I was just reading Robert Pirsig’s “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals“, the sequel to Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which he clarifies his “Metaphysics of Quality” and came across his description of the moral and social chaos accompanying the transition from the Victorian Era to post World War I society, from the change in status of the “intellectual”, from “… social domination of intellect to intellectual domination of society …” I believe it represents a good description of the context in which many of the books discussed on this blog, and the accompanying Integrated Success Program web-site, were written.

Prior to Armistice Day, (November 11, 1918)

“… academicians had been minor and peripheral within the Victorian power structure. Intelligence and knowledge were considered a high manifestation of social achievement, but intellectuals were not expected to run society itself. They were valued servants of society, like ministers and doctors. They were expected to decorate the social parade, not lead it. Leadership was for practical, businesslike “men of affairs”. Few Victorians suspected what was coming: that within a few years the intellectuals they idealized as the best representatives of their high culture would turn on them and destroy that culture with contempt.
The Victorian social system and the Victorian morality that led into World War I had portrayed war as an adventurous conflict between noble individuals engaged in the idealistic service of their country: a kind of extended knighthood. Victorians loved exquisitely painted heroic battle scenes in their drawing rooms, with dashing cavalrymen riding toward the enemy with sabers drawn, or ahorse returning riderless with the title, “Bad News”. Death was acknowledged by an occasional soldier in the arms of his comrades looking palely toward heaven.

World War I wasn’t like that. The Gatling gun removed the nobility, the heroism. The Victorian painters had never shown a battlefield of mud and shell holes and barbed wire and half a million rotting corpses - some staring toward heaven, some staring into the mud, some without faces to stare in any direction. That many had been murdered in one battle alone.

Those who survived suffered a stunnedness, and a lostness and felt bitter toward the society that could do that to them. They joined the faith that intellect must find some way out of old Victorian “nobility” and “virtue” into a more sane and intelligent world. In an instant it seemed, the snobbish fashionable Victorian social world was gone.

New technology fueled the change. The population was shifting from agriculture to manufacturing. Electrification was turning night into day and eliminating hundreds of drudgeries. Cars and highways were changing the landscape and the speed with which people did things. Mass journalism had emerged. Radio and radio advertising had arrived. The mastery of all these new changes was no longer dominated by social skills. It required a technologically trained, analytic mind. A horse could be mastered if your resolve was firm, your disposition pleasant and fear absent. The skills required were biological and social. But handling the new technology was something different. Personal biological and social qualities didn’t make any difference to machines.

A whole population, cut loose physically by the new technology from farm to city, from South to North, and from East to West Coast, was also cut adrift morally and psychologically from the static social patterns of the Victorian past. People hardly knew what to do with themselves. “Flappers,” airplanes, bathing beauty contests, radio, free love, movies, “modern” art … suddenly the door had been sprung on a Victorian jail of staleness and conformity they had hardly known was there, and the elation at the new technological and social fredom was dizzying”.

In addition, there was a dramatic transition from a Mechanistic / Determinsitic world view, in which it was believed science had explained virtually everything, to the discovery of the myriad mysteries of Quantum Theory, in which very little seemed certain. In a very general way, the theories of Isaac Newton suggested that the world behaved very much like a clock (Mechanistic). Through a series of measurements of position and momentum (for example), an objects position could be determined for the past and projected into the future. With successively more accurate measurements, it was believed science would be able to more accurately define events, hence Determinism.

With the introduction of Quantum Theory, Mechanism / Determinism was strongly challenged. For example, Heisenburg’s Uncertainty Principle states (in essence) that the more information gathered with respect to an object’s location (position), the less is known with regard to it’s momentum (mass x velocity). An object (sub-atomic particle) may have it’s location precisely determined, however, in this situation one would have no idea where the particle was going (it’s momentum = mass x velocity - with velocity being a vector quantity, being defined by both a speed and a direction).

To make matters worse, the photoelectric effect suggested light had a particle nature, Thomas Young’s double slit diffraction experiments suggested a wave-like character and Compton’s Scattering experiment demonstrated both wavelike and particle-like behaviour! If we could not be certain with regard to the basic nature of something as common as light, what would we be certain about? (see Dancing Wu Li Masters)

Finally, Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” was initially published in 1937, immediately following the Great Depression, in which millions suffered considerable (to complete) financial loss, became destitute and, as a result, endured hardship over approximately a decade. Families were disrupted as men left home to find work, anywhere they could across the country. Napoleon Hill states,

“The people of America began to think of poverty, following the Wall Street crash of 1929. Slowly, but surely that mass thought was crystalized into its physical equivalent, which was known as a “depression”. This had to happen, it is in conformity with the laws of Nature”.

Individually, these represent huge transitions in the thinking of a culture, of whole societies. Into these turbulent times, many of the authors emphasized here, and on accompanying Integrated Success Program web-site, were publishing books, texts, entire philosophies of personal development / achievement and/or success in an attempt to assist people trying to establish a personal, cultural, societal, intellectual and/or moral foundation.

In many ways, current society is in similar straits, having transitioned from the “Free Love”, anti-establishment “Hippie Movement” of the 1960’s to 1970’s to the “Lost Generations” of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. We are coming out of the worst financial crisis of our generation (in late 2008 to early 2009, some financial pundits compared it to the Great Depression). We may have weathered the financial crisis, in varying degrees of success, however, the repercussions and impact will extend quite some time yet (how long will it take to re-establish faith in “Wall Street” and their economic stewartship). And, finally, science is challenging us with many unresolved and highly controversial moral issues (i.e. stem cell therapy, cloning, Intelligent Design, etc.).

The wisdom in many of these books is every bit as valid as when they were first published. In many instances, they represent “Universal Truths” that are “discovered” every several generations. “Lost” (or even “suppressed”) wisdom and/or texts are discovered, released or otherwise re-issued.

In reading the many books and texts on personal development I have reviewed for this blog, and the accompanying Integrated Success Program web-site, I have come across references drawing on the wisdom of Socrates (469 - 399 BC), Plato (428 - 328 BC), the Bible, Epictetus (55 - 135 AD), Marcus Aurelius (121 - 180 AD), great American scholars from the 1800’s (i.e. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry David Thoreau) and numerous authors from the late 19th to early twentieth century (James Allen, William Walker Atkinson, Charles Haanel, Napoleon Hill, etc.). The wisdom keeps re-surfacing through the authors of successive generations, either being referenced from previous works or being re-discovered.

The student of personal development is urged to access this readily available wisdom through an active reading program rather than making the recurring mistake of mankind in re-discovering this wisdom through “Trial and Error”.

Many of the classic books in the “Personal Development” genre are available on the Integrated Success Program web-site.

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