>I'm frankly suprised that folks are rejecting the
>abstention from ascribing motives as a reasonable term
>of debate. Can we remove ourselves from the situation
>at hand and whatever axes we have to grind and ask
>ourselves how we can ever really know someone's motive
>in stating something or doing something? Apart from
>clairvoyance, I really don't see how that's possible.
It's not possible for us to observe lots of things directly; we still think and talk about them. You observe people carefully, listen to the words they use carefully, and look for patterns. You'd have to have an awfully one-dimensional view of humanity if you didn't do that.
But I'm not surprised that Carrol, who sees history as one ongoing accident and has no interest in agency, would take this position. Nor is this very surprising either:
>Does it matter that
>Stalin went to seminary school and was beaten, etc.?
>The reality was that 30 million peasants were killed,
>and the historico-material conditions were well-laid,
>whether Stalin was a conniving idiot or not. I'll
>leave the talk of individual responsibility and
>personal culpability to right-wing evangelical
>conservatives. Oh and Bill Cosby.
Why is interest in human motivation banal and reactionary? People behave all kinds of different ways under different circumstances; faced with the same situation, some people might cry and some might kill; some might revolt, and some might conform. Isn't it interesting to you why that is, and how it matters for politics? Personalities like Stalin count for some nontrivial nonzero amount. Ronald Reagan too - I don't think modern history would have turned out exactly as it did if it weren't for his repackaging of the vile bitterness of American conservatism as something forward looking and even revolutionary.
Doug