[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> Countries need myths. Myths can only take so much battering. At one point
> some sort of unravelling of social cohesion takes place. Perhaps we are
> living through such a time.
[snip]
I sincerely hope you are wrong here!
Read Edward Hall's _The Silent Language_, and Elias Canetti's
_Crowds and Power_....
Here's what I think: I think that persons are "narrative animals".
We live from the stories we tell ourselves -- stories which
often remain "subconscious" and unthematized because we were
infected with them in our childrearing (there is a beautiful
psychoanalytic term for this: toxic introjects).
I propose further that narratives, while not "factual" like
an assertion such as "the cat is on the mat", need not be
mythic: we can see that the narratives *are* narratives,
and self-reflectively and self-responsibly decide
how to orient ourselves toward our narratives -- we can
decide what our narratives are worth rather than
our narratives telling us what we are worth (myths).
The obvious rejoinder here is that I am proposing
just one more narrative / myth. Obviously. We can
never be sure we have exorcised *all* our
toxic introjects. We can never be sure to what
extent we are in the driver's seat of our lives
and to what extent semiotic viruses live [through] us.
But at least we can do our best, and *we* -- unlike
many persons who have lived and will in future
live, know about sociology, anthropology,
sociology of knowledge, critical theory [the Frankfurt
School, Habermas, et al., not postmodernist "deconstructionists"!!!],
Kantian/Husserlian philosophy, etc.
So I say: Persons need narratives. Let us share
our narratives with each other, and see what
narratives appeal to us. The narrative which appeals
to me is the aspiration to overcome all ethnicities
(with their myths...) and to live in
Universalizing culture -- THe Tower of Babel is
not the worst story to start with here, provided
we carefully attend to the human
mutual-self-respect contratsting with G-d's omnipotent paranoia
which the story clearly tells about
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/babelsig.html
Edmund Husserl's Vienna Lecture (1935) is a narrative
which much appeals to me, and I recommend it as
one of the towering achievements of "The West" -->
the great vision of us "Westerners" aspiring and
knowing how effectively to transcend our own
ethnicity and not just make fun of other people's
stupid customs.
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/husserl_philcris.html
We live in an age of massively destructive myths -- like
making killings in The Stock Market and Derivitive Trading.
I wonder whether the Postmodernists these days are telling
stories about how great Osama bin Laden is for not
being a Dead White Male (it's inconvenient that
Osama is not a woman of color...) -- but I have to work,
so I don't know what's going on at our Prestige Universities,
although the review of Bernard Lewis's new book on
where Islam went wrong in Sunday's NYT Book Review shows
that there are at least a few humanists left there (but
they/myself will all eventually die, and then Nietzsche's Last Men
will not have to be bothered by them/us any more...)....
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/postmodernismx.html
"Yours in *narrative*...."
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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