Diskusi Buku

Kepada teman-teman yang berminat, Komunite Seni Jalan Telawi (KsJT) mengundang anda ke majlis diskusi buku siri 2007 pada Sabtu (12 Mei), jam 4 petang, di Bangsar. Tempat akan dimaklumkan kemudian.

Buku yang menjadi pokok perbahasan dalam siri 1 ini karangan Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, sebuah buku nipis yang asalnya teks ucapan profesor sejarah Princeton University ini pada 1969.

Sesiapa yang berminat, boleh meninggalkan no HP dan alamat e-mel anda kepada saya faomar@yahoo.com untuk dihubungi koordinator, sehari dua ini. SEGERA!

>>> Kepada yang baru berkenalan dengan pemikiran Strayer, boleh baca satu makalahnya di sini The Fourth and the Fourteenth Centuries yang merungut tentang reformasi demi reformasi demi reformasi bangsa yang gagal.

Tulisnya: In the fourteenth century, .... , the problems were not apathy but exaggerated sensitivity, not lack of interest in social organization but strong differences of opinion about how to make social organizations work, not the absence of conviction but frustration caused by the poor quality of leadership. Few people were content with the existing situation, and many must have wondered if there could ever be any real improvement. But while outbursts of despair were common enough, despair was not the dominant mood of the fourteenth century. Instead men talked endlessly, tirelessly, and apparently vainly about "reform."

[....] it is easier to persist, to take risks, to continue to try after a long series of failures if one believes in the basic values of one's civilization. It takes hundreds of trials to restore stability to a society that has been shaken by the apparent inadequacy of its ideals or by wide discrepancies between its ideals and its actual behavior. And the first successful trials may merely aggravate the problem, both because they make the unreformed sectors look even worse than they did and because human activities are so interconnected that isolated reforms cannot survive. Every significant change in society requires a host of changes in related fields, and it is a long and weary task to strike a new balance among all these factors. Naturally, during the years of testing and searching many people become discouraged and cynical.