Lost Horizon

Just viewed Lost Horizon.

I suppose it has its points to make about how man destroys his opportunities for "utopia" and how the hero (Conway - Ronald Coleman) had a destiny to fulfill. And I really should try to read the novel to see how it was adapted.

But what struck me was the "idealism" of preserving a Shangri-La against the onslaught of man's destruction was only so much wishful thinking. In 1937, perhaps they could sense that the winds of world wide war would soon be upon us again. But true idealism means understanding your worldview and standing up for values, not running away to Shangri-La. I thought it especially telling that Ronald Coleman's Conway was a British diplomat, an adventurer, a hero, an amazing negotiator, who was in line to be the next Foreign Secretary, if not eventually Prime Minister. Hey it's 1937 - our hero, if he had stayed in the real world could have short circuited the road to war or confronted Hitler earlier, done anything more than the Chamberlain appeasement! But no, Sam Jaffe (high lama & Catholic priest - 200 years old - the first cultural relativist of liberal theology) had a mission for him to save books and cultural artifacts in a serene valley, so that we could rebuild after the conflagration.

Sorry, the greatest generation had to fight the war , 10s of millions of died, and then it seems with our help!, everybody rebuilt their own cultures, for good or bad (Russia!).

Anyhow, I already have a post entitled "1936" that describes how the world could have been changed by pre-emptive action, as Iraq has changed the world dynamics.

I will go more in another post into how naive we in the West are about "native" cultures. Several times on our recent Hawaii vacation, we were confronted by the canard that the Hawaiian culture is somehow more sacred than Western culture. I'll share my counter-arguments in the next post!