11-21-2019, 06:39 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-23-2019, 03:05 AM by RiverNotch.)
I am in effect checking out of the conversation, but I do have two notes to add, one in response and one a slight tangent.
The slight tangent is my grandfather was a cop -- he was, as I am, in a different country, although he worked during a considerably darker time in our history, that of Marcos's dictatorship. I have never had the gall to ask him about what dark deeds he had to do or at least witness, but with his age ravaging his body he grows more fearful of death, both consciously and subconsciously, the latter mode having a very clear effect on his constitution. He is often supportive of the police, and I suppose such support I have inherited, albeit in a different, perhaps less us-vs-them mode.
The second point is your statement, "Two modes that have no or limited value are blaming "systems" and blaming politics". I *would* like to qualify my retort by saying that the modern age has effectively dispelled the enlightenment illusion of its perhaps ultimately harmful definition of individuals liberty, with the dark vision of the likes of Kafka, and the very real history that is the Atlantic Slave Trade, Nazi Germany, or the current state of North Korea -- regions that are not as limited as one would like them to seem, what with the American president's current and undue cooling of ties with North Korea, as well as his and many other European states' courting of the far right.
But I don't need to. Individuals were at fault in blaming and burning the witches of Salem. Also, common superstition, and everyone's somewhat misplaced anxiety over the Native Americans beyond their walls, was at fault -- clearly systematic problems. And politics is very much the intersection between these two: the individual choices made by the political influencers of the day, and the anxieties and superstitions already discussed. If the history of Western thought is evidence enough, the Old Testament's definition of nation juxtaposed with the value of the individual in the new -- Plato's idea of justice against Aristotle's idea of ethics -- the ever potent ideas of both Marx and Nietzsche -- the tension between Sartre's idea of radical freedom and his own leftist sympathies -- blaming "systems" has as much value as discussing individual agency. In fact, there might not be such a thing as individual agency, if there were no larger framework against which one should be defined. However abstract the idea of "systems" might seem, it is ultimately a discussion of the choices and beliefs of entire masses of individuals, just as any discussion of an individual is the juxtaposition of a person with a system, whether the system is universal (the Greeks' ideas of virtue, Christian ideas of sin, Marx's ideas of class struggle) or topical (contemporary Western ideas of race or gender).
The slight tangent is my grandfather was a cop -- he was, as I am, in a different country, although he worked during a considerably darker time in our history, that of Marcos's dictatorship. I have never had the gall to ask him about what dark deeds he had to do or at least witness, but with his age ravaging his body he grows more fearful of death, both consciously and subconsciously, the latter mode having a very clear effect on his constitution. He is often supportive of the police, and I suppose such support I have inherited, albeit in a different, perhaps less us-vs-them mode.
The second point is your statement, "Two modes that have no or limited value are blaming "systems" and blaming politics". I *would* like to qualify my retort by saying that the modern age has effectively dispelled the enlightenment illusion of its perhaps ultimately harmful definition of individuals liberty, with the dark vision of the likes of Kafka, and the very real history that is the Atlantic Slave Trade, Nazi Germany, or the current state of North Korea -- regions that are not as limited as one would like them to seem, what with the American president's current and undue cooling of ties with North Korea, as well as his and many other European states' courting of the far right.
But I don't need to. Individuals were at fault in blaming and burning the witches of Salem. Also, common superstition, and everyone's somewhat misplaced anxiety over the Native Americans beyond their walls, was at fault -- clearly systematic problems. And politics is very much the intersection between these two: the individual choices made by the political influencers of the day, and the anxieties and superstitions already discussed. If the history of Western thought is evidence enough, the Old Testament's definition of nation juxtaposed with the value of the individual in the new -- Plato's idea of justice against Aristotle's idea of ethics -- the ever potent ideas of both Marx and Nietzsche -- the tension between Sartre's idea of radical freedom and his own leftist sympathies -- blaming "systems" has as much value as discussing individual agency. In fact, there might not be such a thing as individual agency, if there were no larger framework against which one should be defined. However abstract the idea of "systems" might seem, it is ultimately a discussion of the choices and beliefs of entire masses of individuals, just as any discussion of an individual is the juxtaposition of a person with a system, whether the system is universal (the Greeks' ideas of virtue, Christian ideas of sin, Marx's ideas of class struggle) or topical (contemporary Western ideas of race or gender).