This post includes a short video featuring the English singer-songwriter Steven Patrick Morrissey -- known professionally simply as Morrissey -- recollecting his childhood and youth in Manchester.
I don't know much about Morrissey, and I'm not particularly motivated to know much about Morrissey, but I found his poignant remembrances of childhood and his incisive discernment of the crushing burdens of the 1960s and 1970s quite intriguing. So the key here is to focus on what the man says rather than focus on the man himself.
In the video, Morrissey explains why the place he grew up no longer exists and how this has left him feeling as if a part of his childhood had been torn away from him. He describes the the tightly community his family and extended relations had established in a place called Queens Park, and how all of this came to end in one fell swoop when the place was demolished to make room for garish socialist-like apartment buildings in the 1960s, heralding the end of community and the beginning of anonymous society. Morrissey also touches upon his education and recalls the barbarism he experienced in high school.
I found the short video interesting for a number of reasons. For starters, it mirrors my own experience growing up in Canada in the 1980s. More importantly, it addresses many of the problems our modern societies created or exacerbated in the late twentieth century -- alienation, faceless bureaucracy, lack of community, government schools, soul-destroying jobs and careers, etc.
From a spiritual perspective (my own, not Morrissey's), the video reminded me that the world is inherently entropic and that some degree of alienation is practically inevitable even if we manage to avoid some of the experiences Morrissey recounts.
Morrissey's recollections also highlight how extremely effective and efficient late twentieth-century society -- with its emphasis on the bureaucratic implementation utility and altruism -- was at intensifying entropy and alienation for the purpose of soul destruction.
Note added: It's also interesting to note how Morrissey escaped the crushing burdens of the modern world through creativity and the feeling that he what he had to say was "terribly important". As far as I know, Morrissey is a lapsed Catholic, not a practicing Christian, and I suspect that in many ways he is deeply anti-Christian, at least deeply anti-organized Christianity (re: his song, I Have Forgiven Jesus), but his embrace of creativity can be considered instructive if we are willing to compare apples and oranges, so to speak.
I don't know much about Morrissey, and I'm not particularly motivated to know much about Morrissey, but I found his poignant remembrances of childhood and his incisive discernment of the crushing burdens of the 1960s and 1970s quite intriguing. So the key here is to focus on what the man says rather than focus on the man himself.
In the video, Morrissey explains why the place he grew up no longer exists and how this has left him feeling as if a part of his childhood had been torn away from him. He describes the the tightly community his family and extended relations had established in a place called Queens Park, and how all of this came to end in one fell swoop when the place was demolished to make room for garish socialist-like apartment buildings in the 1960s, heralding the end of community and the beginning of anonymous society. Morrissey also touches upon his education and recalls the barbarism he experienced in high school.
I found the short video interesting for a number of reasons. For starters, it mirrors my own experience growing up in Canada in the 1980s. More importantly, it addresses many of the problems our modern societies created or exacerbated in the late twentieth century -- alienation, faceless bureaucracy, lack of community, government schools, soul-destroying jobs and careers, etc.
From a spiritual perspective (my own, not Morrissey's), the video reminded me that the world is inherently entropic and that some degree of alienation is practically inevitable even if we manage to avoid some of the experiences Morrissey recounts.
Morrissey's recollections also highlight how extremely effective and efficient late twentieth-century society -- with its emphasis on the bureaucratic implementation utility and altruism -- was at intensifying entropy and alienation for the purpose of soul destruction.
Note added: It's also interesting to note how Morrissey escaped the crushing burdens of the modern world through creativity and the feeling that he what he had to say was "terribly important". As far as I know, Morrissey is a lapsed Catholic, not a practicing Christian, and I suspect that in many ways he is deeply anti-Christian, at least deeply anti-organized Christianity (re: his song, I Have Forgiven Jesus), but his embrace of creativity can be considered instructive if we are willing to compare apples and oranges, so to speak.
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