Karen you said: > This comes back to the old question of do men as individuals affect history, > or is history such a solid mass that individuals are pulled along by it but > never able to drive history a certain way?
The way I understand this is that the only control we have over history is with the choice of the environment that will surround us knowing that we are shaped by it. That includes the historical environment. On the one hand the Jews have chosen a renewal of that historical environment while on the other they are surrounding themselves with moral problems that has turned the public relations battle from being David to being Golaith. I feel that Islamic history is severely compromised as is the Christian, but up until the present Jewish history has had a remarkable morality to it. The Environment they now surround themselves with is a great danger to the heritage of that history. On the other hand, to refuse to act and to own your house is to remove the problem of morality by simply not having enough power to make morality an issue. > Of course, we all agree that individuals matter in their local, regional and > now global histories. Sharon is certainly part of the problem. He gives > the wall or solid mass of desperate Islamic hate a target on the world event > stage, just as Arafat is a target for the global defenders of Israel. > Identifying the I - P problem as an unmovable, impenetrable object (open > intent to sweep Israel out to the sea) only contributes to the problem, it > makes it seem impossible to change, just as Tom Walker wrote re: Emery Roe's > Analytical Tip opinion that environmentalists and economists can make doing > anything about global warming or global poverty seem too large a problem to > deal with by individuals or individual states. > > When we condense historical events down to a formula to understand it, we > often miss the mythos that is involved. Your statement is practical, using > logos, and reflects (what I think is) your intellectual training/preference, > but both mythos and logos are involved in life and the unfolding drama of > mankind. > In the issue of moral choice Mythos is the "ground of being" while Logos is the choice of naming how you will look at that "ground of being" and act within it. Logos is always creating history because it claims to be factual data that is exclusive of other possibilities, but that is not true when regarding history that you have not directly experienced yourself. History is a set of options that runs all the way from yes to no with every possibility in between. To say the Word is to choose a path but not THE path. There are as many as there are slices to reality. That is a part of the issue with the scientists as "handmaidens of the culture" that I have been discussing in Re: To survive or not to survive. I would be interested in what you have to say on that as well. > If the right CEO can make or break a corporation, if one professor and not > another can attract more students to a department, if a single talented > researcher can make the difference in a breakthrough in medical science, if > one lawyer can make a jury see the evidence in a different way, then why > should we not blame Sharon and Arafat for contributing to this political > problem? I see the I - P issue as a crumbling brick wall, not a solid one, > and I am focused on the crack in my line of sight that I can do something > about. - Karen That is because you 1. believe in redemption and 2. believe in public responsibility. I agree with you on both. Ray
