--- Warren Ockrassa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > To be fair, Dr. Brin explained several months ago > that he was speaking > figuratively when alluding to the rise of the > Confederacy once more. > He's speaking more of a mindset, a weltanschauung, > than a literal trend > that can be mapped by accents or regional voting > preferences.
Indeed, except that "capitalists" scarcely describes the mind set. Indeen, that is a northern, progressive, modernist tradition. At: http://www.davidbrin.com/tolkienarticle1.html I speak of the Great Divide as I see it. Left vs right has no 21st Century relevance. I speeeet on that vile and stupeed French metaphor. Rather, we face a deep rift of confidence with regard to attitudes toward the future, especially when it comes to the improvability of humankind. While I have lately called it Nostalgia vs Modernity, in the cited paper I call it Romanticism vs the Enlightenment. And when it comes to the Confederacy, there simply never was a more romantic zeitgeist... till Nazi Germany came along. Only Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will was more romantic in its essence than the South's fixation with Sir Walter Scott, whose works were despised in the North in favor of Swift, Melville and so on. Every justification published for secession was a romantic rant, never referring to pragmatism. Likewise, the nostalgia, the rejection of evidence, the insistence upon making politics a matter of MORAL good vs evil, plus the incredible gall to call opponents "damned" by their very natures.... see how all this fits at: http://www.davidbrin.com/tolkienarticle1.html _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
