We've got a lot of catching up to do with the 5th century B.C.
Caribou
Jenny Baboolal sent this video.
The original is sooooo good, I wonder if you'll like this rendition.
In any event, I think flashmob music is always praiseworthy.
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Yesterday, while working on my memoirs, I found it necessary to google, "What were Plato's views of music?"
I knew Plato had cautioned against fundamental changes in music as a threat to "the established order."
But the entirety of AI Overview BLEW ME AWAY.
AI Overview: Plato believed music was a moral law that profoundly affected the soul, giving "a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything". He saw musical training as a powerful educational tool, capable of imparting grace to the soul through rhythm and harmony. However, he also warned that changes in musical modes could destabilize the state's fundamental laws.
On musical training:
"Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated, graceful, or of him who is ill-educated, ungraceful". On innovation:
"For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions". On education:
Plato advocated teaching children music, physics, and philosophy, with music being a foundational element because its patterns are keys to learning.
Instruction And Education Aim At Antipodes
https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2024/11/instruction-and-education-aim-at.html
Compendium Of Best "Pax" Posts On The Cornerstone Necessity Of Education
Completely updated 2-22-23
- What adds another dimension to my AI Plato inquiry is that on separate occasions, two of my Aquinas priest-teachers (both trained in philosophy) approached me (independently of one another) and asked, "Have you been reading Plato?
I answered "No, I've never read Plato."
And they both responded, "Well, you sure do think like him."
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Among many keen insights, Postman says that the shallowness of our media is causally connected to people's imagination not being stimulated by reading literature.
One reviewer put it like this. "Television emphasizes simple images. A lack of abstraction comes from a lack of literary involvement."
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The post-modern world has become a remarkably shallow place because there is no longer any philosophical or theological training at the heart of things. (Not to mention thenear absence of essential musical training in our formal educational processes.)
Unregulated "Cowboy" Capitalism (In Memes): Capitalism Is The Foremost Propellant Of Moral And Environmental Degradation In America And In The World -- A Propellant Rendered Nearly Invisible By Plutocrats (And Now, Kakistocrats) Who "Divide And Conquer" Via The Idiocracy's Age-Old Manipulation Of Public Opinion
Just as Cowboy Capitalism has replaced Responsible Citizenship with the seductive allure of all-consuming consumerism -- millions of newly-conditioned "consumer units" "buying things they don't need, with money they don't have, to impress people they don't like" -- so too, the bedrock "winner-take-all-dictates of Cowboy Capitalism" distract us from "matters of the spirit," fixating us instead on materialist acquisition.
Hannah Arendt, a 20th century Intellectual Titan (and the European philosopher who attended the Nuremberg Trials where she coined the phrase, "The Banality of Evil") cut to the quick when she observed: "What has come to an end is the distinction between the sensual and the supersensual, together with the notion, at least as old as Parmenides, that whatever is not given to the senses... is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears; that it is not just beyond sense perception but above the world of the senses... In increasingly strident voices, the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the danger of nihilism inherent in this development. The sensual... cannot survive the death of the supersensual."
The 20th Century Writers Who Have Been Most Influential in the Development of My "Outlook" and Worldview are Ivan Illich, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, Neil Postman and G.K. Chesterton
C. S. Lewis, an atheist in early adulthood, confirmed Arendt's view "the natural and the supernatural" (in a specifically Christian way): "All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been as blind as a bat not to have seen, long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader. George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer; of course it was a pity had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed. On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete—Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire—all seemed a little thin; what as boys we called ‘tinny.’ It wasn’t that I didn’t like them. They were all (especially Gibbon) entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books.”
Alan: And although any topic as big as this cannot be simply summarized, I will conclude by pointing to Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset's ground-breaking, epochal work tracking the modern (and post-modern) world's cornerstone error to "The Revolt Of The Masses" (a 1929 publication that impressed Bob Dylan profoundly when he read it c. 1971).
I have never come across such an insightful, bedrock description of "The Great Unraveling" - and the concomitant collapse of American society - as contained in the work of visionary Ortega y Gasset, whose 1929 book, "The Revolt of The Masses."
The Incipient Unraveling Of The Western World As Seen By Visionary Spanish Philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1929)
