From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Tue Dec 24 2002 - 13:48:54 MST
Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Dec 2002, Greg Burch wrote:
>
>
>>[* I was 13 in 1970, but had an older brother with whom I tagged along
>>into some of the core experiences people associate with "the 60s."...]
>
>
> Lord, I cannot believe that I'm a year older than Greg Burch
> (no offense Greg). It must be that he seems so much more
> educated than I (as his speeches and eloquent post demonstrate).
>
Y'all are making me feel ancient. :-) I was sweet and terribly
naive 16 in 1970. I had read Leary, Huxley, Alan Watts. I had
spend the last several years with the horror of Vietnam,
political assasinations, MAD being formative factors in my
consiciousness. By 16 I had decided to look inward for some
years and to attempt to find those who were doing likewise. I
was persuaded that only a shift of consciousness could really
make a difference. The last thing I wanted was to go
immediately to college and have my math gifts feed the machine
whose products seemed to me then to be so terrible.
> *But* he did miss some essential aspects of the "60s".
>
> The 60s began with the Beatles. It was a "new" kind of music
> (though derived from the likes of Elvis and Buddy Holley in the
> late '50s.) The peak of the '60s was clearly Woodstock with
> people like Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead and the Doors
> (esp. Jim Morrison) were redefining how we thought about the
> central issue of the day (the Vietnam War). The '60s ended
> with the "rock opera", esp. Tommy (from The Who) and Jesus
> Christ Superstar (Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber), good
> hard rock (e.g. Grand Funk Railroad), pop (Three Dog Night)
> and was dead when disco (e.g. Saturday Night Fever) arrived.
>
> To view an era, a good window is its music.
Hardly. This utterly misses the atmosphere of new beginnings,
inquiry outside the boundaries of yesteryear, a sense of
personal responsibility for whatever comes next and so on that
were ate the very heart of the 60s. The music was an outgrowth
of that heart and one expression of it. It was certainly not
the essence.
>
>
>>I very much agree with Harvey that transhumanism can claim to be the
>>legitimate descendant of much of what was best about "the 60s" -- the
>>adventurism, the energy, the ideals of ultimate liberty and exploration.
>
>
> The basic idea is the same:
> "We can do better than this."
>
> The only difference between now and the '60s is that we know what the
> technologies are (biotechnology and nanotechnology) that really can
> accomplish this. Unlike back in the '60s when we only had nuclear
> weapons, missles, primitive integrated circuits and a lot of motivated
> people (enough to get us to the moon).
>
I think we have forgotten the part about the importance of a
"change of mind" though.
> The young people on the list should really study how far we have come.
> I haven't looked for the numbers but I suspect the average hand held
> computer, perhaps even the average cell phone, has more CPU power than
> the Apollo command module.
>
And yet our culture is, if anything, more filed with emptiness
and hype than it was then. I doubt that that is lost on the
young today either.
> Why can't we do better than this? (e.g. a pandemic orphaning millions
> of children in Africa).
>
> Why?
Because our actual working priorities are caught up in a race to
make money faster than our governments can confiscate it? Our
priorities seem (still) more about power, relative prestige,
amassing wealth among assumed and or create scarcity, violent
defense of "ours" and a relative low priority on maximizing the
well-being of all people or even our own. Can it be different?
Some days I think so. Other days I confess to not being so sure.
- samantha
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