Davis's House on the 18th!!

Please reply to this post by three monday if you plan on coming and let us know if you're bringing anyone else. We hate to pull this but if you're a regular and haven't responded and show up you will have to wait until everyone's served to make sure the ones who RSVP'd got something to eat.

We're excited about having people to our house!

Thoughts on looking at a peace sign

In the top floor of O'Henry's Brookwood, there's a big metal peace sign hanging on the wall (it's for sale, which is kind of an ironic statement I won't explore now). I've also been reading Stephen King's "Hearts in Atlantis," a novella about life in college in the initial months of the Vietnam War, which has had this whole thing on my mind to a greater extent. Also, I'm bored with this paper I'm writing.

Preface: none of these thoughts may have any ultimately valid conclusion; they're rough.

In the sixties and seventies, the peace movement was deeply provocative. It was widely cherished as an ultimate ideal by many (mainly, but not only, youth), and hated as anarchistic and unprogressive by many (mainly, but not only, then-adults). It was an ideal for those who held it, kind of a personal and social savior that, fully realized, would totally transform the world for good (as we see in "Imagine" or the unfortunate "Age of Aquarius"). Thirty years later, though, we see the aftermath of the ideology. Many people who remained fully committed to the peace-and-love ideal have burnt out on drugs or are hopelessly out of touch with the world, longing to bring back the promise of the late sixties/early seventies. Many who were only half-committed to or "grew up" from that youthful idealism now see it as distantly fondly as bell-bottom jeans, which is why someone could sell a peace sign sculpture for forty bucks in a coffee shop now.

I say all that because I've been thinking about how that was one of the last expressions of a popular social idealism we've seen (the major exception I can think of is the Obama-centered idealism, which has largely dissipated). At its heart, the peace movement thought that if there were just enough peace and love in the world, everything would be better. The concept was heavily explored in art, but did not motivate people to many practical peace-promoting innovations.

Since then, it seems that popular social philosophy has come to center more and more around pragmatism over idealism. In the eighties and nineties, we saw a lot of self-centered pragmatism: what works best for me and for my own advancement? Now, there is a growing heart for social good that is being approached with the determination to find out what works in effecting social change. An excellent example of this is the series of programs in Greensboro, AL, which has "with not for" as its motto for community development. It follows the adage, "give a man a fish...teach a man to fish." And most of us would agree that that is a better system, especially when we consider the effects of foreign aid on the receiving nations' citizens' views of their governments.

While those programs are worth praising in their own regard, I mention them to support how we are becoming a pragmatic society, in many ways. We sidestep rules and codes when it behooves us (how many of us have distributed music that we promised Itunes we wouldn't?); we seek philosophical and religious systems that work for us, and tend not to impose them on others when they have one that works for them.

Okay, a qualification: there's been an upsurge of idealism from somewhere in the nineties, currently focused on an ideal of authenticity or personality (e.g., the love of vinyl records, antiquated clothing, furniture, and houses, microbreweries--anything in Stuff White People Like, really). But it's by-and-large a pragmatic idealism; we implement ideals carefully and with a healthy infusion of irony and self-deprecation so nobody thinks we're weird.

So what? I don't know if I have a "so what," actually. I tend to think of how these philosophies apply to the practice and proclamation of Christianity, and how they either do or can find expression in the arts (another example: Sufjan Stevens now claims to no longer have faith in either the album or the song, and is producing increasingly jagged and lengthy compositions). I think people want to have something to be idealistic about (like Obama's presidency), but everything seems to fail to bear the weight of its own promises either partially or totally. I think that our generation, which is one that cares about the world and thinks more deeply about the world maybe more than any since the sixties, desperately wants to find hope even though it doesn't know where to seek it. People are exploring ideals tentatively, cautiously, keeping most of their existential faith in themselves like someone who has been burned over and over again by romantic relationships. This doesn't describe everyone, of course, especially in the South; I think it will grow here as it has in other places, just more slowly.

Well, I've foisted enough of my absurd thoughts on you for now. I should get back to that paper.

Brian, man, I miss you already. Hope to talk to you soon (and of course I miss those of you abroad too).

P.S., if you want an example of a modern real-but-ironic romanticism that is also totally beautiful, you should check out this video for "Elephant Gun" by Beirut: