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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32956 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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Maybe this is actually a good thing? Perhaps most people were, after all, born to live simple lives and have no desire or ability to form coherent political thoughts? It really gives me a dim view of democracy, dimmer than the one I had before covid.

It may be just an issue of abstracting. Politics, beyond the very simple, involves a lot of abstractions, and the capacity or interest of many people to handle more than a few simple abstractions at the same time (as in doing short multiplication or division) seems limited. As David Stove put it when defending positivism against the criticism that it robs life of the spiritual and transcendent wonders of religion and philosophy:

For when common humanity does venture in thought beyond the concerns of common life, it is a thousand to one that atrocity, and not just absurdity, will result. Do the scenes of Tehran, Kabul, Beirut in 1986 disgust and appall you? Then learn to see in them the scenes of Alexandria in 415, of Toulouse in 1218, of Munster in 1535, and all the other famous beauty-spots of your beloved Christian centuries.

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