From: Richard Ridge (richard_ridge@tao-group.com)
Date: Tue Jan 29 2002 - 07:04:22 MST
> Actually natural is a bogus word completely. Specticals are natural,
Without wanting to be rude (actually, yes I do, it's great fun) do you mean
spectacles?
>they are made from natural materials, computers are natural, humans are
natural
> and we can only do natural things. I challenge anyone on this list to
> show me something unnatual.
Tony Blair's smile.
But yes, I agree completely. Just to elaborate on one point, I came across
this interesting interview with Christopher Hitchens from:
http://www.thestranger.com/current/logo.html
"Given your passion for dissent and demonstration, I was surprised to read
your views of the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, which you identified
as having "a very conservative twinge in the sense of being reactionary."
You called them "a protest against modernity."
Yes, that's true of the ones that I've seen. These demonstrations occur in
Washington, D.C. as well, and elsewhere. And what it reminds me of very much
is the Port Huron Statement [by Students for a Democratic Society, 1962],
which I don't know if you've read lately, but I don't think you'll correct
me when I say that a lot of that old critique was actually a protest against
scale, against bigness. And the corollary seemed to me to be, in that
statement and in some of the ones that I'm reading or hearing about now, the
better society would basically be more agrarian, more organic, more
traditional. And I'm not at all sure that that's true, and I'm quite sure
it's not feasible. But the idea that the sort of social model would be
something like the Cherokee--which as you know isn't that much of an
exaggeration about some of these people [protesters]--seems to me to be,
even if admirable, definitely conservative, and very unlikely to be
feasible. So, it meets most of my tests of reactionary utopianism, and
therefore, you have to allow me to be unimpressed when people say, "Hey,
look at the broad-based coalition of people dressed up as turtles and
protectionist labor union leaders." You know, I'm sorry, it doesn't move me
at all. I don't want to be a part of that. Don't feel myself to be part of
it at all."
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