If you'd like to believe that the young are less cultured due to their preference of learning, iin the words of the great god nike, "just do it".

Darn, I should know some latin to finish this off.

quote:

---

Originally posted by RevolutionPlease:
Without the internet, I NEVER would have learned as much as I have.

---

RP, if you google either of my expressions, you'll get the answer immediately.

"It is interesting that the story described a hunt for a work by Edmund Wilson. Not too long ago I tried to find Wilson's most famous work, To the Finland Station, in the public library here. An interlibrary search found a battered copy in the Orillia library.

It is immediately clear that, of course, anyone seriously looking for the history of collectivist thought leading up to Lenin's arrival, by train, at an entry point into Russia, in 1917, could google it in a moment.

But that is hugely presumptuous, assuming that everyone is capable of that act of digital manipulation. Some might call that elitist, or, at least, not representative of the real world of youth - certainly it doesn't describe the reading mozaic that is the public.

Among youth, of course, there are fewer digital illiterates, but a significant number will not go past the flotsam.

quote:

---

Originally posted by unionist:

RP, if you google either of my expressions, you'll get the answer immediately.

Without the internet, I never would have learned as much as I have.

---

quote:

---

I find these portents of change depressing, but also exhilarating–at least to speculate about. On the one hand, I have a great feeling of loss and a fear about what habitations will exist for self and soul in the future. But there is also a quickening, a sense that important things are on the line. As Heraclitus once observed, "The mixture that is not shaken soon stagnates." Well, the mixture is being shaken, no doubt about it. And here are some of the kinds of developments we might watch for as our "proto-electronic" era yields to an all-electronic future:

1. Language erosion. There is no question but that the transition from the culture of the book to the culture of electronic communication will radically alter the ways in which we use language on every societal level. The complexity and distinctiveness of spoken and written expression, which are deeply bound to traditions of print literacy, will gradually be replaced by a more telegraphic sort of "plainspeak." Syntactic masonry is already a dying art. Neil Postman and others have already suggested what losses have been incurred by the advent of telegraphy and television–how the complex discourse patterns of the nineteenth century were flattened by the requirements of communication over distances. That tendency runs riot as the layers of mediation thicken. Simple linguistic prefab is now the norm, while ambiguity, paradox, irony, subtlety, and wit are fast disappearing. In their place, the simple "vision thing" and myriad other "things." Verbal intelligence, which has long been viewed as suspect as the act of reading, will come to seem positively conspiratorial. The greater part of any articulate person's energy will be deployed in dumbing-down her discourse.

Language will grow increasingly impoverished through a series of vicious cycles. For, of course, the usages of literature and scholarship are connected in fundamental ways to the general speech of the tribe. We can expect that curricula will be further streamlined, and difficult texts in the humanities will be pruned and glossed. One need only compare a college textbook from twenty years ago to its contemporary version. A poem by Milton, a play by Shakespeare–one can hardly find the text among the explanatory notes nowadays. Fewer and fewer people will be able to contend with the so-called masterworks of literature or ideas. Joyce, Woolf, Soyinka, not to mention the masters who preceded them, will go unread, and the civilizing energies of their prose will circulate aimlessly between closed covers.

2. Flattening of historical perspectives. As the circuit supplants the printed page, and as more and more of our communications involve us in network processes–which of their nature plant us in a perpetual present–our perception of history will inevitably alter. Changes in information storage and access are bound to impinge on our historical memory. The depth of field that is our sense of the past is not only a linguistic construct, but is in some essential way represented by the book and the physical accumulation of books in library spaces. In the contemplation of the single volume, or mass of volumes, we form a picture of time past as a growing deposit of sediment; we capture a sense of its depth and dimensionality. Moreover, we meet the past as much in the presentation of words in books of specific vintage as we do in any isolated fact or statistic. The database, useful as it is, expunges this context, this sense of chronology, and admits us to a weightless order in which all information is equally accessible.

If we take the etymological tack, history (cognate with "story") is affiliated in complex ways with its texts. Once the materials of the past are unhoused from their pages, they will surely mean differently. The printed page is itself a link, at least along the imaginative continuum, and when that link is broken, the past can only start to recede. At the same time it will become a body of disjunct data available for retrieval and, in the hands of our canny dream merchants, a mythology. The more we grow rooted in the consciousness of the now, the more it will seem utterly extraordinary that things were ever any different. The idea of a farmer plowing a field–an historical constant for millennia–will be something for a theme park. For, naturally, the entertainment industry, which reads the collective unconscious unerringly, will seize the advantage. The past that has slipped away will be rendered ever more glorious, ever more a fantasy play with heroes, villains, and quaint settings and props. Small-town American life returns as "Andy of Mayberry"–at first enjoyed with recognition, later accepted as a faithful portrait of how things used to be.

3. The waning of the private self. We may even now be in the first stages of a process of social collectivization that will over time all but vanquish the ideal of the isolated individual. For some decades now we have been edging away from the perception of private life as something opaque, closed off to the world; we increasingly accept the transparency of a life lived within a set of systems, electronic or otherwise. Our technologies are not bound by season or light–it's always the same time in the circuit. And so long as time is money and money matters, those circuits will keep humming. The doors and walls of our habitations matter less and less–the world sweeps through the wires as it needs to, or as we need it to. The monitor light is always blinking; we are always potentially on-line.

I am not suggesting that we are all about to become mindless, soulless robots, or that personality will disappear altogether into an oceanic homogeneity. But certainly the idea of what it means to be a person living a life will be much changed. The figure-ground model, which has always featured a solitary self before a background that is the society of other selves, is romantic in the extreme. It is ever less tenable in the world as it is becoming. There are no more wildernesses, no more lonely homesteads, and, outside of cinema, no more emblems of the exalted individual.

The self must change as the nature of subjective space changes. And one of the many incremental transformations of our age has been the slow but steady destruction of subjective space. The physical and psychological distance between individuals has been shrinking for at least a century. In the process, the figure-ground image has begun to blur its boundary distinctions. One day we will conduct our public and private lives within networks so dense, among so many channels of instantaneous information, that it will make almost no sense to speak of the differentiations of subjective individualism.

We are already captive in our webs. Our slight solitudes are transected by codes, wires, and pulsations. We punch a number to check in with the answering machine, another to tape a show that we are too busy to watch. The strands of the web grow finer and finer–this is obvious. What is no less obvious is the fact that they will continue to proliferate, gaining in sophistication, merging functions so that one can bank by phone, shop via television, and so on. The natural tendency is toward streamlining: The smart dollar keeps finding ways to shorten the path, double-up the function. We might think in terms of a circuit-board model, picturing ourselves as the contact points. The expansion of electronic options is always at the cost of contractions in the private sphere. We will soon be navigating with ease among cataracts of organized pulsations, putting out and taking in signals. We will bring our terminals, our modems, and menus further and further into our former privacies; we will implicate ourselves by degrees in the unitary life, and there may come a day when we no longer remember that there was any other life.

---

quote:

---

Simple linguistic prefab is now the norm, while ambiguity, paradox, irony, subtlety, and wit are fast disappearing. In their place, the simple "vision thing" and myriad other "things." Verbal intelligence, which has long been viewed as suspect as the act of reading, will come to seem positively conspiratorial.

---

quote:

---

Why are my people so impervious to information? Despite how it appears, our mamas did not drop us on our heads. Hell, thanks to our kids, most of us even have the Internet. Still, my faith in the Internet's information democaracy wilted when I once suggested to a friend facing eviction that we Google "renter's rights" to learn his options, and watched him type in "rinters kicked out."(Then too, when we bumped into the banner on a site reading JENNIFER LICKS THE HUGE MAN'S SWORD, we both got sidetracked.) Yet two weeks later he had found the neo-conservative website NewsMax.com and learned how to bookmark it. Sometimes I think the GOP emits a special pheromone that attracts fools and money.

---

[ 30 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Still free in Sask:
Young readers require old readers to guide their reading. With centralized and universal education, the STATE had the power to mould young minds to their own ends.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Ken Burch:
He's a Lyndon Larouche acolyte, Spector. Watch out for the guy to start going on about the Rothschilds and the Bilderbergers.

---

Why should superrich people be off limits for criticism?

Larouche also sees the whole political struggle as a fight between elites, rather than classes, which is an inherently undemocratic perspective.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Fidel:

Ken, I tend to agree with Larouche on a number of things.

---

I got to talking with her and soon discovered she was on Team Larouche. When I said, "Hang on, isn't he an antisemite?" she bristled a second time, then denied the accusation, saying she'd heard it before and that it was unfounded.

I asked her for some pamphlets so I could read for myself what Larouche stood for. She was reluctant, since folks were supposed to buy them, but she gave me one anyway.

I don't remember anything about the pamphlet other than that it called for the USA to take all of Canada's water via a series of dams and canals.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Ken Burch:

Finally, Larouche's "organization" is basically a cult, and a cult that has often busied itself with violent attacks on leftist groups.

---

I am aware of the accusations made against Larouche. Anti-semitic seems to be the one that looms large in my view. Yes, he does pick on a number of superrich and influential people who happen to be Jewish. From what I can tell, he does not limit criticism to rich Jewish banksters or 5th Avenue bond speculators living off compounding debt misery of poverty-stricken African countries alone. Is Hank Paulson Jewish? Was Haljmar Schacht, Hitler's banker a Jew? They don't seem to be immune to Larouche's criticisms either. It seems to me that appalling greed and corruption knows neither ethnic nor geopolitical boundaries. And I think its very non-racist for people to realize that this is true.

For instance, here's an apparently studious group of monk-like folks whose organization did a name-change many moons back after an attempt to bring all churches under a common banner with world revolution as its goals. I experienced it as simply The Ecumenical Institute in the winter of 1970.

Note the innocuous-sounding methods of its ministers and acolytes, like "Focused Conversation." But such sessions were, in fact, just cult indoctrination, and worked on those who are always most vulnerable. Folks like us who want to bring about change for the "good", when it seems to be in such short supply.

You can google it up in a mo' with "ecumencial institute and fifth city Chicago"
-------------------------------------------

(quote)
THE SIXTIES
When the seven families moved from Texas to Chicago, their focus was primarily on developing curricula for church renewal. However, in 1963, they relocated from Evanston, Illinois to the west side of Chicago and gradually began an experiment in community development.

From the premise that local communities constitute the basic building blocks of society, the Institute began working in a ghetto neighborhood on Chicago's west side, which became known as Fifth City. Door-to-door interviews and neighborhood meetings provided a way for the local residents to review their many problems and to begin to design practical solutions (Stanfield, 2000).

The work of the Institute was a combination of training in religious and cultural studies. Half of the courses were theoretical and half were practical. In courses and communities, a frequently used method was Focused Conversation, a way of discussing a subject thoroughly so that factual, emotional, rational, and action-oriented considerations would all be covered in a natural sequence (see Figure 1 for a diagram of the structure of the Focused Conversation method). [figure 1 about here] The seven families, and others who joined the Ecumenical Institute residential staff, developed an educational program taught throughout the nation and around the world, beginning in 1965. They also built a community organization in Fifth City, where others had failed. This was done with extremely limited financial resources. In 1965, the first annual summer programs were begun. In 1971, these became Global Research Assemblies. These assemblies brought together ICA staff from around the world for several weeks to reflect on the year's experiences - what had worked and what had not worked. They then revised their methods and programs and made plans for the coming year. The new programs and methods were tried in practice and then subjected to analysis and revision at the next summer research assembly. Some of the later research assemblies drew 1000 people from around the world.

A Self-supporting Financial Structure

What provided significant momentum for the work of the Ecumenical Institute and later the Institute of Cultural Affairs was the full-time, volunteer, residential staff, who became known as the Order: Ecumenical. This group of people was similar to a religious order such as the Franciscans, Jesuits, or Benedictines. The Order: Ecumenical was a self-supporting secular / religious family order, committed to a mission of service in church renewal and community development (and later, organizational development). Members of the Order lived in shared housing and subsisted on a stipend equivalent to the poverty level of the country in which they were working. Certain members were assigned to take secular jobs. Others were assigned to further the research and program activities. Assignments rotated based on what was needed to advance the mission of service. All income was pooled. Individuals, churches, corporations, foundations and other grant-making organizations made charitable contributions to support the program activities (Crocker, 2003).
(end quote)
------------------------------------------------

To watch one of these "monks" imitate the firing of a machine-gun as his suggested method of overcoming the misuse of power in a third-world country, was to instantly realize the huge gap between appearance and reality of this "Christian" organization.