At Fri, 26 Mar 1999 21:00:07 -0500, you wrote:
>
>Hi,
>
>Reed Konsler <konsler@ascat.harvard.edu> writes:
><<
>Agreed. We live in a world where some people have learned to behave
>violently. I wish we could teach them all, but many are adults with
>strongly fixed patterns of behavior. These people are dangerous. I
>don't think we should exagerate our fear, but if they learn to
>cooperate by trial and error their errors may involve massacres. If
>they learn to cooperate within small groups they may use this
>solidarity to strike out at other groups.
>>>
>
>"strongly fixed patterns of behaviour" = "entrentched theories" =
>"dogmatism". Funny how that virian sin comes up again and again, eh?
>
>To be honest, I have no real idea about what can be done for foreign
>relations. It seems equally obvious that doing nothing and bombing
>are both wrong, that a "happy medium" must exist, but I don't know
>where it lies or of what it consists.
>
>Just before we get back to the BNW below, I'd like to recommend
>Huxley's _Brave New World Revisited_. It covers a remarkable amount
>of material in a slim amount of words (filling on 150 pages), but even
>better than is the eloquence and clear forthright style that he uses.
>Especially of interest is his chapter on "Education for Freedom", and
>his remarkable point about human societies not being "organisms", in
>the sense that ants and bees have a social organism, but rather
>"organizations" (which, of course, flows against what Bloom said). It
>is good enough that I'll even type it out for all Virians to read:
>
>"For the individual termite, service to the termitary is perfect
>freedom. But human beings are not completely social; they are only
>moderatly gregarious. Their societies are not organisms, like the
>hive or anthill; they are organizations, in other words ad hoc
>machines for collective living."
>
>He talks about this point and it's relationship to the BNW and tyranny
>at great length.
>
><<
>Back to BNW..those people are also programmed..but they never
>*crave* anything. They never have to..they don't need to consciously
>ignore their addictions, in the sense a Buddhist learns to, becuase
>they never experience separation. Isn't that more efficient? Or is
>there some value in complexity?
>>>
>
>Efficiency is not a good goal for ones life -- the most "efficient"
>life would probably be over before it began! It reminds me of
>something I read a long time ago.. Rifkin. A real fanatic, and
>usually wrong, but he did have a very good point about focussing to
>closely on efficiency.
>
>http://www.enviroweb.org/coe/e-sermons/jeremy.html
>
><<
>Maybe simplicity shouldn't always be our goal? Becuase, perhaps,
>simplicity..like the void before the universe began..is pregnant
>with instability. Maybe the innocence of BNW, the innocence before
>conception, is too unstable to survive reality.
>>>
>
>On this point, Huxley mentions The Grand Inquisitor. "In the end they
>will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us 'make us your slaves,
>but feed us'." He talks about cycles between attitudes.. those
>without freedom demand it, while those who have it slowly let it go..
>
>http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/dos.htm
>
>It would be interesting to find out if you could us that as an
>explaination of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I need more
>knowledge of history!!!
>
>
>ERiC
I have earlier remarked that BNW was not the mature expression of Aldous Huxley's utopian thought; that rather ISLAND was. I would like to add that Burgess' A CLOCKWORK ORANGE is surpassed by his novel THE WANTING SEED, with its memetic confrontations and alternations between Apollonian and Dionysian worldviews.
Joe E. Dees
Poet, Pagan, Philosopher