>Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type really makes
>me puke, you vacuous, coffee-nosed, maloderous, pervert!!!
Oh, I'm sorry, no, she didn't. That was from the Monty Python skit. She actually wrote,
>I don't think there's a person on this list who isn't aware of this
>happening. Maybe it's time for a snit poll to see how self-reflective we are.
My greatest anxiety would centre around the absence of any response rather than being disagreed with. Could that motivate me to be accessibly disagreeable rather than dismissibly ambiguous and inclusive? I'm thinking about Thomas Seay's quotation from Milan Kundera, quoted below. What strikes me particularly about controversy is that the most enthusiastically joined controversies are those for which there ready-made set pieces that can be tossed back and forth without a great deal of original thought. A controversy of some subtlety and uniqueness will sputter to a quick and inconclusive end. Wisdom, of course, passes without comment.
Sorry, the five minutes is up.
<<Man desires a world in which Good and Evil are
clearly discernible, as humans have an innate and uncontrollable desire to judge rather than understand. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire. They [religions and ideologies] can reconcile themselves wih the novel only by translating the latter's language of relativity and amiguity into their apodictic and dogmatic verbiage. Religion and ideologie require that someone is right; either Anna Karenina is the victim of a narrow-minded despot or Mr. Karenina is the victim of an immoral woman. Either K is innocent and been crushed by an unjust court or the court is an expression of divine justice and K. is guilty.>>
<<In this 'Either/Or ' resides the incapacity to bear the essential relativity of all things human, the incapacity to face up to the absence of a Supreme Judge. Due to this incapacity, the novel's wisdom (the wisdom of uncertainty) is difficult to accept and understand.>>
The Sandwichman