How odd, Ed, that is a book I have not read that I meant to get around to. I also have not read all of Proust or gotten through Finnegan’s Wake and I dont like astrology. I have huge gaps in my bibliography! There are so many books to read and you better do it ASAP, because , like money in the bank, you cant take it with you. In other realms, I have discovered to my great disappointment, that I am totally dyslexic.
I think, to paraphrase Whitehead, that we are a footnote to the sixties. I once had a friend, who was well versed in Marxist philosophy and Foucault ask me. " What is the Post-modern?"
I shrugged my shoulder and replied. " We are the Post-modern."
Those who lived through the post-modern did not at the time know that is what was happening. It was only after the French Invasion that the term became popular. I imagine that our review yesterday is just the " tip of the iceberg."
I recall the Paris protests and the Stonewall riots happened in '68. Those events were riding upon waves of discontent with Vietnam, the Cold War and other social injustices. My teen years happened then. In many ways, after the crack down initiated by Reagan and Thatcher, which shut down many liberating initiates, we hunkered down. And we have continued to hunker down. In many ways, each decade has become even more disappointing. The AIDS epidemic shut much of it down. The heat, as one hooker said, from the street is gone.
I have a vague hope that with the pressures we are confronting, that the aging boomers and the agile millennials, could reawaken to those weird, pagan, nature mystic rhythms of the 60’s and break out of the Neo-Liberal consensus trance states transmitted by the flat screened culture.
I have my doubts that this will happen and yet I sense that there are underground public events ( like our Cafe) that are perhaps connected to a 4th dimension, a non-Euclidean social topology, just beneath us, that wants to happen. that could break up our habitual patterns. As Arran Gare says, Western Culture has become Nihilism, Inc.
Is there something we can do to re-enter a reconstructive phase that breaks up the Nihilistic wave? We need to repair the rifts that the deconstructive post-modernists have created by deconstructing the humanities. I have the hope that we can start that reconstruction phase by honoring the Post-modern attempt to preserve pluralism. Now that we have pulled up the weeds can we start planting some seeds? I think Peterson is partially right and partially wrong. So I need to do a better job of getting clear about those indeterminate zones, where angels fear to tread.
I expect that by reviewing these Integral thinkers we could rekindle a new wave. We have lots to win if we can make even a minor gesture in that direction. I’m open to that possibility.
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