Sárospataki Füzetek 1. (1997)
1997 / 2. szám - Dr. Frank Sawyer: How can we go forward? (Hogyan tovább?)
DR. FRANK SAWYER the modern age are falling apart. These building blocks were religion, democracy, science, technology, capitalism, or alternately, socialism. The postmodern attitude teaches people to question these movements and to pursue personal choices which give meaning for the moment. At the same time, new movements arose, including mind-expanding drug philosophies, new ecological concerns, feminist perspectives, a turn to yoga meditation, and a search for something different than what the capitalist society was offering. This has led in our time to a pluralistic situation in which one’s lifeview is no longer handed on so obviously by family, church, neighbourhood or schools. Today there is a ’struggle for the world’s soul’.1 Multidimensional approaches The music of the Beatles and their writers John Lennon and Paul McCartney passed through various styles and themes. True to the postmodern trend, many of their songs are playful, sensuous, cynical, breaking down faith in any grand ideology, but also at times very humane, seeking for greater justice and the recovery of the whole person from the fragmentation imposed by rapidly changing technological societies. John Lennon raises worldview questions interwoven with personal dilemmas, felt by himself and by many of those in the vast audiehce. The trend was toward more expressive music and freer style. This search for freedom had earlier been expressed in the art movement: Van Gogh, Dali and Picasso. In music we find it in blues, jazz, rock and roll, and then in hard rock. The search for freedom in the west during the 1960’s and following was first of all a search for freedom from the plastic death (artificiality and inauthenticity) of suburban life. In the deepest sense, the movement of the 1960’s was a search for a new humanity and a new spirituality. Thousands of young people got together for beat music ’happenings’. They were not just there for entertainment; they were looking for a new identity, a new consciousness.1 2 1 Howard A.Snyder: Earth Currents: The Struggle for the World’s Soul (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995). 2 cf.further Mark Hertsgaard, A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles (Delacorte Press, New York, 1995). 60
