Well said, Garth.
Speaking of Adams, for anyone unaware an extensive world-touring exhibit of
his work kicked off in San Francisco at the Museum of Modern Art. I believe
it's slated to remain in San Francisco through February, then head off to
wherever. I haven't been down to view it yet but I will, perhaps this weekend.
Tris
At 11:16 PM 9/17/2001 +0800, Titoy wrote:
>Of course there has to be a limit to OT discussion. But the recent disaster
>in New York is just to big for most to ignore. Not to see remarks here would
>seem unreal. Let us agree on a reasonable cool down afterwhich all agree to
>carry on discussion off list. Or just make a new list for OT? In the
>meantime, we just need to bear it giving tolerance to the max otherwise we
>see a degree of intolerance that does sometime leads to the violence we see
>now.
Well said, Titoy. New York and the Pentagon isn't an "event"; it's an
*****EVENT!!!***** I'm not at all surprised that there's a great deal of
discussion about it, even on Lists which are ostensibly about other
things. If we were all meeting in a big bull session over beers (as
opposed to over our keyboards in cyberspace) you can bet the
discussion/arguments/rants would be going on for days, weeks even.
That being said, there's plenty on this List that I've disagreed with over
the past few days -- most of which I've kept silent about. Why? Well,
because partially we're arguing about ideological differences, and
ideologies have (largely) replaced religion as the modern mental map by
which we try to understand the world. Attachment to ideology is largely
arational and irreducible, *regardless* of whether it's liberal,
conservative, dynamist, technocratic, environmentalist, feminist or
whatever. I learned this twenty-five years ago when I did Master's level
studies of how interpretive frameworks are formed and adhered to. When
someone's diametrically opposed to your interpretive matrix, there's
almost no way to even successfully *communicate* with them, much less
convince them of your position. Arguing under such circumstances is
largely a waste of breath, and pretty much guaranteed to piss all parties off.
Like it or not, small-L liberalism (and the moral equivalency arguments it
espouses) is the ideological 'god' which has been extremely badly damaged
in the light of September 11th, 2001 -- and those who still espouse it
sense the damage, even if they're unwilling to articulate it and it
dismays them immensely. For some (such as myself), that particular 'god'
is essentially dead, and I'm in the process of weaving a new interpretive
matrix for my world-understanding. It's much less pretty than the old
matrix, and I'm not sure precisely where I'll end up landing with it, but
for me at least, it causes a lot less cognitive dissonance.
And that, of course, is the political issue, as well as the moral one.
Peace, everyone, regardless of whether you like what I've just
written. Let's hope for a world, however it's brought about, where we can
get back to arguing over which camera system is the best (or whether Ansel
Adams truly is a deity... ;-) ).
Garth
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