Subject: Re: Dinosaurs and Job
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 12:11:17 +1100
From: Richard Kerr < 
Newsgroups: aus.religion.christian

Graeme Hunt wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 17 Nov 1999 23:05:14 +1000, Robert Davidson
> > wrote:
> 
> >Graeme Hunt wrote:
> >
> >> That demonstrates how society has degenerated. It no longer has any
> >> real culture.
> >
> >Isn’t that a little bit of a sweeping statement?  I see the problem that
> >consumerism has taken over most people’s ideas of the arts.  Mozart would not
> >have been possible without aristocracy - do you think the inherent injustice of
> >that system was preferable to modern democracy?
> 
> Aristocracy is a great thing. Civilisation would have had a hard time
> advancing without it. Today the socialist thinking that has almost
> overriden common sense everywhere and has propagandised into the idea
> of equality when there is no such thing. It’s great achievement is to
> reduce everything to the lowest common denominator. It stifles
> initiative and the exercise of one’s own ability and eventually
> enslaves all to collectivist thinking.

You’re tilting at windmills, Graeme. There is 
absolutely no way you could describe the society in 
which we live as socialist. Nothing could be further 
from the truth. You may not like the way things are 
going but socialism is not to blame.

If anything reduces us to the lowest common 
denominator it is consumerism. We are told what to 
desire and we desire it. The tribal badges our 
children wear (basketball shoes and baseball caps) 
are the product of capitalist driven social 
manipulation in the form of advertising pandering to 
our desire for “stuff”, not a socialist 
conspiracy.

It’s interesting that the threat of “reds 
under the bed” survives in the minds of many in 
spite of the fact that the social tide has swept 
socialism in the recyling bin of history and the 
driving forces in our society are now overwhelmingly 
capitalist, even in countries that call themselves 
“communist”.

> Why do we have no Mozarts today? I would say that a major reason is
> the degeneration of music in many areas to the beat - disorganised
> chaos. It is an expression of the decline in culture. The same with
> dancing. In the thirties and forties we used to dance; now we have two
> strings of spaghetti and a beat.

Paradoxically Mozart himself contributed to the trend 
which leads to the modern dance scene. Part of his 
genius was to redefine what was possible in music, in 
terms of form, instrumentation, melody, harmony, 
subject matter... the lot.

After the Renaissance, the endless pursuit of this 
sort of change - constantly seeking after “the 
new” - changed our perception of genius from 
somebody who does something exceptionally well (such 
as Bach) to somebody who redefines what is possible 
(such as Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Stravinsky, et 
al). In popular music, as in everything else, the 
search for the new is being driven by what is 
technologically possible.  This has been a factor for 
a long time (viz. Beethoven and the piano), but is 
overwhelming every other factor at the moment. Since 
the Beatles loosed the genie of technological 
experimentation there has been very little chance for 
genuises, in the sense of those who forge paths into
 new territory, to emerge from the pack because every 
Tom, Dick and Harriet can do something new just by 
playing around with the latest software.

The geniuses are there, they’re just harder to 
spot.

> We’re almost back in the African jungle.

There is so much wrong with this sentence it’s 
hard to know where to start.

It falsely characterises African cultures with our 
“Tarzan” stereotype.  It ignores the 
advanced African cultures that were overwhelmed by 
European imperialism. It implies that our culture 
is (or was) intrinsicaly superior to native African 
cultures.  It falsely links dance in modern western 
pop culture with an imagined stereotype of African 
dance. It ignores the complexity of both African 
dance and modern western popular dance and reduces 
“dance” to the steps performed rather 
than seeing it in a social context. It implies a 
social hierarchy in which one form of dance is 
intrinsically superior to another... and on, and on.

-- 
Regards,

Richard Kerr