[MD] BBC documentary 'the trap'

[John Carl]

Well I think you missed my point about no hope, Arlo. I'm not blaming
Academic or Mediated reality for the decline in community, I'm saying those
are about the only two means of spreading a metaphysical shift needed for
the healing,  and as they are constructed, I do not seen any way to get them
to bring about this shift.

For cause, I have some differing ideas.

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 9:29 PM, ARLO J BENSINGER JR <ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:

[John]
> But how does that interact and create change in a real world?  Where is the
> interface of modern culture with metaphysical shifts?  Two places I can
> think
> of, Academia and MediaWorld.  I have no hope in either.
>
> [Arlo]
> And if we are examining the loss of community, where do we look as
> something
> that spread this devalue? I can tell you in my life exactly when it became
> noticable, and it was not in the 70s. The devaluing of community, even if
> you
> see it as a "final nail", was part and parcel of the rhetoric of "rugged
> individualism" of the 80s, the outright demonizing and ridicule of any of
> the
> "commun-" words, not just communism, but communal, community... We started
> having it beaten into our skulls that caring about one's neighbors,
> thinking
> about community, acting in any communal way, was un-patriotic, anti-freedom
> and
> outright evil.


Well I noticed it in the 80's, but I saw the roots of the decay begin in the
70's, and to my mind, the biggest contribution was the way Women left the
home and went into the workplace.  Women had been performing for millenia
the indispensable role of social conduit from the family to the community at
large, women organizing dinner parties, women organizing tupperware parties,
all the undervalued social nicities that men denigrated and overlooked.

And please, I am NOT claiming women should go back to the kitchen, barefoot,
pregnant, etc.  But sometimes the solution to a social inequity causes its
own problems in turn and I think a case can be made here.


> The greed of the 80s decade, the "yuppie" thing, all the focus of the
> glories
> of selfishness, this was the drumbeat of the new patriotism. As I said, you
> don't lose something you value, when society valued community it held onto
> it
> strongly. Somewhere, someone, it devalued it.


I agree.


> And you place the blame on
> "Academia"?


No.


> Hell, if anything "academia" is continually assaulted for even the
> most remotest considerations or valuations of "community". Most of the
> "academics" have been pointing, with sadness, at the erosion of
> neighborhoods
> and community for decades.
>

I agree.


>
> Still, many academic disciplines contributed, and many adopted a
> non-social,
> isolationist view of the human condition. I don't deny this.
>

Me neither


>
> Joseph Campbell talks about this from a de-mything of culture, lamenting
> that
> social humans need an "effective general mythology", a shared set of
> symbols by
> which they can orient their understandings of the world, through which they
> can
> be part of a larger thing than just their own lives. He attributes (if I
> understand him) the high rates of psychoses in modern life to the void
> created
> when western culture abandoned all "myth" and scientific rationality was
> the
> only thing offered in replacement. I think this maps accurately onto
> Pirsig,
> another post though.
>


We probably didn't so much abandon myth, as replace one myth with another.
 That "other", being values-free, has been a disaster.



>
> I'm not sure the level of blame to place of the "media", other than its
> role in
> promoting via advertising the crass consumerism and selfish behavior of
> people.



Sometimes that which ameliorates, also contributes to the problem.  If
people get a surface social itch scratched, they won't see the need for
addressing the deeper problem.

Communistically,

John