Don sounds a theme that recurs here every now and then ... usually briefly.
That a lot of us are not so single-minded about our rationality that we
exclude the 'higher passions' .... the intense feelings that modernist
culture has no room for, gives no support to ... the deep ecologist's sense
of participation in a living whole Earth ... the longings for and ecstasies
of the spiritual dimension of human experiencing ... the fusions of feeling
and reason in actions born of love and deep empathy.
And we look for a language, besides that of experience itself, in which to
savour and remember and share and reflect on and further pursue these
aspects of what is most real to us. We look for companions and artifacts
and institutions or whatever means there may be to link and extend the
moments into lives made richer by a quality we cannot doubt.
There have been educational systems devoted to this ... though usually
mixed with the other aspects of humanity -- practicality, and the many
other passions we swim in (including the passion for reason, for
dispassionateness). These higher passions are not antithetical to
materialism, but they represent other values. Real human communities on a
reasonably large scale can and have accommodated both mysticisms and
materialisms, both nobility and pettiness. It is not human to be too pure.
Our modernist society, especially in its late neo-liberal
globalist-capitalist consumerist materialist hyper-regulatory terror of
imminent catastrophe (oh are we ever millennialist!), is being pushed
toward an unsupportable extreme of hyper-rationalization and monopoly of
empty-feeling pseudo-values. Its institutions more and more invite our
contempt and our tactical appropriation of them for our own local and
trans-institutional purposes.
We are practically forcing Anti-Christs and False Prophets to appear and
prosper. We are hoping for catastrophes to release us from the juggernaut
we're caught in. We're ready to cheer on every sort of good-hearted outlaw.
And we're hoping that the toppling idols don't happen to land on US.
Mysticism will rise, is rising, again and here .... for worse, and maybe
even for better. JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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