Wojtek Sokolowski:
> There is a difference between upholding principles and fundamentalism.
> The former takes common sense into account, the latter does not. It is
> easy to preach from the campus ivory tower about principles but that
> does not help much in upholding them. The German Left sticked to their
> principles in 1930 and let Hitler take power. That is fundamentalism -
> "I will not sacrifice my principles no matter what." It is often more
> dangerous or hypocritcal than spineless drifting with the trend. At
> least the latter do nor take a high moral ground and sermonize others.
You're making the mistake of thinking that I moralize in an individualistic sense. Quite the contrary: I am looking at a social function. The moral order of a society is a set of ideas, illusions, perhaps, which bind the community together and allow it to know what it is.
If it loses its moral order, it falls apart because it no longer knows itself; it can no longer distinguish itself from chaos and war. There are communities whose moral order could permit opportunistic war and assassination, but I don't think the American community, as it stands, is one of them; part of what holds American society together is the Rule of Law, however illusory.
According to the media, the most recent attack was, with malice aforethought, aimed at a particular person or persons: it was an explicit assassination. Clinton, with his bombings, was certainly on the same path, but he was further back. It's karmic -- the more of something one does, the greater the propensity to do it grows, the easier it becomes to go further, and the more one finds oneself in territory where the something is customary, habitual, even necessary. And so one moves on to the abyss. The recent election might have impeded the march, but the opportunity was not taken. Unless some unforeseeable force or event intervenes, I think we must anticipate a catastrophe.
Again, this is not moralization (or "fundamentalism" or, God forbid, "hand-wringing"). It's simply common sense, a kind of dry, abstract anthropology or sociology. One may argue with it, but let's get beyond the gibing and name-calling.
-- Gordon