Blue Jay Way: Where Will Critical Culture Come From?: Responses
Adler, Margot
I LOVE Marshall Berman's notion of jaytalking. t reminds me of Ms. Frizzle, in the Magic School Bus series, telling her kids, "Take chances, make mistakes, get messy." It's exactly the...
...As I listened to these people, I remembered how many years I spent yearning secretly for some kind of apocalyptic moment: If only the revolution would come, then I would know what to do with my life, and my decisions would be as clear and pure as fire, not the messy day-to-day reality I was actually encountering during the late sixties and early seventies...
...But down deep I think that while there may be some breakdowns, mostly our society will keep on going, and we will have to find a way to create a critical and loving human culture even if nothing big changes, and even if the stock market keeps on going up and up and up...
...When my mother died, one of her friends wrote, "She phoned every night, tucking us into our beds...
...The seed of that yearning went something like this: if there is a breakdown of society, perhaps people will be forced to understand the importance of community, and perhaps this will create a moment where people will see that "things," "stuff," technology, should not be the center of a truly human life...
...Early in 1999, I spent quite a bit of time with Y2K organizers in Boulder, Colorado...
...We tried to think about how our lives—those of us in our fifties— were different from theirs—only a few of them still alive now, in their eighties and nineties...
...Many of them were grassroots activists who had spent many years doing tenant organizing or health care work...
...The idea of jaytalking also reminds me of a wonderful notion that was put forth many years ago—only partly as a joke— by the science fiction writer Robert Anton Wilson...
...The seemingly free individual in our market culture is in no way as free as he or she thinks—every so-called free idea is tinged by one's history, class, race, gender, family history, unconscious drives, and so forth...
...Most of our lives are so truncated and busy that we might do well to consider that creating a critical culture also means creating a human culture, and that takes daily human effort that few of us, so far, have been willing to make...
...They were constantly on the phone talking to each other...
...As I watched these Y2K organizers using this moment in time to create community meetings and neighborhood associations...
...Wilson and several friends started the Erisian Movement, named after the Goddess of Chaos, Eris or Discordia...
...The other day I was at a memorial service...
...I felt it in myself as well...
...MARGOT ADLER is a correspondent for National Public Radio and author of Heretic's Heart: A Journey through Spirit and Revolution...
...DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 35...
...Marx in particular gave many of us a framework for our ideas—an order that was at times creative and at times destructive...
...In writing about the idea of Eris, Wilson noted that people in our culture tend to split the world into order versus disorder, but in fact, if you understand creativity there are always at least four possibilities, not two: creative order, destructive order, creative disorder, destructive disorder...
...They never said, "Let's do lunch," and disappeared...
...Eris was the goddess who threw out the golden apple that started the Trojan War...
...They not only worked at living their ideals, they worked at friendship...
...By emphasizing the creative instead of emphasizing order it is possible to help bring about a cul ture that understands that creative disorder is often necessary for art, culture and life...
...Frizzle, in the Magic School Bus series, telling her kids, "Take chances, make mistakes, get messy...
...About twenty people sat around and remembered a woman who had been my mother's best friend...
...We all spoke of this circle of friends—our mothers and fathers—that had come of age in the Great Depression and most had been ardent radicals...
...These friends were never too busy...
...The obsession with order at the expense of creativity has created a situation in politics, in our schools, in the workplace, and everywhere else, where people are afraid to honor the juices that ferment in creative chaos, to take chances themselves or to let their kids get messy...
...as I watched them make very good and rational arguments—that whether Y2K involves any breakdown or not, this is a moment when neighborhoods and communities can get together and prepare (always a good thing), and in addition they can get to know their neighbors and create community—I noted that underneath there was a yearning...
...I LOVE Marshall Berman's notion of jaytalking...
...It's exactly the opposite of the push in today's culture, to "get it right, pour on the homework, choose your career carefully, don't rock the boat...
...Berman mentions the debt all radicals have to Marx and Freud...
...It's hard to conceive of a critical culture without some method of imparting the knowledge to future generations that there are always veils to pull 34 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 SYMPOSIUM aside, and hidden understandings that are not apparent at first glance...
...But given the flaws of our present society and the lack of a critical culture, it seems fitting to mention that both Marx and Freud understood that nothing is as it seems...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
