> -and why even those of us who do
> not go seem, on some level, to approve of the sentiment: "Dulce et decorum
> pro patria mori"...
(1) Like all explanations of anything which appeal (directly or implicitly) to some concept or other of "human nature," Ehrenreich utterly ignores the probability that an appeal to human nature cannot explain variation. E.g.,
These fought in any case,
and some believing,
pro domo, in any case...
Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later . . . some in fear, learning love of slaughter:
Died some, pro patria,
non "dulce" non "et decor" ...
"Hugh Selwynn Mauberley (Life and Contacts)," IV
(2) All appeals to human nature are *also* (implicitly or explicitly) appeals to Psychology.
(3) All appeals to the pseudo-science of psychology (including the mechanistic ones) are (implicitly or explicitly) appeals to a human nature which has about as much reality (historical or natural) as does the Holy Spirit.
Carrol Cox
P.S. An important strength of Pound's Mauberley poems, and particularly poem iv, above, is the absence of any attempt at causal explanation. Attempts at causal explanation not grounded in historical materialism (the subordination of theory to practice) end up in mysticism. Poem V teeters dangerously on the edge of offering causal explanation:
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
And when, a few years later, Pound begin searching for an explnation within an individualist world view, he embraced fascism.