From: Dehede011@aol.com
Date: Tue Apr 08 2003 - 07:44:15 MDT
In a message dated 4/8/2003 12:20:25 AM Central Standard Time,
lcorbin@tsoft.com writes: It's perhaps hard to credit, but a lot of history
was created by people who acted as a part of something larger than
themselves; who believed that they were a part of a nation, or who believed
that they had a people. I understand that this does not resonate with some
very strong individualists, for whom practically all communal feeling is
alien.
Lee,
The writer John Taylor Gatto in his book Dumbing Us Down devotes a lot
of time to discussing the differences between traditional communities with
strong families and modern communities where the families are weaker and the
community is more mobile.
I feel very uncomfortable with the content of the book. Not that Mr.
Gatto doesn't present his thoughts convincingly but that I haven't heard any
discussion of his subject. That makes me so uncomfortable because I think
those differences are extremely important and imminently debatable.
When I was in Grad School I had one of the national experts for my
professor in sociology -- that was forty years ago and his name is long since
forgotten. He spent some time detailing the characteristics of the northern
middle class family.
As I recorded all his lectures I took the tape home and shared them
with my wife. That sparked one of the most intense discussions of our
marriage. In fact it may have ultimately ended our marriage.
You see, we were middle class southerners and that is very different
from the middle class northerner. Because of the considerable inducements
involved we found ourselves becoming northerners and weren't sure at all that
we liked that.
Briefly the northern family is not nearly so much an extended family
as the southern one. The northern family is also much more mobile. It
doesn't not have the support structure of the southern family.
When I read what you wrote above, " who believed that they were a part
of a nation, or who believed that they had a people" I hear the essence of
what Gatto is saying of the stable traditional society.
When you write, "I understand that this does not resonate with some
very strong individualists, for whom practically all communal feeling is
alien" you are simply describing a person without roots. They are
individualists because they have no community or a strong family.
Mr. Gatto also maintains that experts devising rules cannot construct
a community that has the closeness of the traditional society.
But let me go a step further. I think this subject is particularly
appropriate to Extropians. The central question is shall we have a strong
community that achieves our goals or a weak one that is among the first to
crack when the singularity approaches?
Ron h.
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