On Sat, 17 Jul 2010, Carrol Cox wrote:
> I don't know. I probably expressed myself too strongly. I am fairly
> certain however that _origins_ explain _nothing_.
I think perhaps you might be expressly yourself too strongly again. I think what you mean is that origins don't explain everything all the time. Not that they explain nothing never.
> No tradition is ever accepted or adopted unless it responds to some need
> in the present. It is that present cause that needs to be identified.
That's not missing in the case of the borderer tradition of honor. It suited bad farm land and consequent poverty, lots of hunting, very little government presence. Vendetta law is a functional substitute for the state and precedes it historically almost everywhere. The code of honor suits men to fit into that system.
But just as origins doesn't explain everything, neither does present needs.
But I'll certainly buy that you need at least a partial fit to something somewhere.
> Actually, this became clear to me before I ever got involved in
> politics. Literary influence doesn't explain a fucking thing. If a
> writer shows strong influence of a past writer, it is because he/she
> finds a current need that is fulfilled by his/her 'acceptance' of that
> "influence." Pope and Wordsworth both practically knew the works of
> Milton by heart, and both show strong Miltonic influences, but
> obviously in both cases the influence is only operative because it
> satisfies their purposes independently of the influence.
Do we really want to use intellectuals' relation to artistic tradition as a model for the average person's relation to problem-solving and self-imaging culture? There are some parallels, sure. But I think it intellectualizes what normally isn't. Professional poets think *all the time* about whether poems they read are good are not. Most men don't think about whether "being a man" is ...well, they just don't evaluate it as if they were comparing it to another way to be.
Michael