>star.matrix at verizon.net wrote:
>
> > there is not much of a correlation between incest or inbreeding and
> > congential disorders like being a "village idiot" or whatever. iow, this is
> > largely a myth.
>
>I think this is true -- and "village idiot," moreover, carries a rather
>different force than Marx's "idiocy of rural life." The former is a
>statement about the (apparently inherent) nature of individuals, while
>the latter, which almost certainly invokes the original greek sense of
>"idiotes," is (whether or not true) a historical and social analysis,
>not a reflection on individuals.
I take it you are not take issue with the claim: inbreeding and incest do not cause greater rates of congential disorders and birth defects?
I imagine that MArta isn't reading, but I was curious if she had some information that might help Cian see that it might just be the case that what he sees as a higher rate of village idiocy is a result of the fact that he's talking about poor areas.
Analogy: "inbreds" have higher rates of tooth decay, bucked teeth, and bow legs (a stereotype)
because of the lack of medical and dental care.
Similarly, it only appears that there are more idiots since they are more public, often relying on the entire community to take care of them, rather than their nuclear family or a private institution where they all get thrown together, often away from where they were born.
Furthermore, those same people don't get treatment that might make their conditions quite manageable so that they don't appear to be village idiots at all.
I could go on, but one note. It occurs to me that one interesting thing about urban life is that it actually affords us a measure of privacy previously unavailable to people, precisely because urban life is more impersonal and bustling with so many different, strange people, behaviors, and customs we don't know. Simmel remarked on the same phenom with regard to urban life over a century ago: Urban life encourages us to recoil into our private worlds, strangers to one another, a reaction against the closeness of urban space.
Simmel shows how a highly differentiated modern social landscape--like a city--actually requires a high degree of privacy and secrecy from others in order to function.
"modern life has developed, in the midst o metropolitan crowdedness, a technique for making and keeping private matters secret" for "what is public becomes even more public, what is private becomes even more private."
I bring it up b/c the conversation reminded me of a town I once lived in. It was on the outskirts of a "metropolitan area" of ~120k people. However, despite the fact that it was consdiered to researchers at the time an 'urban' space, it appeared unique compared to other communities in so far as it exhibited signs of being much more like a village. They coined the term "urban villages" and set out to study them to ask why the predictions about urbanization didn't follow in certain places.
All of its rather astonishing to me since I do not experience more backward views in a city or a village. The backwardness I've encountered in people who are supposedly more urbane comes in many forms. They engage in new forms of hidden sexism and racism that are clothed in the mantle of academic respectability, for instance. The Bell Curve wasn't written by hicks. Nor are sociobiologists hicks.
>Raymone Williams in one or more of his essays expressed irritation at
>Marx's phrase, and cited (without particularly developing the point) the
>great peasant revolutons (China, Vietnam) of the 20th century as
>refuting it. But if you read any of the many fairly detailed accounts of
>revolutionary activity in China or Vietnam (Hinton's _Fanshen_ is
>probably the most illustrious) you see how central a part of that
>activity was precisely the breaking through of that "idiocy of rural
>life."
the problem with daniel's claims (and some variants of marxism, by extension) is that social change that advances beyond the privacy of rural life has to be explained by reference to events outside the system that functionalist marxist explanations tend to set up for themselves.
Such a theory, according to Roy Bhaskar, is that it ends up being much like Max Weber's. It is very historical, but change is reduced to novelty.
If you will recall the great Weber debate that was sparked by an offhand comment about double entry bookeeping, what I said was that Weber argued that, prior to the rise of capitalism, people lived in collectivities that embraced a dualistic economic ethos. They treated outsiders in one set of terms, insiders in another. While Weber had much admiration for a materialistic account of history--he had an _action_ theory of history--he could not break out of the logical limits of his theory because he could not explain social change without referring to some external event, or by reference to technological innovation, or by reference to the leadership of charismatic individuals who might uniquely lead a movement for social change.
But, as I've said about some Marxist epistemologies: Weber cannot explain _why_ those individuals are different. Some Marxist talk about the vanguard and point to how they became enlightened enough to realize that they must break through the privacy of rural life and stride toward revolution, along with others. While you or I might say, "the events in our lives made up ripe for experience the resonance of leftist ideas for explaining our lives once we finally stumbled over them." (...."long before I ever imagined that I was a Marxist, I knew...."), we are faced with the brute fact that 99.9% of people who had the same experiences have not come to the same conclusions. Your explanation (and mine) is that, like Marx, we recognize that capitalism is a juggernaut:
"The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West."
However, we both would argue that this is not enough. this is only the beginning. What is needed is revolutionary action. For me, that would be focusing on building alternative institutions that will be the matrix within which such rev. activity to develop. For you, it's more on building a mass movement.
Daniel seems to be taking up a (Georg) Simmelian position. For Simmel, the mere fact of living in an urbanized environment would break down the idiocy of rural life since it cannot survive on those socio-spatial conditions. The person would be seen as backward, odd, an idiot, etc. and would be shunned as, likely, crazy.
>Can anyone suggest a synonym for "inbred" (for application to such
>contexts as an inbred intellectual tradition, etc) that does carry the
>negative force but not the false biological implications of the term?
>
>Carrol
insularity
back to work kids. i really have no time for playing anymore.
kelley