RonPrice
Member
THE HEART OF HISTORY IN AN AGE OF EXTREMES
This morning on ABC Radio National I heard an interview with a Professor of Politics from La Trobe University. He was talking about Eric Hobsbaum’s new book The Age of Extremes: 1914 to 1991. His analysis of the twentieth century was a useful one to a person like myself who had grown up, according to Hobsbaum, in the period of the greatest prosperity and advancement in material conditions in the history of humankind: 1945-1970, but had seen a decline in traditional religion as the main psychological support structure for human beings in the West, in and after the 1960s; and the collapse of socialism/communism as a hope for civilization.
This piece of prose-poetry tries to place Hobsbaum’s analysis in the context of my life(1944-2008) and some of my personal perspectives on world history beginning in the post-WW2 period. -R Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 3/4/08.
I’d made contact with what seemed like
an unrevolutionary revolutionary Force
in the midst of an age of prosperity,
an epoch, among the earliest, in the morning
of my life, epochs which would stretch to the
fringes of a Golden Age, perhaps like the Greeks
But meanwhile, as part of that long history
of infinite toil, I would forge a post-war experience
in these days of a war so unlike the first two in this
century of horrors with its own type of light & wonder--
which were difficult to comprehend, when looking back
over these past six decades, the first stirrings of a
spiritual revolution. That, Eric, is at the heart
of my history in this Age of your Extremes.
Ron Price
9 December 1999
(up-dated for House of Politics
Forum: 3/4/08)
This morning on ABC Radio National I heard an interview with a Professor of Politics from La Trobe University. He was talking about Eric Hobsbaum’s new book The Age of Extremes: 1914 to 1991. His analysis of the twentieth century was a useful one to a person like myself who had grown up, according to Hobsbaum, in the period of the greatest prosperity and advancement in material conditions in the history of humankind: 1945-1970, but had seen a decline in traditional religion as the main psychological support structure for human beings in the West, in and after the 1960s; and the collapse of socialism/communism as a hope for civilization.
This piece of prose-poetry tries to place Hobsbaum’s analysis in the context of my life(1944-2008) and some of my personal perspectives on world history beginning in the post-WW2 period. -R Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 3/4/08.
I’d made contact with what seemed like
an unrevolutionary revolutionary Force
in the midst of an age of prosperity,
an epoch, among the earliest, in the morning
of my life, epochs which would stretch to the
fringes of a Golden Age, perhaps like the Greeks
But meanwhile, as part of that long history
of infinite toil, I would forge a post-war experience
in these days of a war so unlike the first two in this
century of horrors with its own type of light & wonder--
which were difficult to comprehend, when looking back
over these past six decades, the first stirrings of a
spiritual revolution. That, Eric, is at the heart
of my history in this Age of your Extremes.
Ron Price
9 December 1999
(up-dated for House of Politics
Forum: 3/4/08)
