funny how people get defensive and personally worked up (victor vaughn tries to attack my personality, nomad with her usual reductivist psych and character assassination, Tea egging her on, Padraig with the insults, etc) when i say a simple think like modern society has lost rich and wonderful dimensions of life, and that this loss has to do with the privileging of rationality since the Enlightenment in Europe and the suppression of spiritualist world views.
none of what i said is new, many thinkers like the Frankfurt School and the Situationists, etc, etc, have said things along these lines, that "modern life" lacks a sense of mystery. these notions are pretty common place in the critical tradition.
I could say that Western rationalism has fueled your education, your profession, the laptop you chatter away on, your DJ gigs, your entire existence as a self-described "urban nomad", and on & on, but what's the point? you are all the anarchopunk bands I grew up with, selling vinyl to pay for gasoline so you can tour around & shout about who much you hate consumerism and car culture, only in a different context with different things to shout about and different things to sell.
dissapointed to see this rudimentarily falty logic coming from you. according to this, if someone has a job he can not criticize capitalism. pure rubbish.
I'm quite happy to be into science, actually, and so are most of the people I know who study or teach or work in a scientific field. if anything, science opens up your imagination to limitless possibilities. which is why it's especially ironic that you think it does the opposite.
I wonder if you've ever been to a place where people don't believe in science. where having sex with virgins is supposed to be a cure for AIDS, for example. or simply to place where people actually are impoverished.
you falsely simplify my stance as "against science".
and predictably (not to mention borishly) you start with the Vigin Cure for Aids to demonstrate the backwardsness of superstitious society, insinuating that a close connection with a spirit world can pretty much lead to nothing but misery.
typical western conceit born of ignorance and fear.
you've been to Mexico, and i don't think you can deny (or maybe you can) that the spiritual traditions there make life very colourful, rich, and full of wonder. in ways that are lost in Strip Mall Culture. i'm sure there are some bad things about these older belief systems too, but i am addressing the good things in this thread, which are IMO largely neglected in "progressive" anti-spiritual doctrine.
Alienation and Animism
"Animism is spontaneous, the ‘natural’ way of thinking for humans: all humans began as animistic children and for most of human evolutionary history would have grown into animistic adults. It requires sustained, prolonged and pervasive formal education to ‘overwrite’ animistic thinking with the rationalistic objectivity typical of the modern world. It is this learned abstraction that creates alienation – humans are no longer embedded in a world of social relations but become estranged, adrift in a world of indifferent things."
this is indeed interesting. thanks for posting. but of course nomad tries to dismiss it as "unscientific". what a bore.
What should i do in my life practically to move more towards the model you describe. I am genuinely curious to see what i behind all the general poetic hyperbole.
well this thread was not intended as 12 Steps To Introduce A Sense of Wonder and Mystery In Your Life, but that is of course a valid question. it's difficult in this day and age, where all mystery has been sucked out by compartmentalization or commodified, relegated to the area of "entertainment", and rendered impotent, but maybe:
bring back more ritual
go about life and fun with more of a trickster mentality
dress up as demons not on holloween
do inexplicable things without explanation
flash mobs
improvised music outside of concert halls
spontaneous dancing in public places
unplanned concerts
dadaist crazy shit
weird public sculptures
unofficial performance art
creativity outside official channels...
One example that sticks in my mind is how the Dahomey (I think) had more equal (if different) social roles for women int eh 16th century than many European countries several centuries later. Once it became a full-on raiding and slaving state, this all went to shit.
i have mentioned similar things before, in particular a letter from a first wave German collonialist in Africa to Europe saying
these people are so primitive, the leaders consult their women on major decisions!
which was of course seen as an attempt on my part to paint a fantastic African Utopia.
no, i am aware of the bad things about traditional cultures, all I'm saying is that there are ALSO amazing riches about them that modern life has lost (and practices more "advanced" than current thinking) -- and that these are not talked about nearly as much as the "evils of superstition".
and one of my fundamentalist beliefs is that science, as it advances, is absolutely not mutually exclusive with a spiritualist world view. many things such as ancient teachings on the interconnectedness of all things are being "proven" in quantum mechanics. etc.
jesus i'm spending way too much time on this.