Letters to the Editor
Timelagged
Published Letters: 244 Editor's Choice: 12
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Consider the source, always
[Read the article: What is the meaning of life?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Terry Eagleton is a Marxist. It colors everything he writes, it informs everything he says and thinks. Keep this in mind and it becomes more clear. He writes well, he has the rare talent of making complex things comprehensible to the masses. He is however writing from a clearly and religiously Marxist perspective, which he admits here and there. And yes, I use the term "religiously" advisedly.
Certain practices are more efficient for humans trying to live together, the golden rule in many cases works because it makes more people happy and helps them thrive. This is evolutionary, it follows everything else we know about evolution. Bringing abstract terms like "meaning" into the argument is distracting and blinding. Meaning is a real concept, as he points out, but it's not, as he insists, intrinsic.
I find his theory of a built-in morality as wrongheaded as the idea of built-in religious dictums. If humans eventually migrated to live on Mars, there may end up being entirely different rules and practices that become considered moral there. Our "built-in" morals have everything to do with the environment in which they developed. There are built-in structures in the brain, of this there can be no doubt. This doesn't mean anything about some mystical "morality" however, it's a product of evolution.
There's a cartoon in which a scientist is writing equations on a board, which proceed to a box in the middle in which the scientist has written "then a miracle occurs", then the equation continues on in orderly fashion. There are so many seemingly intelligent theories that use this argument, in some form. Anything that resorts to "it's just that way" is bound to be wrong.
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Scrtich scritch
[Read the article: Opus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Salon is a puzzler. A real head-scratcher. On the one hand, there's Glen Greenwald and other bitingly current political commentary, a new techno column that's pretty cool, and so on. Cutting edge, alive, On the other hand they have this habit of giving space to people whose main qualification seems to be precisely that they're anachronistic to the extreme, like Paglia and Garrison whatshisname and now this.
In some of those cases, e.g. Paglia, the anachronism status is for a good reason (that she was always pretty much a sensationalist saying almost nothing and the few who thought otherwise finally realized it). In other cases like, well like this, it's more something once brilliant that somehow is just not anymore, though we wish it still were.
It's almost like Salon aspires to become the Vegas of online zines, I think at times. Or it can't decide.
By the way, I don't think it's just a 50-somethings versus 20-somethings divide, I'm for example closer to the former than the latter of those two demographics. It doesn't mean I've gone to sleep though.
Also I loved Bloom County, back in the day. Don't get me wrong. It's just that this isn't it. I don't really know why, is it me, is it him? The times? I've been wondering, in an offhand sort of way, since Opus reappeared. My conclusion was well, who knows. Just definitely not *it*, anymore. Who knows why. Shame, but there we are.
And the next thing I know, Salon puts it on the front page.
Figures.
I'm starting to believe the evil twin editors-in-chief theory. Not sure how Joan would look in the alternate Spock getup though, hmm.
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Pure evil: motive or tactic?
[Read the article: A tragic legacy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I couldn't help but think of this passage by Vonnegut from Slaughterhouse Five when I read this article. Billy Pilgrim is speaking to the Tralfamadorians, in the zoo on their home planet where he's been transported and put on display:
"I am from a planet that has been engaged in senseless slaughter since the beginning of time. I myself have seen the bodies of schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were proud of fighting pure evil at the time." This was true. Billy saw boiled bodies in Dresden. He went on, "And I have lit my way in a prison at night with candles from the fat of human beings who were butchered by the brothers and fathers of these schoolgirls who were boiled. Earthlings must be the terrors of the Universe! If other planets aren't now in danger from earth, they soon will be..."
Vonnegut wrote more than once about the dangers of the concept of pure evil. The novel Mother Night also deals with the theme quite a bit.
I wonder however. I wonder if this particular mindset in Bush's case is as much a cause as it is a tactic. What I mean is that the concept of pure evil, like religion itself with which it's often entangled, can be seen as a means to an end, a way to simplify justifying aggression for gain, a way to package it in a compact sound bite form.
It's pretty clear now, even on the record, that "establishing a democratic base in the Mideast" was the real goal of this war. Pure evil is a convenient way to whip up fervor but I think it's used in service of specific goals, in this case domination and conversion of a region with the aim of remaking it in our image, for mainly economic reasons.
The settling of our own country began with what can only be called ethnic cleansing, after all, to anyone who looks honestly. I'm sure they justified that in other ways, by calling them savages or subhuman or the like. Pure evil is just one tactic used to justify grabbing what you want, but there are others.