page 50.
If you could remind me what Christopher Lasch says, I'd be grateful DR.
Sometimes I'll read a book and remember, like three things.
I would disagree with the few selections. I agree that conservatism tends to slow the growth of ideas. Not because change is unwelcome, but because we refuse to take the bad with the good. There is no "I've got mine" at ude, but rather it is nobody's business to steal from me to give to others. As for the militarism, I would say most conservative want a strong standing Army. That is for insuring we are never defeated rather than changing others. Changing others isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it should definitely be the last resort.
Remember, Im only on page 50.
Basically, Lasch is a Marxist reformed. The gist of it, so far, states that turn of the 20th century liberalism was forgotten or misapplied in every iteration since. Conservatism relies on the mass consumption of everything cultural. Material, wealth, morality, manufacturing, et al.
The book, so far, tries to tackle this uniquely Western idea of consistent and forever progress. That history is viewed through Western eyes with a wistful reverance for its simplicity and innocence that never really existed (*cough*ES*cough*). Him being a child of the Depression, his aim in life was to be married and have an exorbitant amount of offspring with which to share and create a fmailial life with which was lacking in the times beforehand.
Also, he speaks to a degredation of authority in every facet of society. Authority has no credence in our society, they hold no sway outside the proximity of it to us. Thus Western authority has a vested interest in creeping ever closer so as even though it is an emperor without clothes, it is the emperor nonetheless.
He postulates that the liberal approach to a pseudo Utopian society was admirable and maybe even achievable, but the means used to achieve that end were counter-productive. Examples: Welfare, Abortion, Women's Rights and the Civil Rights Act. It wasnt so much that these ideals were negative or unnecessary, but that their application into our society was done through the court system instead through popular opinion. The Civil Rights Act may or may not have passed the public litmus test but liberals of the time cared not for the test so much as they cared for their legally won result.
And it is this very fabric of mid-century liberalism that gave rise to the schism amongst liberals that lead to conservative prevalence before and after Carter. He cites Ted Kennedy, and in my own words and interpretation, as the prime example of liberalism of the time at its worst. Not that TK was a bad person, but that his answers to the country's moral problems were the addition of more social programs by force, not the guiding hand of logic and compassion. He cites this exact politician as the reason liberals were/are (correctly) viewed as aloof intellectuals who just plain know better than you do. That liberalism is uncontent and cant reconcile the social "drag", as perceived by them, between themselves and voting Americans.
So far, the book deals with the Western/Christian idea of progress that never ends, at least, in our eyes. He tries to deal with what could possibly explain the ascendance of such mindless thinking. What defines progress? What is progress? Progress can be interpreted many ways...its interpretation by Western/Christian/American seems to be the ac ulation of luxury to such an extent that even luxury becomes necessity. That realistically, we as a society cannot endlessly progress because our progression depends on the economically weak but resource rich to remain so. Moreover, we cannot extend our luxury to the world because the world's resources cannot sustain it. A liberal estimate would say 1 billion people in the world live as we Americans do. Multiply that by six and hope the oil doesnt run out, right? Not happening.
Thats about all I can say, so far, but I see where he is going with this. BTW, my summaries have always sucked. I read like this and constantly get dragged away mentally by my own insights and thoughts on the topic at hand. I use these authors as conduits to my own thinking, not the memorization of theirs. Personally, this guy is extremely intelligent and introspective, but completely blind to a possible world without his ilk and conviction of perspective. But really, arent we all?
Holy grammatical and spelling errors, Mr Dictionary! Thats what happens when you get pulled in and out of a post like that, I guess.
Growing up, I never heard the word "community". You helped when others around you needed help (southern hospitality) but you yourself were suppose to be as self-reliant as you could become.
Thanks for your reply, DR .
I'll take my own reply to you offline. It's deadly dull.
One of his more curious observations had to do with the counter-culture pervasive amongst the youth during the Vietnam war.
Their minimalist approach, the restructuring or relearning of societal tendencies, was amusing if not misguided. Encouraged by their resistance to authority without merit, he was equally mystified by their non-demand or follow through for a great rethinking of society. They instead chose an outsiders path, communes and the like that existed outside the boundaries of normal society.
The fact that they went through the same growing pains (disease, hierarchy, etc) that previous culture did (albeit, at a much more rapid pace) only further pushed their organizational thinking toward more extreme spectrums of political structure.
I found that amusing. A bunch of dope-smoking hippies reinventing the political wheel on a micro scale. Throw in long dead diseases popping back up in their communes and I think Hollywood may have found the answer to their sequel-prone, creative writer's block.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
