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

Thomas

Thanks for that.. only I must point out that my position is much more extreme than yours or perhaps just the one that you described- which is why so many people are uncomfortable with me or regard me as perhaps a "loose cannon"- most often when they do not really know me.

First- That oneness is much greater than the oneness of humanity.. My oak and rainbow experience in 1919 is in keeping with a long tradition of Englishness that feels a oneness with a living Nature which is part of the dynamics of the whole universe. People have a special place in that universe, which is not one of "equality" or "sameness", nor for that matter of inferiority or superiority.

Secondly- Just as Descartes had to start from cogito ergo sum, I had to start from an even more basic question seeming to be a real nobody- John Lennon may have felt much the same - a "Nowhere Man". So the starting point as Paul Tillich wrote was to find "the courage to be", and for a long time I could associate with the idea that I finally found in "The Disinherited Mind"- in which the great art historian Burckhardt was quoted as saying that at any point in his life he would have been happy to exchange his life for a never having been born.

So mine is not a middle way. Like writers such as Albert Camus and Arthur Miller I think that what is of value are eternal verities that have been explored by all Humankind throughout time and space.. Now politics has been defined as the art of the possible, and that in practice has come to mean what IS possible, rather than what may be possible. That is why it was so great to teach children who live for the Future and expect the Future to be different because they can see how they will make it different and better. This is not a middling, muddling-through but a process in which people of love, goodwill and enthusiasm work to achieve as much as is humanly possible in terms of making just the mere feeling of being alive a thrill.. "Bliss was it in that age to be alive, but to be young was very heaven."

Cass

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Thomas

I may have quoted to you already that another 22 April person, the great violonist Yehudi Menuhin, wrote that it had been his privilege to spend his life creating utopias, for that is what listening to great music can do.. There are moments of musical listening that for me are just in themselves worth all the rest of being alive: and as for making music!!!

Before this vision and materially obsessed age many civilizations- for example the grea Hindu one- held that the essence of life is not matter but sound. Matter tried to deny, fight and limit energu, sound is pure energy, and energy is the essence of being.

One of the main chapters of the first thing that I completed is about this difference between the real and the apparent, for in this age we most of the time people have to work on the lesser basis of what they can see... and people make themsleves miserable about things in that static world that will all inevitably decay and disappear leaving only the energy- that is eternal.

Our business in life is to be energy conductors that pick up the energy of nature with its potential for good and evil and to "make good and mend".

But here on h2g2 we have left the History Board and are somewhere in cosmic space among "The Harmony of the Spheres"..

Regards

Cass

Thomas B

Thinking of our last exchanges It seems to me that there are 2 significant differences between us that must be kept in mind:

(a) I believe that you were born in 1968- in other words at that moment when the Revolutionary energy of my generation had already changed the whole course of history into a more positive and progressive one. As you were growing up The times really were a'changing, and by the time that you were 21 in 1989 you were part of that moment that George Osborne claimed as his own formative influences when a whole edifice of hatred and conflict crumbled away, and all things seemed possible.. Unfortunately, as I wrote in "Gordon Brown "The Rock", Rock-Solid Guarantees and the Rock and Roll Generation" too many of us "Sixties people" had just settled for less, or were prepared to be fooled by the idea that it was our youth that had made the difference, and that it was time for the next generation to take up the challenge. They had much less knowledge and experience of real challenge and hardship, for successive generations seek to give better protection to their own children than they had themselves.

(b) The idea of being revolutionary and radical has, I suggest a different connotation in Germany than it does in England, which T.B. Macaulay commented in c1827 and later in c1852 has a genius for managing to get through revolutionary times by means of making constructive internal adaptations, rather than foreign adventures or even extreme internal violence.

An English "massacre" is still 10-11 people killed. Terible to the English, but hardly significant in most other countries it would appear.

Regards

Cass

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Thomas

My response to your post follows almost exactly on from something that I have just bee writing about 1066.. Obviously as you were only born in 1968 you missed out on the experience of being at the heart and soul of that movement that moved the whole world.

As per usual there were a few stand-out people, and for the very reason that they stand out they only represented the most extreme outreach of that movement that was at heart a re-assertion of the right of people to be treated as human beings.

In my first published article on education in c 1978 I highlighted this fact that what we had achieved was the humanisation of schools, and the relationship of all within it- teachers, pupils and parents.. The article was entitled "Parthership" and its theme was the need to move on from this move to treating each other as human beings, to go on to see how we could all combine in shared interests, values and causes- our own core ones- in order to create a free and willing partnership.

The experience of fighting Nazi Germany, and that unity of purpose achieved by the misuse of power, had led to the conviction that power needed to be used in a similar way within democracies in order to win the war, and then to win the peace. Thus post-war Britain was a world of State restrctions and State control based upon the authority vested in an paternalisticv elite. This was reflected, as I wrote in that Labour article, in the idea that by 1960 British life was managed for the people. The Sixties revolution demanded that people should be left with as much freedom to manage their own lives as possible, and obviously some people abused that freedom.

But actually most did not.. and when I walk and travel around London I feel the blessing of the way that there are habitually warm human contacts. The cozy fires of hate, seclusion and separatism are much less evident. The Humanist revolution is gathering momentume, and eventually some other people than you may be interested in what History can tell us about the Human beings we could all be.

And surely what the World Cup in South Africa showed to the world is that we are all human beings.

Regards

Cass

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Thomas B

I am sorry that you think that they are riddle games.. But I think that you are well advised to focus on other avenues than this "lost in space one"-- the avenues of your own Odyssey.

I have mostly tried to respond to your questions, but perhaps my answers have not been useful to you.

Ultimately I do not think that we can achieve much in the spacelessness and timelessness of the "heavens". Our space and time has earthbound limitations... But then that has always been part of English common sense.

Regards

Cass

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Thomas

There is no "end" once we become introspective..there is an infinity within.

Which is why I mostly stick to History and the interface and interaction between people.. Only then do we become identifiably human.. which is why an introspective, self-absorbed person given the possibility of total power like Adolf Hitler leads people into Hell.

I refuse to have people follow me.. for I know where I might take them. As a thinker and teacher my aim is to give food for thought, and encourage people to believe in their right to think for themselves and thus have the courage to be.

Regards

Cass

Thomas

I have just managed to provisionally finish "Work In Progress".. It seems to me that it actually should introduce the "Towards Project" so I have placed the Five Parts at the start on the Contents Page.

I am just off to France for three weeks, so please forgive my silence.

Regards

Cass

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Thomas

As I said I have added them to the contents page therefore via link that you have already tried to share with other posters

Cass

Thomas

Here is the link

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/A64369281

Regards

Cass

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Thomas

Thanks for the update... I was required (probably by the computer) to XXX out some of John Lennon's swear words when I tried to paste Part Five.. I just hope that they are not going to object to my use of other people's work as historical documentary evidence- which, as you know, I rather like to do... I know that I had problems some years ago when I was trying to build on some of the wisdom of J.K. Galbraith.

Cass

Thomas

I see that Three has been referred as well.. Did you manage to get it before that?

Cass

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Thomas

Well that is good news.. On the Galbraith piece I had to go back and paraphrase what he had written, when what I really want to show is how my thinking fits in with what other people have actually said.. It is why I am or try to be an historian not a playwright of novelist.

Perhaps things are more difficult for copyright when you are not quoting really old works.

Cass