h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thanks for the link to those two maps, Effers. How neat is that that you got to see those things.

I didn't see the maps; it was a group tour on a bus..going from ruin to ruin. One of the people running the trip was very well informed about the history, and I remember him talking a lot about the importance of the place as a focal point for the rise of Greek rational thought, and making the attempt to properly map the physical geography of the world...but still you notice Miletus is placed at the centre..you can't escape a certain subjectivity in map making I think..however hard you try.

It's like that cultural strand is part of our culture but so also is something quite other.

I remember that statue very well and the pleasure in learning that the word 'meander' came from the name of the river god of the Meander.

We saw some fab stuff on that trip...a lot not even fenced off in many places. You walked around and came across statues and friezes in rocks, tombs etc..but that was a long time ago.

Actually further to that fusion of Anglo-Saxon culture and the "Romanism" brought back by Christianity (a fusion of Greek philosophy, Jewish religion and Roman 'statism') I was pointing out (among other things) yesterday re Hillsborough that this fusion persuaded the AS to give up the duty of revenge and the "blood feud" and accept a "King's Peace" under a system of justice based upon the common people. Subsequently "English Peace" became one of the great forces of History.

But the "blood feud" tradition lingered on for centuries. In fact Charles Kingsley (Professor of History at Cambridge) wrote in "Herewarde the Wake" in the 1860s, when that other, warlike, tradition was 'on the rise'that "Highlanders" were currently fitter to survive because the "sins of civilization" were more dangerous to a species than the "sins of incivilization". The latter killed off those "not fit to survive', whereas a civilization allows them to breed and multiply.

Some of those old attitudes, and local "blood feud" traditions, seem to have come into the Hillsborough tragedy- and its aftermath. Clan/tribal loyalty meant closing the ranks.

But actually why I bothered to come back to this thread is because perhaps the greatest ever example to the OP question is the London Games of 2012.

"English Peace" survived over a thousand years because of the "immovable object" strength of London, matched only by its "irresistable force" when "the tides in the affairs of man" made a more expansive approach possible.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was one such moment, and London then showed the world a vision of humankind living in harmony for the greater good.

The London Games has repeated this, and, I know from having been in France for most of it, that this new vision was not lost on the French.

Unfortunately, however, some of the reaction to that "English Utopianism" was once more rather defeatist, with learned commentators explaining just why the Paris bid had failed. The French were too pre-occupied with holding on to past glories, and showing off a city that had been the European capital of culture and civilization for so long.

But Paris can not even solve the serious problems of its ghettos and deprived 'banlieus'. Even the new Socialist Government has declared a kind of militarisation approach to these problem areas. So people questionned whether it would be worth Paris trying to bid for the 2024 Olympics. It would be the centenary of the 1924 Games. But one of the features to the background of those 1924 Games was that, though France had suffered so much between 1914 and 1918, it seemed that Paris would be the only great city that might be able to afford it. French hardline demands especially for massive reparations in gold and materials as revenge for what Germany did in 1871 (Alsace and Lorraines came back etc, created a feeling that the French were greedy and avaricious, and not prepared to "do what was necessary" for World peace. When Maurice Chevalier went in the 1920s to start a film career in Holywood, he was advised not to react to US criticism of the "typical Parisian" that he could play to perfection.

So France in 1924, as in fact France after 1851, reconnected with militarism and war, sabotaging the Versailles Peace Settlement.

Ensuring the "legacy" of the London Games is indeed the Future challenge. But surely that is the whole purpose/value of great cultural/spiritual achievements. They point us towards a better world.

Cass

Not sure what the connection is between London 2012 and the cultural leavings of religion and spirituality... and I read the whole post and everything.

Mr Dreadful,

The Olympic Games were started in Ancient Greece as an offering of the very best of which human beings were capable. when coming together in order to present these performances to their Gods who lived above Mount Olympus. They therefore, to my mind, qualify as a spiritual/cultural legacy that has been bequeathed to the modern world in this revived form, which Monsieur Rogg (?) quite accurately stated was really inspired by the English/British development of sport in the Victorian Era as an activity that could transcend barriers and work towards a world of peace,mutual prosperity and harmony.

The competitors were drawn (I believe) mostly from the Greek City States- so often at war- and possibly later from the wider Hellenic World that, for example, Albert Camus thought should be the basis and inspiration for a new post-1945 World Order..

His old friends and admirers in the French Resistance were angered by "La Peste", his novel comparing the Second World War to the plagues of the Ancient World. Most people were happy to see the Rats as Germans, but not to see the Germans as just as much victims of the diseases that had infected Europe and Western Civilization as the French.

I presume that the Ancient Olympic Games must have involved some kind of tent city since (with no offence intended) 'Mohameds' would have to go to the Mountain, not the other way round. Mount Olympus would not move. But having brought up Islam, what is very special about the Great Haj in Mecca is that the number of pilgrims who all go in this, for most, once in a lifetime, special occasion, create an incredible "critical mass" of devotion, love, aspiration, and determination to "be worthy".

So desert plains around Mecca are covered with tent cities, that stretch all "norms" of urban life almost to breaking point, and sometimes beyond. Mecca too has had its Hillsborough disasters. Another great tent city event is the great Kumb Melah in Hinduism when perhaps as many as 20million people assemble for the special period of this ancient festival.

Compared with these the "critical mass" of humanity in an event like the London Games is quite small, and it is still just about possible for a city to have proper facilities to house its guests and to provide facilities for those who aspire to "divine performance" to place before them. But for sure there is a global audience joining up people all over the world.

And, even more than in those great inward looking assemblies of Islam and Hinduism, which are really looking back at traditions of greatness and "lost ages", the Olympic Games is focussed on people being better than ever and creating a much better, brighter and new Future- and that means all of the people being better, competitors, spectators, organisers, merchants, businessmen, plus the media and broadcasters.

I have mentioned to many people seeing an interview on Monday with what appeared to be an American nuclear family. They had heard of the Olympic flame arriving in Cornwall, and they flew over to be at the Lizard when it arrived. They then followed that flame in a peregrination/pilgrimage all around the UK. It ended up in the stadium, and they watched as much of the Olympics as they could. Then they heard that there was going to be a Paralympic Flame. They made another pilgrimage and then watched the Paralympics. On Monday they had watched the London Games procession to the front of Buckingham Palace.

The interviewer asked them when they would go home, and they said that they were not sure that they would go home. They just loved the spirit of the whole London Games experience. Shades of young Jesus staying in "His Father's House", when he first went to the Temple at Jerusalem for the great Jewish assemby festival of Passover.

It reminds me of a song that I wrote many years ago, having set an RE class the challenge of writing an imaginary letter that one of the disciples might have written back home having just dropped everything in order to follow "The Master's Call"..

In fact it became a song cycle about the disciples' experience of Jesus' ministry with one song entitled "Come With Me to My House" based upon Jesus sending his followers out with nothing, no assets, and only entitled (Buddhist style) to what hospitality people would give each one each night as they extended that invitation.

"Come with me to my house
Lay your burden down
You're welcome in our house
It's so good to have you round"

In the London Games Londoners gave that message to people from all over the world. Madness sang their hit "Our House", and the whole experience has left me feeling the last line of my song:

"Just as the fisherman sinks his net not knowing what's to find,
I now know for right or wrong where I belong".

To my mind these are all classic functions of great cultural/spiritual experience.

Goodnight- alias "Godsnight"

Cass

Beyond the name and the fact it involves sports, I don't think there's really not that much of a connection between the modern Olympics and the ancient ones though. The Victorians liked sports and Classicism. The religious element of the original Olympics is pretty much coincidence, being as that element was not retained in the modern version and really the modern Olympics are as far removed from the ancient ones as it's possible for them to be without removing the sports.

If there were some continuous element there, I could agree with you to an extent but saying there's a real connection between London 2012 and Olympia 776BC is like saying there's a real connection between Wicca and ancient Paganism.

Hmm. Unconvinced, Mr D.
That was then, this is now and between the two are layers of change within change.
Just because London 2012 was far removed from... , doesn't mean there's no connection and if there is a connection then it is a real connection, shirley?

Hey, it's all individual perspectives, innit?

And don't call me Shirley.

Mr. Dreadful

There is a very real connection, which was why those "Americans" made such a fuss about the torch.

"Modern History" was very much associated with the idea of a "Renaissance" of the greatness of antiquity, the apparently "Golden Age" that would never be brought down to Earth in Medieval times, when people looked back at the great achievements of antiquity.

At no time was this more important than when Burckhardt developed this idea of the Renaissance c1860's at a time when thanks to "progress" and the Industrial Revolution it seemed that the walled-in greatness of the Medieval World, producing Greece and Rome, might yet be rolled out across a new greater world than that world based just around "The Sea in the Middle of the Land". But visions of that world order came down to ()a)a "Germanic" one based upon the "Pax Romana" and a mighty state equipped with inhuman force, and (b)an "Hellenic" one based upon free peoples in small self-determined democratic states like modern Greece and Belgium, which were formed as part of the new World vision promoted by Great Britain.

These visions are still shaping the Crises of 2012, and the London Games was a triumph of Humanism.

Cass

>> There is a very real connection, which was why
those "Americans" made such a fuss about the torch. <<

I think we've established that the whole torch thing
was Goebbels' idea for the Berlin Limpix in 1936.


~jwf~

I still don't see a tangible connection, Cass... thank Bob Squiggles is here to talk some sense...

Don't encourage me or I'll start engaging lines like:

>> the wider Hellenic World that.., Albert Camus thought
should be the basis and inspiration for a new post-1945
World Order..<<

and muttering stuff about the gay agenda.


~jwf~

Mr. Dreadful

"I don't see a tangible connection"

Exactly-That is because it exists within the cultural/spiritual dimension - "the ground of our being". And unfortunately this materialistic age confuses physical appearance with reality, and learns to ignore the fact that there is no "personal" life, or even physical existence, independent of being part of something greater than we are.

A favourite story is the story of the amateur inventor John Day, who invented and built a diving machine in which he descended to several fathoms in Plymouth Sound in order to win and bet that would reimburse his backer. Like most of us he was fortunate enough to have always been able to take for granted that part of our interactivity with the world around us that we call breathing. The role of oxygen was identified a few years after his death.

For there is no clear physical distinction between what becomes our corpse and its interactive process with our environment, and in fact other living things, apart from the loss of animation. [Recent research in France this year has pointed out the vital significance of the "inner populations" within our guts, that control the processing of the stuff of life that constantly flows through us, and even influencing behavior and choices.

So when you wrote about "personal" interpretation, I was reminded of years of conversations with teenagers in the full throes of a "crisis of being", when they refused to be "the person" that they were, and had not yet managed to be the person they hoped to be, or would be.

Many claimed a sense of private ownership of their lives. "It is my life and I can do what I want with it".

It was a time that I well remember in my own life when I had some sense of "being", but did not feel that I was, or perhaps really could be, a "human being" within the world into which I was born.

Bob Dylan's "It Aint Me Babe" seemed to sum up exactly those feelings of not really existing in any real way as a "person". To quote Dylan again " I want you to surround me so that I can know that I am really real".

These were years when I resolved that I would never cry about anything ever again, but would harden myself and armour myself against the worst inhumanities of man to man.

But retreating from the world, as intellectuals have been encouraged to do for centuries, means cutting off those ties that actually connect us to that essential attribute of the human species as a social one - its ability to link up and transcend.

Jesus said "He who has ears to hear, let him hear".

Alienation ,uprootedness, rebellion and apparent self-sufficiency have been features of the last 250 years of "Western" History, while it claimed the status of world leadership and the right to have a self-serving relationship with the rest of the world.

But across wider time and space it seems that the basis of the Human experience, is and has been, that most people are fortunate enough to develop a sense of being one joined up human living entity in the close bond that forms between Mother and Child.

It is a sense of being a person that develops and expands as the childmind expands to a comprehension of the Universe, and some picture of where their own life, and the lives of those with which it is intimately bound, fit in with that universe.

It is such a sense that Arthur Miller found in Classical Greek drama in his college days back in the Thirties and which informed his career as a dramatist and human being, no-one better handling the great themes that linked the intensely personal to the infinite and timeless, something that spirituality and culture can do for those who are receptive.

Cass

Quote: “I think we've established that the whole torch thing
was Goebbels' idea for the Berlin Limpix in 1936.”

But that is a perfect example of what I said. Quote : “But visions of that world order came down to (a) A "Germanic" one based upon the "Pax Romana" and a mighty state equipped with inhuman force, and (b) an "Hellenic" one based upon free peoples in small self-determined democratic states like modern Greece and Belgium, which were formed as part of the new World vision promoted by Great Britain.

Very obviously both Nazism and Fascism were more closely based on Ancient Rome than Ancient Greece, with Roman Games prostituting the earlier Greek vision.

But Germanic “Scientific History” tended to have a Marxist/Darwinian inevitability that meant that by definition things progressed across time, and therefore Rome was superior to Greece. So by 1941 Dr. Julian Huxley, eminent Darwinian Biologist, could describe the struggle of that “Age of Catastrophe 1914-1945” as an evolutionary struggle between the forces of disintegration and reintegration. Things were falling apart in the modern world, not least personality, with the very significant upsurge in Schizophrenia and the increasing importance given to the role of the “Subconscious Mind”- no longer wedded to coherent and integrated personalities and ways of life. In the resulting World Chaos of 1932-3 the totalitarian powers, especially the Axis Powers, managed to steal a march on Liberal Democracies because it was easier for them to harness Science and Technology to the service of the State at War, conflict being the driving force in history and evolution.

In 1940 the British War Cabinet were afraid, after the French Armistice, that Hitler might offer Europe an controlled and managed Customs Union not unlike that which had created the modern German Empire. In this and in other ways there was an assumption, especially amongst Scientists and Technocrats that the Nazis had got a great deal right behind the planning for the post-war world. It would be a kind of Pax Romana backed by the greatest inhuman force in history- the threat that NATO could hold over humankind of nuclear annihilation, with the compensation of a ‘You‘ve never had it so good materially’ life for the average and compliant citizen.

The Sixties saw a widespread mood of rebellion against that Roman/Nazi model. It was a changing world. But then the Beijing Olympics signalled a return to that “Berlin model” in which the Olympics can be hi-jacked in order to show off the massive power of the State over the weak and powerless citizen. London returned to the Hellenic idea of harnessing the power of the City and the citizens of a City who, as in Periclean Athens believed in the most vital form of democracy- that in which the people do not just vote for what is to be done, they get together and do it as a Sovereign People.

Cass

Apologies if this has already been mentioned, but religion gave us the cross, which in 90% of cases stops vampires from getting at you.

Of course if you want something that will stop 100% of the vampires you need to use a stake to the heart. However for this you have to get up real close to them and you probably only have a 5% chance of administering a successful blow before they convert you.

Stone Art

Actually- as I understand- it the Romans "gave us the Cross". Whether or not they invented it, they seem to have made it THE exemplary form of punishment across much of the Empire and a warning for all those who would not bow down and comply to the 'Pax Romana'.

Christianity adopted the Cross it seems for various reasons. As an underground and suppressed movement early Christians adopted the sign of the fish (not quite &amp because their Jesus had bade them become "Fishers of Men"- forming the fish tail involved lines crossing. Gradually the emblem of the Cross became a simple way of referencing not the power of the cross but the triumph of a common man over the Cross and the apparently overwhelming power of the State.

Whatever the roots of the Jesus story, as a religion Christianity drew very heavily for its development as an actual religion on Greek philosophy, though I always suspect that Plato's concept of what would happen to a purely good man was embellished by later Christian scribes who copied out these ancient texts. But Plato probably had his own master, Socrates, in mind when he wrote that a purely good man would not be able to live in the world as it is, but would be rejected and eventually sentenced to death. Perhaps we should have a "Religion of the Cup" since his death sentence involved him drinking a cup of hemlock poison.

Cass

But Christianity became the religion of the Roman "Establishment" so that religion became associated with the actions of State/Secular power which sought to harness its greater power, rather as States in the great age of Science and Technology sought to harness atomic power.