I've especially enjoyed this little bit of self love going in this list.
I've not encountered it before on this list and it gives me hope for the
future even if the options thus far seem to be "Blade Runner" or "Road
Warrior." At one point I was especially impressed with
all of the Ivy hanging around but a couple of things popped into my mind.
Well three anyway.
1. When Brad talked about the value of exchange to the GNP having little
to do with what had really happened. i.e. (Housewives)
Given the power of economics in the current world and their cowardice I
particularly like their nose being tweaked occasionally.
Not that I don't believe there is hope for them, just that they are currently
on a self destructive power trip and must get beyond that bit of adolescence
before we will know whether the baby will live or not.
2. The issue of revenge or vendetta is not so simple as one would surmise
from what was said. Even the fragmenting that Brad did as he explained
the various components is not really indicative of the sophistication of
those laws. There have been many ways in which Laws of Blood have
worked. Indeed if the national law broke down here, then my
particular culture with very defined primary laws about how that works
for our particular people in relation to the rest of the world, would take
precedence. The same thing happened in Yugoslavia when the rest of
the world intervened, out of fear, after they had screwed up the IMF loans
and provided the match to start the flame. But I never met a Yugoslavian
from any of the cultures that didn't understand the necessity to maintain
the balance of the world.
3. The problem with Jay's premise is that logic is limited to the knowledge of the conscious mind. Such knowledge proved inadequate for I.A. Richards class at Oxford to even decide the meaning of a group of unidentified poems that they were supposed to evaluate. They were supposed to define the time, author, message and quality of the poems. None of which were correct. The entire class got a huge zero because without the context of time they couldn't make judgments. Unlike Math, poetry was not reversible. Richards on the other hand could do all four. He concluded that there was a holistic evaluation that sprang from the interaction of being with the material to be evaluated. Something that only life and experience would give the young geniuses.
Buber makes much the same point as does Jerzy Grotowski when Grotowski identifies that encounter with cadre a specific point in the body where a synergistic focus creates another way of seeing the world being encountered. All of this relates, in case you were wondering, to the bit of "put down" to the hallucinations of vision.
Actually it is in times of stress and trial that those points of clarity emerge as stories in the mind. Up until that time they are just dreams and popular songs. It is the vision on the mountain top after four days and nights of no food or water that brought some of the greatest points of synthesis in human history. Afterwards it was, like grammar, the erection of a system of logic to explain the synthesis for the purpose of memory and education of the young.
Jay, your vision seems to fit some of the things that I was taught early on. But what they assumed and I don't see you believing, is that a vision is a time/space bound event. After that, like art, it is something to help us understand how people lived and thought in another time. I agree with you about rhetoric, but then you seem to lose faith, as a result, in the ability of each generation to find their own vision through their life journey. I think that is a mistake. Visions are from the place where even words cannot walk, while logic is limited to this electronic beast without even the ability to utter an inflection. In my mind that is a pretty narrow walk to take. Kind of like judging the universe through Galileo's telescope or maybe a keyhole.
But all of that being said, I enjoy your wit and imagination and loved the spaceship. And you are one hell of an imagination. Do you write science fiction?
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Chamber Opera of New York, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Jay Hanson wrote:
From: Brad McCormick, Ed.D. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>>> I agree with you Eva. In a different world, with different animals,
>> Democracy would be geat.
>
> IF NOT US, WHO?
> IF NOT NOW, WHEN?(a) The first step in successful problem solving is NOT having a
hallucination ("vision") as is the current fashion. (Gee, I am in love with
the idea of Democracy, so let's do it.)(b) The first step in successful problem solving IS to analyze the nature
of the problem (ask any engineer or systems analyst).(c) With respect to politics among animals (believe-it-or-not, people are
animals), think of it as a "game management" problem. The goal of the game
manager is to minimize the aggregate suffering of the herd.If one can simply accept a, b, and c above, then one will have made more
progress towards a sustainable and just future than anyone else has thus
far.Jay
