[PEN-L:6215] Re: Re: Columbin High: Community Kills

[Ken Hanly <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I thought Milton's heaven had as its materialist basis capitalist free markets
and as its pyschological basis self-interest :)
   Cheers, Ken Hanly

Carrol Cox wrote:

> Thomas Kruse wrote:
>
> > Here's a very healthy anti-dote to much of the spin on Columbine High.  As
> > a non-jock whose school was divided between athletes and non-athletes, this
> > rings true.  By pointing attention to the collective culture, it also helps
> > to see how the enemy is in us, not "out there", in the families or psyches
> > of a couple of kids, and without simplistic recourse to video games and tv
> > as expalantory variables.
>
> I think a fairly commonplace marxist explanation is possible here. The
> Community Tom criticizes is a "willed community," one without any
> material basis. I think that the two most dramatic images of community
> with a material base are two persons working with a two-handled saw
> and a chain-gang. A physical activity compels some unity of thought
> and feeling (the saw will buck like hell if the two are not in some sense
> "in tune," even *simpatico* as in Spanish). Similarly with chain gangs,
> the rhythm of whose work has created some wonderful songs/poetry
> in the 20th century.
>
> In contrast what I call a "willed community" (in an advanced capitalist
> state) merely reinforces the *lack* of any social ties that bind. One
> can see this in all the touchy-feely efforts at building "community in the
> class room" that emerged in the '60s. My guess is that most of the
> professors who really went for this did what one friend of mine at
> ISU did: retired early because he was so bitter that students given
> "freedom" didn't perform just as his dream said they should. There are
> bound to be large numbers of people excluded from such a community,
> and a large amount of bitterness flowing from that exclusion.
>
> Most of the politics I call anarchist (and this is doubtless unfair to some
> who call themselves anarchist) assume a mystic community arising
> from the concordance of individual souls with no material basis.. Milton's
> heaven is like that.
>
> Carrol