Bill Barrowy asked about a chat view to terrorism - and i just ran
across this while reading this morning "The sense of reality: Studies in
ideas and their history" - Isaiah Berlin - Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996
- this book came out the year before he died.
anyway - page 254 - "In our world the crisis is caused by the fact that
individual talent and success, economic power and ability, and sometimes
even political influence, have fallen too far out of step with the
all-important factor of the craving for social status. Lack of adequate
status, humiliation of the parents, and the sense of injury and
indignation of the children drives men to social and political extremism."
further on:
"The revolutionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were, as
often as not, sons of capable and self-made men, who had been socially
excluded or rejected, or found themselves in an embarrassing or false
position in the social hierarchy of their time. This was conspicuously
true of Russia too. Among the source of strength of the Russian
revolitionary movement was the combination of moral and political
indignation, directed against a corrupt and oppressive regime, with a
quest for status by men whose resources and education entitled them to
play a part that they were rigidly denied by the state."
and on page 255 - "But the roots of discontent lie deeper, in
loneliness, in a sense of isolation, in the destruction of that solidarity
which only homogeneous close-knit societies give to their members. Ruskin
and Morris, and before them Fourier and Marx and Proudhon, have long ago
taught us to see that an increasing degree of industrialisation and
mechanisation leads to the disintegration of society, to degradation of
the deepest human values - affection, loyalty, fraternity, a sense of
common purpose - all in the name of progress, identified with order,
efficienty, discipline, production. We are all too familiar with the
results: the steady dehumanisation of men and their conversion into
proletariats - masses - 'human material', machine- and cannon-fodder. ...
This demand to be treated as human and as equal is at the base of both the
social and he national revolutions of our time: it represents the modern
form of the cry for recognition - violent, dangerous, but valuable and
just. Recognition is demanded by individuals, by groups, by classes, by
nations, by States, by vast conglomerations of mankind united by a common
feeling of grievance against those who (they rightly or wrongly suppose)
have wounded or humiliated them, have denied them the minimum demanded by
human dignity, have caused, or tried to cause, them to fall in their own
estimation in a manner that they cannot tolerate."
this, perhaps, well, anyway, it did for me, help understand more the
actions of the terrorists - who are certainly men of education and
social status - privilege indeed, some having strong capitalist roots.
phillip
* * * * * * * *
* *
The English noun "identity" comes, ultimately, from the
Latin adverb "identidem", which means "repeatedly."
The Latin has exactly the same rhythm as the English,
buh-BUM-buh-BUM - a simple iamb, repeated; and
"identidem" is, in fact, nothing more than a
reduplication of the word "idem", "the same":
"idem(et)idem". "Same(and) same". The same,
repeated. It is a word that does exactly what
it means.
from "The Elusive Embrace" by Daniel
Mendelsohn.
phillip white
doctoral student http://ceo.cudenver.edu/~hacms_lab/index.html
scrambling a dissertation
denver, colorado
phillip_white@ceo.cudenver.edu
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