>Thomas Kuhn said the person who is led by anomalies to reformulate a different explanatory model, a new paradigm, never does convince the believers in the old paradigm. He attracts young scientists, who have no turf to defend. Philosophically.
This quote fits in with young people being more receptive to original work. But I think one might hit yet another roadblock. They’re TOO young.
Youngsters might be brave openminded searching rebels but they still tend to go in the Tom Robbins (‘Cowgirls’) direction, looking for permission to party hearty. They can’t relate to the adventure of family life, married life, a career story.
Breakthroughs in solid culture seem to work best on those who’ve ‘been there, done that,’ which gets you into that territory mentioned in the quote above where most such people have either joined em or made peace. It takes a big shakeup to get establishment people to start searching again.
But that sector isn’t just tiny. It’s a fascinating one as well.
Adults who make breakthrus are scarce. What’s sad is that this basically means ‘adults who keep growing.’ Coz if you grow you will break thru. How many even escape adolescence? As a result of this possibly limited audience, maybe original work today comes close to exerting secret society action like the Sufis. Hard core insiders. Levitators. However, even they had a spell of popularity when Idris Shah first published their ideas in the West in the 1970’s. “Learning How to Learn” is an amazing book. Much of his stuff is still in print. Movies on this topic are popular, like Bill Murray’s ‘Razor’s Edge.’ So maybe there can be some popularity with such material.
Thinking of aging, each stage of life has to present special greater powers. The weakness of elderhood hides some other greater potential for vision, greater adventure, even MORE risk than youth.
I’m dismayed at the weakness of youth. What an idiot our society is for focusing on it. It’s training wheels. As we get older we can do certain things better and better that we couldn’t even imagine when younger. Life has no other pattern except internal development. And external decay. There’s no life group without a necessary, natural function that contributes to the survival of the whole. Elders are NOT here to be cared for, per se. Same with kids or teens. Babies, yes. No one is a customer. At the same time, just as with babies everyone does need care, at all times. It’s just that they also contribute. And wisdom is the pinnacle. And old folks CAN have it. And even physical decline can be good for us internally. A time we can pay our debts. Purgatory? Gurdjieff always said that the higher you go the riskier it gets, not the safer. That being saved means more suffering not less, only it’s a different kind of suffering, one that acts as food even as none of its sting is taken away, but is only more so. It might feel hopeless but it doesn’t act that way in life. It brings life. It’s very high octane. If we’re willing to endure it. Of course this isn’t necessarily tied with age, but odds are…
***
The Scary Thing about Today’s Teens
I wonder if a scary part is that the open period of youth is going away. Maybe there’s just hardly any more room for anyone of any age who doesn’t stick with a group. There’s more slavishness. Teens aren exploring less. They’re slaves to the rythmn.
The teens of the 70’s were searching for freedom. (I was one of them.) We were handed a bill of goods that many of us fell for that said freedom equaled sex and drugs. Pleasure and fun. But at least we started by looking for freedom. We went a lot of places before we ended up at Tom Robbins, Robert Heinlein, Robert Anton Wilson. We were onto John Muir and Hermann Hesse before we got derailed.
Now it seems like freedom is a foregone conclusion. It seems to get slotted right into an unexamined libertinism. Party all the time. That search is skipped right over even at the teen stage and the rush is on for pleasure. No questioning what comes before. Who cares? There’s a know-nothing-ism going on with the kids. Or too much specialized focus: pushing for political causes without exploring their roots as they connect to your neighborhood right around you.
In the 1970’s, kids jumped into scary radical reading. Many of those authors abused their readers for personal gain. But the kids took risks. Now it seems like kids jump into Typical Radical reading. Who’s an approved radical for me to read, for my group, they ask. Where are the books written today that question today’s particular scene?
Even supposedly questing adults have me worried. There are some eager beaver philosophy types on the Paglia Email-list. One guy is a Plato buff. And he takes it for granted that life is based on the pleasure principle. It blows me away. He would not find that in any type of serious reading, much less Plato. It’s the title of a 70’s pop-psych book. It’s a magazine idea. No creed follows it that’s worth a minute of attention. They’re not even in the game. Plato ripped right through it and made jokes of it and it hasn’t recovered since in any philsophical sense. It sells cars, sure, but…. Anyway, that guy was a serious questing guy yet it seemed like he missed the biggest mark of square one. Or maybe I just misunderstood him. He seemed pretty clear, though, and he said that my questioning of the role of pleasure smacked of puritanism. I said it’s a means, not an end—it’s an effect of good living but not its motivator. You don’t do the right thing because it feels good. (Because try it and you’ll find out how it feels! Oops, I guess I’m just a ‘puritan’—a limited term if there was one.) Well, I guess we’re all limited in our own ways, but it makes for a smaller market for truly open-minded reading. It’s still a necessary thing to promote if a culture hopes to stand a chance. The only thing.
