(In response to someone else’s highly-organized schematic schema he sent me)
I usually get twitchy with this many ‘neat’ categories. Something relative to Blake’s I must create my own system or be a slave to another man’s, has something to do with the above certainly.
There were bits and pieces that resonated like self-actualization’s rise (in the ’70s, Maslow-vian influence) and the conformity of the late 40s, ’50s pretty much, and the first half of the ’60s. The Beats in the late ’40s/early ’50s and the ’60s hippies reflected that, plus ’60s music and movies hugely.
People looking for spiritual awareness and direction goes back to the mid/late ’60s. You still find the guru stuff around, but as Joseph Campbell pointed out North Americans have tended to ‘do spirituality’ on their own. (Even The Beatles walked away from Maharishi.) The limits of any/only one practice or inflection as Aldous Huxley pointed out. (He, incidentally, favored a blend of East-West approaches for one’s own consciousness development.)
Re. heroes–in America, they started being killed off with presidents: Lincoln, McKinley, Kennedy; then ‘dangerous’ types like MLK, JFK, RFK, Malcolm X, then more ‘innocent, harmless’ notables like Lennon. (In the UK, George, forgodsake, which shortened his life.)
For too long in the States, there hasn’t been full/true equality continuing up to the GOPs shutting down black votes. The “entitlement” mentioned in the Wiki piece has been around despite the 2007-8 stock market failure so the US has been extending the poor base at the expense of Musks, Gateses, and crooks like Trump. If only there hadn’t been a Trump to foment the massive unrest of the new millennium! Anyway here here we are with the massive US deconstruction/complete meltdown and a dumb-ass, hard-core orney base (doesn’t that say something about human nature?) that wants the Civil War again complete with Rambo guns.
Canada has been lucky with most people having access to prosperity and economic improvement until the pandemic started. We don’t have a 1/3 nutso ready-to-use-arms population, a stupidly-misread Second Amendment, and something like a 1/10th disenchanted black base.
Here, we do have a bigoted, drunken sailor spending as a PM, but he gives out taxpayer money whenever there’s a problem. But, with billions more to be paid to natives and climate crisis hitting home, we seem to be in more peril up here of late. Suddenly a hospital system crisis and governments everywhere shown to be weak or feckless in multiple, continuous unstructured situations.
Our lives and family’s remain our own personal responsibility, which is still ground-zero, existentially speaking.
For instance, I did not wait for Kenney’s promised rapid tests, I bought ’em for my family from a company. They came early, were here as things got worse, and are still on the ready. Surety. Definitiveness. No pie-in-the-sky reliance on a horribly limited, dumb-ass, corrupt politician. I have something rather than absolutely nothing like too many people who lucked out from believing or trusting an egotistical, ignorant politician.
So, yeah, I’m still in the autonomous frame of mind I and Booi used to teach in the AC seminars back at Scona in the heyday. “The readiness is all.” “To thine own self be true.”
Self (and family first, then all else follows naturally….)
I will add that I felt I was covering Big Lit stuff in gr. 12 with you guys back in the ’90s: Hamlet or Lear, Ran, Gatsby, Kane, 1984, Strangelove. It was always gratifying to see the hungry, thirsty minds like you and James who soaked these up.
Huge perspectives. Massive patterns of dualistic views. Core human behavior/nature stuff. Recurring themes. Examples of openings to salvation, escapes, copings and the like. Great art. Masters. Major consciousness in the context of the best and fullest version of public education.
Going back, ’60s consciousness for me started with the music, the likes of Dylan, Cohen, The Beatles…. But ’twas my olde u education/course that really accelerated with my interest in Ideas and Patterns that have continued….The main blog is really “the novel” I meant to write. It is me, my consciousness and study of it, personally as well as socially to some extent.
Back then, I also recall I did sometimes teach Auden’s poems about Time and Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”. More consciousness, but pretty basic. Process. Time. The passing of time in human life and consciousness. Process and Time passing give us the purpose and means for understanding our lives and social contexts. Ideas emerge from whatever possible reflection.
And, yes, Virginia, there are Patterns, even glimmers of awareness that also emerge.
Common sense (remember that?) and personal experience factor in, too, in this process.
But deeper down, the built-in restlessness and maybe a lifelong curiosity and desire to know more that helps one cope, make sense of, understand, and appreciate.