Amazon.com description: Product Description: In ancient Greece there was a philosophical revolution which was concerned with the nature of generality. The ideals inherited from that time have been at the core of western civilization. But now, without much comment or notice, a new set of ideals have appeared centered, not in eternal forms, but the habit structure and mentality of individual persons. Its guiding principle is something which we can call “rhythm”. It is an ideal of peak performance in superb athletes, musicians, and raconteurs. Until now, this ideal has lacked the type of explanation which Plato and Aristotle gave to concepts such as justice, beauty, and the good. The book, Rhythm and Self-Consciousness, contains a philosophy of rhythm, rhythm being a positive end of personal exertion. The negativity appears in the guise of self-consciousness, seen as a distraction from rhythm. (For the performance of rhythm requires intense concentration.) Self-consciousness is actually a double consciousness - a focus not only upon a concrete object of thought but also upon thought itself as an object. Rhythm becomes impossible under those conditions. Therefore, its cultivation involves the suppression of self-consciousness as well as the grooving of proper habits and skills and general physical conditioning. So we see that cultural ideals are not eternal but vary according to conditions of time and place. Foremost among those conditions would be a society’s dominant cultural technology. A previous book by William McGaughey, Five Epochs of Civilization (Thistlerose, 2000), presented the thesis that world history can be divided into five epochs or eras correlating with changes in communication technology. The ideals of classical Greece are appropriate to a society which has recently acquired literacy. The ideal of rhythm is appropriate to a society dominated by mass communication in the form of motion pictures, sound recordings, radio and television broadcasting.