[lbo-talk] gore vidal is an old, cranky prick

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Fri Oct 30 11:45:07 PDT 2009


Eric Beck wrote:
>
> Life is about the interaction of forces, and people only
> matter as indexes to those interactions.

Perhaps this can be made a bit more palatable for those it offends.

Understanding is necessarily abstract. "Red haired child with pimples on his left cheek" is abstract. You can't utter a word without abstracting. Concrete communication, if it is possible, would consist of grunts and pointing fingers.

At that level "life" would be about people, but above that level, when we try to understand anything at all, we have to abstract, and that, as you say, is about the interaction of forces.

Or as I've often put it, I don't have a history, I am my history, and that history is an ensemble of relations, of varying social forces. Hence to say "life is about people" is not so much wrong as meaningless. It wouldn't even be possible to give intelligivle defintions of the words in that clause.

All that is decoration. Your simple staement is ccorrect.

Carrol



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