(no subject)
"War is conducted with a fury that requires abstraction."
John Updike, regarding the 9/11 attacks
My boyfriend and I have been discussing various political and social issues at length. He has very radical ideas, and sometimes I feel as though mine are very naive, and perhaps under-examined. I really like hearing things from his point of view, but very often am APPALLED at some of the things he says. I jokingly refer to him as Anakin Skywalker sometimes for his emphasis on efficiency and the bottom line at the cost of ideals like equality and human rights.
Actually, yesterday, on the way home from a trip to Schlitterbahn, he had me convinced of some pretty radical ideas regarding the Middle East--that the area was inherently unstable, a medieval culture polluted by the bulk of the world's wealth, and that the US was the only country with the balls to go in and stabilize it. If you finish the thought by asserting that the US, thus stabilizing the world, deserves the profit it reaps from such an effort, you essentially have a Machiavellian justification for blatant imperialism.
We then digressed into a moral discussion about whether a single life should be justified for the good of many, and then got to talking about Africa.
The real trouble with this kind of analysis is that it is done at such a great distance that human lives become hard to differentiate. Humanity appears to be one great organism, and it begins to make sense that any part of it which becomes diseased or simply inconvenient can and should be deprived or even excised.
So John Updike's statement about abstraction had an impact. And at the same time, too arduous a passion for the well-being of each individual organism can undermine progress, even leading to decay. Abstraction, like war, may sometimes become a necessity.
What a pitiful fence-sitter I turned out to be. :(
John Updike, regarding the 9/11 attacks
My boyfriend and I have been discussing various political and social issues at length. He has very radical ideas, and sometimes I feel as though mine are very naive, and perhaps under-examined. I really like hearing things from his point of view, but very often am APPALLED at some of the things he says. I jokingly refer to him as Anakin Skywalker sometimes for his emphasis on efficiency and the bottom line at the cost of ideals like equality and human rights.
Actually, yesterday, on the way home from a trip to Schlitterbahn, he had me convinced of some pretty radical ideas regarding the Middle East--that the area was inherently unstable, a medieval culture polluted by the bulk of the world's wealth, and that the US was the only country with the balls to go in and stabilize it. If you finish the thought by asserting that the US, thus stabilizing the world, deserves the profit it reaps from such an effort, you essentially have a Machiavellian justification for blatant imperialism.
We then digressed into a moral discussion about whether a single life should be justified for the good of many, and then got to talking about Africa.
The real trouble with this kind of analysis is that it is done at such a great distance that human lives become hard to differentiate. Humanity appears to be one great organism, and it begins to make sense that any part of it which becomes diseased or simply inconvenient can and should be deprived or even excised.
So John Updike's statement about abstraction had an impact. And at the same time, too arduous a passion for the well-being of each individual organism can undermine progress, even leading to decay. Abstraction, like war, may sometimes become a necessity.
What a pitiful fence-sitter I turned out to be. :(