Carl Remick wrote:
>
> >From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
> >
> >My experience has always been, both in political work and in teaching,
> >that taken one at a time and in an interactive relationship people are
> >far more intelligent and open then they are in groups.
>
> I know that I cited this comment on the list only recently, but it has been
> much on my mind: "In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties,
> nations and epochs, it is the rule." -- Nietzsche
>
No -- this is not quite right; I did not use the word, "individual," and in the next sentence after this tried to guard against this reading (emphasis added): "The student sitting in the instructor's office is often a rather different creature from the student in the classroom _or sitting in his/her room writing_ a paper." The "groups" in the classroom are just groups of individuals. I don't know what Nietzsche meant by "insanity," it the "stupidity" I speak of is precisely the stupidity of the isolated individual, whose sense of solidarity can therefore be manifested, realized only by the abstract relation which Nietzsche finds in "groups, parties, nations." We run in to terminological difficluty here because bourgeois jargon gives us only terms for the abstract individual or the mass of abstract individuals. No term carries by itself what I was trying to get at by adding "in interactive relationships" to "taken one at a time.
A few months ago Yoshie used the term "historical individual" to try to capture this contrast. Patriotism (at least the U.S. version) is the link of the isolated, abstract idndividual to a false collectivity. That is why I claimed in the original post that to break through this ignorance a strong and coherent left was required.
Individuals cannot do it on their own, as individuals. Mina is only partly correct in arguing:
"I also think that in an age of mass literacy, public libraries and the internet, you're as ignorant as you want to be. I don't exempt myself in any way: the friend I dined with last night was appalled that I didn't know the CIA had funded thugs in Jamaica to support Seaga/defeat Manley. When I looked around, I found the information was everywhere!"
It took a friend to point her to the information. The individual sitting alone in her/his living room watching television or reading the daily newspaper is still a member of the false solidarity of what Riesmann a couple generations ago called "the lonely crowd."
That is why we need a strong and coherent left -- to make it possible for people to break both from Nietzsche's "groups" and his "individual" -- which are both merely individual.
What Mina is demanding is ltruism, a nineteenth-century invention that presupposed the bizarre isolation of the bourgeois individual -- it is always reactionary because it demands of the isolated individual that she act on her own, in isolation. Against this altruism (which can approve of defending America by killing Afghanistan peasants) we must attempt to build solidarity.
Not a small part of building that solidarity is establishing a left jargon to oppose the jargon of individualism.
Carrol