Re: virus: Building Utopia
Eric Boyd (6ceb3@qlink.queensu.ca)
Tue, 23 Mar 1999 15:53:07 -0500
Hi,
Reed Konsler <konsler@ascat.harvard.edu> writes:
<<
I have a question. If you had never suffered any frustation, would
you value art? I think this consciouness thing is kind of a
consolation prize for putting up with the bullshit of life. It's like
building a taste for spicy foods...once you have it, you can never
imagine going back but before you have it, you could never imagine why
anyone would want it.
>>
A very interesting theory. I suppose you would also maintain that
Adam and Eve were happier and better off in the Garden before they ate
of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil?
<<
But, even as you an I wouldn't live in BNW...don't we as a culture try
to preserve innocence into ever and ever longer periods of life. We
invent childhood, and then adolecence, and then college. The tend
seems to be an attempt to alleviate frustration, suffering...to offer
a longer period of innocence.
It strikes me that this general trend (do you agree with my
perception?) is indicative that, while we might recognize our own
taste for the perverse, we try to make the lives of our children less
so.
>>
This is the general trend in our society, yes. However, the parenting
theory I have been studying (TCS) is a marked change from that -- it
*does* call for non-coercion of children (alleviating fustration,
suffering, etc), but it is firmly against innocence; promoting instead
a stance of Taking Children Seriously, treating them as adults from
the beginning, and letting them choose the course of their life right
from step #1. Which is to say, the TCS ideal calls for a BNW in which
people choose their own paths with a minimum of coercion from those
around them. In my opinion, it's a ideal worth striving for, and far
better than the hide-them-from-the-world ideal you describe above.
ERiC