One Visionary's Prescription for a Better Culture
If America fails to revive as a result of the decades-long cultural collapse that accelerated in the second half of the 20th century and the ongoing downward economic spiral which burst forth in 2008, it won't be because of a lack of "visionaries" who tried to point the way to a better day. Here's a quick look at one such visionary, David Gelernter, as he attempts to revive an appreciation for great music.
This commentary by Mr. Gelernter in the Wall Street Journal deserves your attention because of his interesting suggestions about using technology to introduce the music of Beethoven, as well as other serious music, to the current generation of students he teaches. While not entirely surprised that even students at Yale University were relatively unfamiliar with the classics, it nevertheless a bit jolting to read:
And lest you think that the comments about culture, society, religion, and America's future are somehow peripheral to an ongoing analysis of money and markets in crisis, and our promotion of reason and common sense, you have only to remember that crises typically resolve to something better or worse than the previous state from which the crises arise. As for reason and common sense, they are two tools with which we not only analyze the current state of affairs, but also attempt to find a light at the end of the tunnel. And reason and common sense, based on some common understanding of true and false, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly give us the chance to find that light.
So if you find yourself mired in the relativistic world of social chaos and cultural collapse based on our post-Christian, secular materialist world, wake up and start your long climb up and out, for your own good as well as the common good of us all.
This commentary by Mr. Gelernter in the Wall Street Journal deserves your attention because of his interesting suggestions about using technology to introduce the music of Beethoven, as well as other serious music, to the current generation of students he teaches. While not entirely surprised that even students at Yale University were relatively unfamiliar with the classics, it nevertheless a bit jolting to read:
For most young people, music is a minor consumable, like toothpaste. Musicians and music majors aside, my students at Yale—and there are no smarter, more eager, more open students anywhere—just barely know who Beethoven is. Beethoven. “He composed music”—that is the general consensus.For those of you who believe the description of our culture as having "collapsed," if this doesn't convince you, you're likely part of the problem. Really. If you're not sure what the problem is, it's simply that there is no culture when everyone decides what's good and bad, or better or worse, when it comes to music and other forms of art. There's chaos. Put another way, where there's chaos, there's no culture. And that's basically where things stand now: chaos rather than culture. To quote Mr. Gelernter:
To know nothing about Beethoven? That is cultural bankruptcy. That is collapse.As to why I refer to this Gelernter fellow (with whom I was unfamiliar before reading his WSJ commentary) as a visionary, it has to do not only with his innovative suggestions on how to begin to remedy this cultural collapse, but also because of his vision of the World Wide Web as well as cloud computing years before their actual coming to fruition. A rather shocking fact about this guy is his having been permanently injured by a mail bomb from Ted Kacynski, the so-called Unabomber, in 1993.
And lest you think that the comments about culture, society, religion, and America's future are somehow peripheral to an ongoing analysis of money and markets in crisis, and our promotion of reason and common sense, you have only to remember that crises typically resolve to something better or worse than the previous state from which the crises arise. As for reason and common sense, they are two tools with which we not only analyze the current state of affairs, but also attempt to find a light at the end of the tunnel. And reason and common sense, based on some common understanding of true and false, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly give us the chance to find that light.
So if you find yourself mired in the relativistic world of social chaos and cultural collapse based on our post-Christian, secular materialist world, wake up and start your long climb up and out, for your own good as well as the common good of us all.
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