Max Sawicky wrote: >> First: Who are we? Only someone from deep inside the imperium, with a >> strong sense of _belonging_ in it and to it, could pen such a line. > >Au contraire, usage of "we" is pretty common. One might say that only >someone extremely alienated would be irked by it. The common usage of we should not be taken as vindication. I've written public relations material and the use of we to create a vague sense of identification with authority is a first principle. But then, being "extremely alienated" shouldn't be assumed to be shameful, either. Rather, extreme alienation can more usefully be read as subjective awareness of the objective alienation that infects all of us. >This tendency to demand that people make sacrifices for putting forward >ideas is regrettable. Whether they do or not has no bearing on the value of >the ideas. I've got no use for the DEMAND that people make sacrifices for putting forward ideas. However, the quality of ideas that people feel comfortable offering "for free" (that is without personal sacrifice) is less than that of the ideas that people are prepared to act on. Wendell Berry wrote an essay on this titled "Stand by Words". It goes without saying, of course, that the quality of ideas that people are only prepared to entertain in expectation of a reward is even worse. >Those who refuse to condemn the bombing altogether are not immoral if they >believe that some bombing is consistent with further objectives -- saving >Kosova. I agree with this. People who believe that bombing is a necessary means to an ethical end are not immoral. They may be tragically mistaken, but they're not immoral. Only people who celebrate bombing is an expedient means to a self-serving end are immoral. But what does one call it when the means at one's disposal overwhelm the ends and "credible ends" have to be woven for institutionally inevitible means? William Blake called it 'Satanic'. Which brings me to a pair of quotes I'm juxtaposing. The kicker is that Blake's "Satanic Mills" aren't "fire and brimstone" belching factories of the industrial revolution that a precocious high school student might suppose them to be. They are the self-same utilitarian calculi that Samuelson hails (contradictorily) simultaneously as unpretentious, necessary and revelatory. "Any prescribed set of ends is grist for the economist's unpretentious deductive mill, and often he can be expected to reveal that the prescribed ends are incomplete and inconsistent. The social welfare function is a concept as broad and empty as language itself -- and as necessary." -- Paul Samuelson 'And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic Mills?' -- William Blake And how's that for a post-mod assertion, ". . . as broad and empty as language itself . . ."? regards, Tom Walker http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/covenant.htm
