Why most people dont like Classical Music

[Amalie]

Originally posted by Peter:
Sorry Amalie but I think you're looking back with rose-coloured spectacles - by 1848 much of Europe (not just France) was engulfed in revolutions which threatened to break out also in England. And why? because it wasn't the utopia you descbibe, but a world of great hardship, cruelty and injustice when a man could be hanged for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. It was a world which depended on slavery to build empires and for the riches provided by the industrial revolution - a world in which children as young as 9 were set to work in the most dreadful conditions. A world in which women had no rights and could be legally raped and beaten by their husbands. It was also an age of great drunkeness and debauchery (especially amongst the aristocracy and personified in the king). It was also a world without anaesthetics - especially relevant as I was at the dentist yesterday!

Our society today has many faults, but going back to the 18th/19th centuries is not the answer. We need to build on the social reforms we have achieved, and most importantly to truly improve education (not the false and cynical manipulations that we see today which will betray a generation) and yes there needs to be a cultural and spiritual reawakening. Music should be part of the curriculum - the value of this was realised by the ancient Greeks - truly our politicians are living in the dark ages.

Interesting comments Peter, but I am not sure you have really got the history in focus here. I am not trying to sound like one of the last horseman of the apocalypse with regard to modern times, though goodness knows with the proliferation of nuclear weapons in unsafe hands, there is plenty of scope for this, but it really is the case I think that there is a vast gulf in sesibility, civilization and culture between say Eruope in 1800 and in the year 2000, of course there have been inumerable technological and hygenic advances between then and now which are largely the result of the industrial and scientific revolution.
But, but this has been achieved at a truly terrible cost. We have all been implicit in a Faustian bargain with the great God of material progress and the deal has been and still is that we get the material advances and he gets mans soul. This is precisely the terrible dilema that the great supermen of the spirit such as Beethoven, Byron, Wordsworth, etc. were obsessed by. And rightly so in my view. Wordsworth and the Romantics and the more sensitive Victorians such as Arnold and Carlyle were horrified at what technological advances and industrialization were doing to the soul of man and not just the brutalized masses, but the whole of what they termed organic society. Wordsworth prophetic lines stated 'The world is too much with us, early and late and getting and spending we lay waste our powers'. You cannot simply say surely, that there is just a few problems in modern society after two world wars which have nearly destroyed the planet, when it is clear, I think, that what is happening is simply the working out of the Faustian bargain of man trying to grab everything that it can for himself with no thought either for God or the society around him. Huxley's Brave New World, brilliantly sums up the whole situation of the modern world when we do everything for instant gratification and then worry or at least the more sensitive people do about the way our souls are rotting away. The brutal truth is, unforunately is that we can't have both at the same time, that is to say, a dynamic life enhancing culture with technological progress and the material aggrandisement.
Without being depressing, there is even surely a great truth enshrined in Nietzsche's observation that great culture and art is based on suffering, cruelty and slavery. I wish that was not the case, but that is the way it is, and yes, sure I would have had less rights I guess, 200 years ago, the fact is society is far more spiritualy impoverished and indeed getting worse so, now than it was then and with consequences for the future I do not wish to think about.

[Peter]

Originally posted by Amalie:

Interesting comments Peter, but I am not sure you have really got the history in focus here. I am not trying to sound like one of the last horseman of the apocalypse with regard to modern times, though goodness knows with the proliferation of nuclear weapons in unsafe hands, there is plenty of scope for this, but it really is the case I think that there is a vast gulf in sesibility, civilization and culture between say Eruope in 1800 and in the year 2000, of course there have been inumerable technological and hygenic advances between then and now which are largely the result of the industrial and scientific revolution.
But, but this has been achieved at a truly terrible cost. We have all been implicit in a Faustian bargain with the great God of material progress and the deal has been and still is that we get the material advances and he gets mans soul. This is precisely the terrible dilema that the great supermen of the spirit such as Beethoven, Byron, Wordsworth, etc. were obsessed by. And rightly so in my view. Wordsworth and the Romantics and the more sensitive Victorians such as Arnold and Carlyle were horrified at what technological advances and industrialization were doing to the soul of man and not just the brutalized masses, but the whole of what they termed organic society. Wordsworth prophetic lines stated 'The world is too much with us, early and late and getting and spending we lay waste our powers'. You cannot simply say surely, that there is just a few problems in modern society after two world wars which have nearly destroyed the planet, when it is clear, I think, that what is happening is simply the working out of the Faustian bargain of man trying to grab everything that it can for himself with no thought either for God or the society around him. Huxley's Brave New World, brilliantly sums up the whole situation of the modern world when we do everything for instant gratification and then worry or at least the more sensitive people do about the way our souls are rotting away. The brutal truth is, unforunately is that we can't have both at the same time, that is to say, a dynamic life enhancing culture with technological progress and the material aggrandisement.
Without being depressing, there is even surely a great truth enshrined in Nietzsche's observation that great culture and art is based on suffering, cruelty and slavery. I wish that was not the case, but that is the way it is, and yes, sure I would have had less rights I guess, 200 years ago, the fact is society is far more spiritualy impoverished and indeed getting worse so, now than it was then and with consequences for the future I do not wish to think about.

Well I agree with much of what you say in relation to our world now - we are spiritually impoverished and grossly materialistic, my original point was that it is hard to imagine a time when it was otherwise and I don't really think that the 18th century was spiritually superior for the reasons stated earlier. Beethoven was in favour of the revolution and even Napoleon initially for good reason - society was unjust and rotten to the core. That the ideals of the revolution were trampled under much blood doesn't alter that.

The argument is academic anyhow as we both agree that the state of things at present is pretty dire - what matters is not so much how we got into this mess but how we get out of it and this ties up nicely with the original question as i believe classical music does offer a way. As you say it takes us deeper into ourselves and to our spiritual core - in other words closer to God where we ought to be!

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'Man know thyself'

[Amalie]

Yes indeed Peter, how to get out of it is the big question, but I suppose we all have our own views on that. All of us on this site however, would surely agree that whatever is the way, the man from Bonn is part of it and therefore part of the solution!

My own hobby horse is television, which I am very anti. When I was at school in the 70's I recall a number of teachers inveighing against television and saying that it would bring about the collapse of society and culture as we know it, and I always used to smile at that and thought it was very extreme. But my goodness, how right they were! I think one of the great things about the internet is that when it is used intelligently, ie. on our site, it is a very communal thing and acts as a clearing house of ideas and in a sense brings people together whereas television fragments people and society, quite apart from its sub-literate content.



[This message has been edited by Amalie (edited September 27, 2003).]

[Peter]

Originally posted by Amalie:
Yes indeed Peter, how to get out of it is the big question, but I suppose we all have our own views on that. All of us on this site however, would surely agree that whatever is the way, the man from Bonn is part of it and therefore part of the solution!

My own hobby horse is television, which I am very anti. When I was at school in the 70's I recall a number of teachers inveighing against television and saying that it would bring about the collapse of society and culture as we know it, and I always used to smile at that and thought it was very extreme. But my goodness, how right they were! I think one of the great things about the internet is that when it is used intelligently, ie. on our site, it is a very communal thing and acts as a clearing house of ideas and in a sense brings people together whereas television fragments people and society, quite apart from its sub-literate content.

[This message has been edited by Amalie (edited September 27, 2003).]

I understand how you feel about tv - most of it is dire and banal and I hardly ever watch it - but like the internet there are some good things on it - at present I'm enjoying the series 'Great wonders of the industrial world' - (the Bellrock lighthouse was fascinating especially as it was contemporary with Beethoven), David Attenborough's series have always been absolutely brilliant and I'm going to give this Eroica film a go next week, despite the inevitable liberties!

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'Man know thyself'

[mrfixit]

I think attention span has a lot to do with it. I have said before education is crap becuase those in power want it that way. Anyway i dont mind people not liking classical music. I hate having to explan why i like it to retards. (Being harsh but i find people who hate classical music, are people who tend not to read and believe everything they see on tv.)

[Joy]

Television like everything else can be 'crap' as can the internet. The solution is using these marvelous inventions intelligently. Getting back to a few posts ago I agree the world is in a right mess and I also don't profess to wearing rose coloured glasses, but I would rather live in this time than in a previous era. Think of all the technological advances, scientific advances and space exploration, traveling opportunities, medical advances, cures for illnesses that people only 50 yrs. ago could only dream of. It's mind boggling. Not to mention living conditions, plumbing, electricity, modern miracles to say the least. Things most of us take for granted but can you imagine what people 100 yrs. ago would have loved having?
All the ages had had their problems diseases, wars, brutalities, injustices, but for all it's faults and for it's wonderful conveniences, I'll pick this time.

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'Truth and beauty joined'

[Steppenwolf]

Originally posted by Amalie:
[B] Yes of course, Beethoven wrote in the age of revolution and he wrote for the elite and wealthy patrons. It is true that in a material sense people had less in general than they do now, but the odd thing is with the notable exception of France, society in Europe was remarkably coherent, stable, and spiritual in often non-religious ways. Society today in the west is insane, dangerously unstable and in many ways quite inhuman in the sense that there are precious few shared values, no common culture with a progressive degradation of everything spiritual and immaterial.
People like Mozart and Beethoven, like the scholars of the middle ages, who where ever they came from, all spoke and wrote in a shared language, ie. Latin, took it for granted that among the aristocracy at least, there was a shared culture which meant that they could speak in musical terms to one another in intelligable terms.
That sort of society is of course, virtually extinct. The west has become in effect Balkanized, that is split off into thousands of pieces and sub-cultures, many often within the same country and now that all the eggs have been smashed the pieces cannot now be put together again. Of course, the hope is that like minded individuals listening to the greats of the past will, like the survivors of some great cataclysm composed, as Auden said, of Eros and of Dust, exchange messages like ironic points of light in the darkness.
[B]

I must agree with Amalie's comments 100%. Like it or not, modern society is sick, sick to the core. This is not something people like hearing - who wants to hear a negative diagnosis? - but it is the truth, difficult to discern when we are in the middle of it, but in the future with the benefit of hindsight it will be obvious. I am sure that most Roman citizens living in the year 400 were blissfully unaware of the impending doom of their civilisation - it is difficult to see something when you are living close to it, distance gives clarity.
Certainly, life was harsh in the 18th century, harsh and often cruel. The average person had to struggle to survive in a way a person of the modern era, living in the comfort of western civilisation, has no conception. But the SPIRIT of the age was SO radically different from our own.
I have tried to diagnose the cause of the modern sickness and I believe I may have arrived at the answer. And Nietzsche sheds some light on the problem, because he had the forsight to see it comming. God is dead, and we have killed him - or, more precisely, belief in spirituality has all but disapeared in the western world, and as a consequence of this there is a general feeling of dispair that life has no purpose; a nihilistic gloom has set in. What can make me happy? Material luxury, the pursuit of wealth, drugs, compulsive sex, violent movies .... any thrill or stimulant that makes me FORGET that I am standing before the abyss, that makes me forget that perhaps life is nothing more than a journey from the maternity ward to the crematorium, that after all it may be, as Shakespeare put it, a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"! A society whose collective concsciouness is based on this anxiety, on this overwhelming dispair, cannot create great art, because as Nietzsche says great art is only possible as a supreme AFFIRMATION of life. The decadence, the decay of modern society is evidenced by modern 'art', which is often neurotic and self-possessed confusion. People often talk about the 'drug problem' in modern society - there is no such thing! It is merely the SYMPTOM of the problem, and clamping down on drugs through law enforcement is as useless in solving the problem as placing a bandage on a rash rather than curing the inner sickness that causes it. And as we stand before the abyss, and as we face the vacuum that the absence of spirituality has left, all sorts of fake moralities and cures come and go - political correctness, socialism, etc ... but all this is just like a group of animals huddling together for comfort in the abatoire, it is not going to solve anything.

Nietzsche suggested that the challenge facing our age (which he forsaw before it happened) was to overcome this nihilism and once again affirm life, despite all its uncertainty. Until then we will continue to decay - can't you see that Western society is loosing the will to live? How else can you explain the emergence of bizare fads such as 'multiculturalism' (ie. the tolerance of all cultures EXCEPT the dominant culture of the majority, western culture), and the tendency many liberals have for self hatred and self loathing (ie. 'stupid white men' are responsible for all the evils in the world).

I suspect that in Roman times, under the last emperors, there was rap-style music as well.

[Steppenwolf]

Originally posted by mrfixit:
I hate having to explan why i like it to retards. (Being harsh but i find people who hate classical music, are people who tend not to read and believe everything they see on tv.)

As a favourite saying of mine goes - you can't feed strawberies to pigs!
People that HATE classical music (rather than merely being uninterested in it) I view with deep suspicion and unease. I am sure that there is something deficient with their brains.

[Steppenwolf]

Originally posted by Joy:
I really enjoyed your interpretation of Beethoven's 5th second half. I agree with you! Powerful stuff. The way part of the third movement just lulls you into a state of calmness and then explodes with the power of the 4th movement. Makes me want to put on my CD and listen right now!

The dominant theme of the third movement also expresses something difficult to describe in words, a feeling .. the closest I can come up with is the ideal of 'nobility'. There is something very majestic, very grand and very noble about it, in a very human sense. It succintly expresses an ideal of true manhood, an ideal rarely encountered today, an ideal of nobility - avoiding the extremes of crude, macho, boorish masculinity, and foppish effeminacy of some cultured, intellectual types. A strong but refined masculinity, strongh in character and in mind, elevated to the realm of true nobility! You can sense the Stum und Drang of Beethoven as he bravely faced the misfortune of his own life, his disability of deafness. What a great soul Beethoven must have been. Such great human beings are not born often.

[spaceray]

Originally posted by Beyond Within:
I was thinking about this today...and I realized it seems due to several factors:

1. Most people dont have any musical training (or very little) so they cant appreciate music intended for an audience with extensive knowledge (like Mozart 'n stuff).

Yes,people don't sit in the salon anymore playing string quartets with eachother after dinner.But in music schools ,music is alive and well.

[Gurn Blanston]

Actually, I am not all that sure that I can accept your basic premise - i.e. "Most people hate classical music". If you would phrase it thusly "most people don't consider classical music as their main musical choice" then perhaps I could agree with you, but as someone who has uncompromisingly played my own music in forums that required interaction with others, I have nearly without exception found people to be actually quite content with it after the initial shock wears off. ANd since the bulk of these people are, like myself, the intellectual unwashed, it is definitely not because their great educational background came to the fore in a pinch, either. What I have found is that many people have told me that they like the music, but they feel as though they have to have some basic level of understanding in order to listen to it. I invariably point out to them that the only understanding required is that they understand that it is OK to listen to what they like no matter their level of understanding. In fact, I have only run across 1 person in 10 years who has said that he absolutely couldn't listen to that, and this is a man who seems to hate everything anyway, so I put little creedence in his opinion of music.
Perhaps it is a twisted manifestation of latent Quixote-ism, but I really disagree with the statements that I have been reading here that the world is well on its way to cultural hell. Many of us are now old enough to say "back in my day", just like we used to hate from our relatives when we were young, but I'm sure we have noticed that the world is more complicated than it was when I grew up in the '50's and '60's, and some of us even commiserate with the younger generation about how much more complex their lives have become, but never stop to think that OUR lives have become equally complex, and that what we now view as wrack and ruin is in fact a part of that complexity. There is just so much more out there, we can only be apprised of so much by the media, they don't have TIME to report the good stuff. This does not mean that there is not plenty of it out there. And even though I would have loved to be an intimate of Mozart, and also part of the Conversation Book Circle, nonetheless there is no way that I would be convinced that life in that time was better than now, unless you will concede that ignorance is bliss, then it was Utopia.
That's my opinion, I may be wrong.
Regards,
Gurn

[This message has been edited by Gurn Blanston (edited September 27, 2003).]

[Peter]

Originally posted by Steppenwolf:
I must agree with Amalie's comments 100%. Like it or not, modern society is sick, sick to the core. This is not something people like hearing - who wants to hear a negative diagnosis? - but it is the truth, difficult to discern when we are in the middle of it, but in the future with the benefit of hindsight it will be obvious. I am sure that most Roman citizens living in the year 400 were blissfully unaware of the impending doom of their civilisation - it is difficult to see something when you are living close to it, distance gives clarity.
Certainly, life was harsh in the 18th century, harsh and often cruel. The average person had to struggle to survive in a way a person of the modern era, living in the comfort of western civilisation, has no conception. But the SPIRIT of the age was SO radically different from our own.
I have tried to diagnose the cause of the modern sickness and I believe I may have arrived at the answer. And Nietzsche sheds some light on the problem, because he had the forsight to see it comming. God is dead, and we have killed him - or, more precisely, belief in spirituality has all but disapeared in the western world, and as a consequence of this there is a general feeling of dispair that life has no purpose; a nihilistic gloom has set in. What can make me happy? Material luxury, the pursuit of wealth, drugs, compulsive sex, violent movies .... any thrill or stimulant that makes me FORGET that I am standing before the abyss, that makes me forget that perhaps life is nothing more than a journey from the maternity ward to the crematorium, that after all it may be, as Shakespeare put it, a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"! A society whose collective concsciouness is based on this anxiety, on this overwhelming dispair, cannot create great art, because as Nietzsche says great art is only possible as a supreme AFFIRMATION of life. The decadence, the decay of modern society is evidenced by modern 'art', which is often neurotic and self-possessed confusion. People often talk about the 'drug problem' in modern society - there is no such thing! It is merely the SYMPTOM of the problem, and clamping down on drugs through law enforcement is as useless in solving the problem as placing a bandage on a rash rather than curing the inner sickness that causes it. And as we stand before the abyss, and as we face the vacuum that the absence of spirituality has left, all sorts of fake moralities and cures come and go - political correctness, socialism, etc ... but all this is just like a group of animals huddling together for comfort in the abatoire, it is not going to solve anything.

Nietzsche suggested that the challenge facing our age (which he forsaw before it happened) was to overcome this nihilism and once again affirm life, despite all its uncertainty. Until then we will continue to decay - can't you see that Western society is loosing the will to live? How else can you explain the emergence of bizare fads such as 'multiculturalism' (ie. the tolerance of all cultures EXCEPT the dominant culture of the majority, western culture), and the tendency many liberals have for self hatred and self loathing (ie. 'stupid white men' are responsible for all the evils in the world).

I suspect that in Roman times, under the last emperors, there was rap-style music as well.

I think we are more spiritually aware in a truer sense than in the 18th century - the majority of people today would not tolerate the barbarity of slavery nor the appalling social conditions. Who is the more spiritual, the 18th century man who regularly attends church, comes home blind drunk and beats his slaves or the 20th century man who never goes to church but spends his days working with the sick and poor in Africa? Who are we to judge!!!

The modern world really began with the age of enlightenment, when people began to question the corruption that existed in politics and organised religion. Democracies started to replace dictatorships and people began to be better informed and more educated, they no longer accepted things without question - in other words fear and ignorance were replaced with rational thought. Therefore I do not share the pessimistic viewpoints that have been expressed here - I believe we are moving into a different era and it has been necessary for all the old ways to be brushed aside.


I think if you walked down a London street in the 19th century and saw the drunkeness, the poverty, the child prositution you'd know which age was the less hypocritical and the more spiritually advanced. As I said elsewhere we are far from perfect and have an awful long way to go, but to imagine things were better in the past is misguided.




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'Man know thyself'

[Amalie]

Originally posted by Peter:
I think we are more spiritually aware in a truer sense than in the 18th century - the majority of people today would not tolerate the barbarity of slavery nor the appalling social conditions. Who is the more spiritual, the 18th century man who regularly attends church, comes home blind drunk and beats his slaves or the 20th century man who never goes to church but spends his days working with the sick and poor in Africa? Who are we to judge!!!

The modern world really began with the age of enlightenment, when people began to question the corruption that existed in politics and organised religion. Democracies started to replace dictatorships and people began to be better informed and more educated, they no longer accepted things without question - in other words fear and ignorance were replaced with rational thought. Therefore I do not share the pessimistic viewpoints that have been expressed here - I believe we are moving into a different era and it has been necessary for all the old ways to be brushed aside.


I think if you walked down a London street in the 19th century and saw the drunkeness, the poverty, the child prositution you'd know which age was the less hypocritical and the more spiritually advanced. As I said elsewhere we are far from perfect and have an awful long way to go, but to imagine things were better in the past is misguided.

With the greatest respect Peter, I think I have to differ for the following reasons.

1. We are not more spiritually aware than people in the 18th century, in fact we are incomparably poorer. Despite grinding poverty in those times,and in the face of desparate adversity, the almost superhuman courage and character of say the inhabitants of Georgian London puts us all to shame today, when we are all too aware in our pampered existences of seeking redress for the slightest of injuries. The people then for all their penury and distress were part of an organic society which simply does not exist any more.
It is quite wrong to suggest that Chrisianity in some way supported human degredation and the record of for instance, Methodist and Catholic clergy in working selflessly in the most deprived and dangerous parts of Britian in the 18th century and later, speaks for itself.
The churches were full then of rich and poor because everyone was aware of the reality of a numinous Deity, and that in turn for all the much hyped social deprivation in fact bound people and society together and many rich people and members of the nobility were perfectly aware and fullfilled their social obligations to the poor and society, and it is only really after all the news worthy bad aristos that make it into history, not the good ones. When you think of the work of Wesley for instance in the 18th century it is just fantastic what he accomplished, travelling the length and breadth of the British Isles many times to bring a better way of life to people who were the poorest of the poor.

2. I would maintain we live in a very cruel and barbaric age far worse that the 18th century. Why, we now have all these great technological gizmos and we are more aware than ever of the vilest poverty and maltreatment and abuse of the third world where two thirds of mankind lives in the rankest poverty and we do nothing as a society and very few individuals do to do anything about it. And this is the so called enlightened society where you can go to Holland and inject hard drugs into yourself in public and they have a ship that they perform abortions on that travels round the North Sea. And in Britian we have the highest divorce and bastardy rates in Europe, 12 million people functionaly illiterate, millions more drugged by tv, alchohol and football. the majority of the population having scarcely any idea of what spirituallity is, indeed rejecting the life of the mind for a mindless destructive persuit of Mammon and the body. And we are therefore more advanced than the 18th century, really?.

3. Of course Mr. Blair is only a reflection of the society around him, shallow, narcisstic, and delusional. But what really gets me, is the arrogance of this - super vacuo, who wants to sweep away the past and forget history because he does not understand it and finds it too challenging, and yet seems to want to replace it with a world where young children are brainwashed into sexual licence, dissent of all kinds is abolished, where in fact the rich are encouraged to gain further advantages at the expense of the poor, and Britians vanishing identity is submerged in a sludge of Euro trash. As I previously said, all of these themes were summed up by Huxley in Brave New World, and Blair, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung etc. etc. are on the side of the modernizers, ie. the future is what I say it is, and the, for want of a better word 'conservatives' who believe in culture and the enobling of the human spirit are consigned to the scrap heap.


4. I have to say something about the liberal obsession with progress. Mankind is not progressing, certainly not in a moral spiritual sense, and that is palpably obvious to us all surely on this site.
We may have put a man on the moon and given a vote to women and free school milk to children, but our spiritual ills are desparate and getting worse and does us no good at all think we are any better than people in the past, because in actual we have become barbarians in many ways in many areas of our lives, again Nietzsche summed it all up by saying, you just can't have a life giving culture and happiness for all at the same time, despite what the framers of the American constitution thought.
If you want happiness for all and better standards etc. it will lead to cultural imporverishment, if you want culture in the greatest sense, you have to accept pain, slavery and human suffering.
Our society gives me the overwhelming feeling of something from which the spirit has departed, much the same way Gibbon thought the spirit of Ancient Rome, contrary to popular belief did not live on in Byzantium. A poweful case can be made that the spirit of Europe departed for the shades at the latest at the time of the first world war and indeed may well have been intuited by Beethoven one hundred years before. Indeed Europe will not revive from its cultural grave for generations, if at all, and certainly not in the ridiculous corrupt Euro trash culture.


Really I have to say that it is the Liberals who look at the word through rose coloured spectacles, and who refuse to confront the reality of mans nature, thinking that man is progressing when his is really in some sense lower than the animals.
You mentioned walking down the streets of London in the 18th century, but I can think of a few places in London that is not safe for man or woman to walk down today, and have have you been in the West End late at night recently?
As I said on an earlier post what we have in Britian is a Balkanized society where whole sectors of the population live in a swirling sub-culture of crime, illiteracy, desperation and many English cities and people living in them are disconnected from any concept of society or state or nation.
Sure, we don't send our children up the chimney now adays, instead we expose them to the rotteness of modern society in all its lurid contours and moral decadence.
I am sure Dickens would not think that was progress. There again thats what comes from the Liberal let it all hang out, do what you like, mentality, and then we wonder why we have these problems. Progress indeed!



[This message has been edited by Amalie (edited September 28, 2003).]

[Gurn Blanston]

Amalie,
Just a short bit as I carried on last night and don't wish to do so again today.
I am pleased that I do not live in the same world that you do. Perhaps things are worse in Europe than in the States, but I simply don't see the things you describe, at least not in the sense that you describe them. I came from a very poor background but I took advantage of every opportunity available to me and was able to rise above it. Millions of others have done likewise. The reason that the world is a better place now is that WE WERE ABLE TO DO IT. This was not the case in the 18th and 19th century, and certainly not before. If you were born to the privelege, you were priveleged. If you were not, you were screwed with no chance of ever being otherwise. Yes, there is grinding poverty in the world. There has always been and will always be grinding poverty. The reason is that there are too damned many of us sharing the same finite resources. And as far as that goes, one man's poverty is another man's Utopia. Simply because a country full of people do not have the same technological and monetary advantages that we enjoy, does not mean that they are suffering for it. In fact they may be quite content with their lot in life. It is our culture which says that we must have certain possesions and other accoutrements of "civilization" and anyone who doesn't have them must be deprived in some sense. But other cultures live by other standards, and rate their success by other measures than we do, and it is unendurably snobbish of us to suggest that if they have not the same attainments as we have they are impoverished in some way. And although I hate to bring religion into any rational discussion, it is simply wrong to say that religion had no part in making the world the way it is now. Religion (specifically christianity) has been a mainstay of creating our culture with all its warts since it gained the ascendancy in the Dark Ages, which is where we would still be if they had been able to retain the control they had before the Enlightenment.


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Regards,
Gurn
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That's my opinion, I may be wrong.
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[mrfixit]

Amalie some good points but, its a waste of time yearning for a past that never was. I think basicly Human kind is headed in a direction of inprovement, but those in power panic and mess it up on purpose. I dont get all this blame on liberals.