From: Case (Case@iSpots.com)
Date: Wed Oct 05 2005 - 19:15:27 BST
Thank you, Ant
This post was met with a silence matched only by the reponse to my Ghost
Dance post. Platt's belated reply to your comments was predicatable and can
be summarized as: "Buncha damn Hippies"
One can account for the hedonism criticism of the 60s by noting that the
boomers were the first generation of people on this planet to find
themselves immune from all of the really bad stuff that plagued their
ancestors. Most diseases had cures, pregancy was not the invitable
consequence of sex, wars were reduced to "police actions" and poverty had
been bought to historically low levels in the developed countries.
I am tempted to credit this to the good auspices of liberal control of most
institutions but the point is that for a brief moment anything seemed
possible. There was a recognition that many of the reasons we had assumed
for behaving as we had been were no longer valid and other justifications
would have to be found. Until they were, heck, let's party. Nevertheless,
there was an strong undercurrent of spirituality to much of that hedonism
and it was the first time at least since Hesse that eastern ideas received a
popular hearing in the west.
My main point really was about the space program. Here was a task that had
no obvious benefits. It was the ulimate chasing of pie in the sky and yet
look at the way, even in its currently crippled state, it continues to
capture the imagination of people around the world. At minimum it showed
that mankind could be motivated by a vision of something at higher levels of
Maslow's hierarchy than previously suspected. It indicated that the selfish
pursuit of individual desire was not the only road to travel. Some of the
current threads going on now about permaculture and thinking local and
acting globally, originally spun from 70s echos of 60s idealism. Sadly I
thought those echos die out long ago. It is heartening to hear that anyone
remembers them.
I am flat out willing to say that exploration of space is a task of the
highest moral order from an MoQ perspective but that would take a bit more
time than I have at the moment and would be utterly futile if no one is
interested anyway.
Your comment on Paul McCartney's comment reminded me of the movie Flashback
where Dennis Hopper tells Keiffer Sutherland, "When we get out of the 80s
the 90s are going to make the 60s look like the 50s."
You know if someone had been able to keep his privates in his pants, it
might have been.
Case
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ant McWatt" <antmcwatt@hotmail.co.uk>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 04, 2005 9:21 AM
Subject: MD Terrorism
Case stated to Platt September 25th:
I actually remember the kind of system I am comfortable with. I remember a
time when I had hope for the future of our people. You are going to love
this one Platt.
It was the 1960's. It was a difficult time to be sure. There was the Cold
War, Vietnam and the assassinations or our leaders by terrorists. But there
were other things as well. The Civil Rights movement showed that we were
finally coming to terms with the power of the beliefs we had set as the
foundation of our nation. We were willing to deal at last with the blight of
racism. A blight we had enshrined in our constitution. These are exactly the
points I have been trying to make here. During that period we as a people
were willing to reexamine the way we had been treating our fellow citizens
for a 100 years. The same people we had enslaved for 150 years before that.
We began to see the consequences or our failure to Value a significant
portion of our population.
Under a Dynamic leader we had set our sites on the stars and actively
promoted scholarship and science in the pursuit of an impossible dream. I
can't watch Apollo 13 without breaking into tears over the majesty of the
vision, the intensity of our commitment to the men and mission and the
tragedy of having thrown it all away. In a recent anniversary screening of
the movie, Frank Lovell was interviewed. His comments on the spirit of
commitment at NASA during that time and his distress over the political
failure to push that vision forward through the 70's (read: Nixon era) was
heart breaking.
We saw that by working together we could do the impossible and in the
process make discoveries that would have lasting benefits for everyone on
this planet. It was a time when money was not the only thing that people
valued. But ultimately it is our baser instincts that seem to have won the
day. Those baser instincts like greed and lust for power that you seem to
Value so highly. It was a very dynamic time on many fronts and apparently a
lot of static latches got tripped. Much of the evil in the present results
from backlash against those days.
Your failure to recognize that there is a higher good than money or that
people other than U.S. citizens have any right to self determination and
your failures understand our system of finance and politics would be
shocking if:
a. I believed you were serious
b. You weren't parroting views trumpeted in our media by supposedly serious
people.
Ant McWatt comments:
Case,
I enjoyed the above piece of writing. It reminded me of Paul McCartney's
observation in the mid-1990s that the Sixties still seemed like the future
to him. Again, I think it was because of the number of "static latches
[that] got tripped" then in the arts and in the political arena which still
haven't been followed through or developed yet.
I have to agree with you that it has been a great pity the ways things have
generally turned out in the West since the Sixties. I know there was a
certain hedonist degeneracy with the hippie era but since then, the US and
UK and moved towards a far worse type of conservative degeneracy as seen in
Watergate (Platt is always very quiet about that certain right-wing
episode), military actions (as seen in Iraq) and a materialist, selfish
ethos of fear (as seen in the governments of Thatcher, Raygun, Bush etc).
I do hope therefore that Pirsig's work will eventually provide more balanced
individuals their own foundation of moral values that can be used to fill
the vacuum left by Hippie hedonism and, at the same time, challenge the
present right-wing hegemony. As Liberal politicians need to realise, moral
values don't necessarily have to mean the political agenda of neo-con
Fundamentalist Christianity. As such, and as a small step in the correct
direction, maybe people should consider sending their local Liberal
candidate a copy of ZMM or LILA!
Best wishes,
Anthony.
www.robertpirsig.org
.
_________________________________________________________________
Don't just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Oct 05 2005 - 20:59:39 BST