ravi wrote:
>
> perhaps i misdirected the discussion by posting the text of a
> review/inteview. in the booklet, singer is a lot more nuanced: he quotes
> marx/engles as suggesting/claiming that they extend darwinian theory (in
> [CLIP]
> singer's primary point, as i read it, is [CLIP]
Thomas Seay wrote:
>
> [CLIP]
> Have either of you (Jim or Charles) even read his
> essay on the subject? [CLIP]
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Thomas & ravi encounter the problem that I have been insisting for years is the actual problem of the left -- its invisibility, not its "message" or its "rhetoric."
I have just responded to ravi on singer over on pen-l as follows:
ravi wrote:
>
> unfortunately, i don't
> think singer's writings regarding (and defense of) animal rights
> received mention (unfortunate particularly today, as thousands,
> millions?, consume cruelly farmed and killed creatures in celebration).
>
Singer's concern with animal rights has a metaphysical origin. It is one of the innumerable manifestations of the lust for certainty that is deeply grounded in the thought of capitalist societies. He thought he[clip]
[Insert: Every so often someone complains about others being "irony-challenged"; I don't know about that, but on the basis of the posts on leftists percentiles, quite a few people on this list are trope-challenged. They seemed to think that the specific things named were important, when those questions were only synecdochic pointers to a widespread issue that existed quite independently of my particular examples. My personal references here are a vehicle for a tenor that has little or nothing to do with me.]
Thomas and ravi apparently think Singer has something to say; that he has an important message and that his expression of it is persuasive. If only people would read him.
Well now, there are only so many hours in the day, you know, and there are _so_ many books out there by so many mute, inglorious Miltons, and Singer will just have to wait his turn, I'm afraid, unless Thomas and ravi can do a better job of making him visible than they have so far.
If they could get a really long thread going, with dozens of people on the list contributing to that thread, and that thread began crowding out other topics, so that participation in the list, de facto, required knowing Singer's book, that might do it.
But a few weeks ago I "discovered" (scare quotes because I had read the poem half a dozen times in the past) Wordsworth's _Prelude_ -- that is, I discovered it in the sense that reading it became exciting and compelling. I can't imagine Singer having anything to say that would make it worthwhile to take time away form mere loafing, from browsing in e-mail, or reading and rereading the 1805 Prelude. You've got to make Singer more visible ravi than you have so far (and not by quoting from him -- I'll skip those).
So the left (like Singer in the thought of ravi & Thomas) has something to say and knows how to say it well, but we just aren't visible enough. We just haven't found ourselves in or created the context in which people would discover that we exist, just as ravi hasn't convinced me that Singer exists as someone to spend my time on.
Carrol