🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <495@mipos3.UUCP>, ekwok@mipos3 (Steve Dallas) writes:

>Your implicit assumption is that the classics are inherently good and
>that are now by the wayside is gross injustice.  I happen to think other-
>wise.  The modern man is now enlightened to the fact that what plato
>says is logically inconsistent, that what the greek thinkers say are
>curious at their time, and as irrelavant in theirs as in ours. The modern
>man has matured from his romantic adolescence, ready to take on the
>harsh reality of the universe that we live in. The modern homer and
>plato are the scientists, engineers musicians, novelists. In order for
>the modern man to be "educated", it is necessary to refute untruth and
>irrelevance - or to discount, using your word. That does not say that
>the greek thinkers are not historical curiosities, but let's not make
>them anymore than that; even they would find it silly.

I read the above and want to throw up.  Ignorance is one thing, but
pride in it?  And then pseudo-logical reasonings to justify ignorance?

Quite frankly, I find much of Plato, Homer, etc quite relevant to the
world around me.  It's because "modern men" don't get educated beyond
their petty how-to-make-a-fortune-and-retire-easy desires that so much
is wrong with the world today.  Instead of ever learning how to think
for themselves, which is what a classical education was supposed to make
possible, we get endless gibbering morons who can't make two sentences
cohere logically, although they know how to program in C, and that suf-
fices for them to make themselves out to be experts on rational analy-
sis.  And these are the people who turn into rabid Randroids or funda-
mentalists or the like--intellects that can be blown over with a feather,
yet who through their stubborn stupidity are reshaping the world around
us with their stinking effluvia into their own pointless prefab image.

I spit in your general direction.

	  Life,for mostpeople,simply isn't. Take the socalled
	standardofliving. What do mostpeople mean by "living"?
	They don't mean living. They mean the latest and clo-
	sest plural approximation to singular prenatal pas-
	sivity which science,in its finite but unbounded wis-
	dom,has succeeded in selling their wives. If science
	could fail, a mountain's a mammal. Mostpeople's wives
	can spot a genuine delusion of embryonic omnipotence
	immediately and will accept no substitutes
	  --luckily for us,a mountain is a mammal.
					-- e e cummings

Lucky indeed.

There's an extra irony here in this widespread lack of a full education.
Mostpeople think Cummings poems are all cute looking games or something,
but if they only knew that he majored in Greek, and that Greek poetry is
often preserved in fragmentary form only, they'd have seen what his game
was a lot more clearly.  Feh.

ucbvax!brahms!weemba	Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720