- 02 Jan 2012 04:04
#13862839
I appreciate this point of view. You can see the quandary though. On the one hand, directly criticizing and placing responsibility on the individual is insensitive to the conditions that potentially drove the person to that behavior. "Stealing is wrong," without understanding the circumstances that led to the theft, for example. But on the other hand, constantly apologizing and making excuses for the behavior of others can be perceived as elitist and paternalistic, and to some extent is elitist and paternalistic. Also, it hinders our own sense of control over our situation. I like what I recently read in an article from Mother Earth by Voltairine de Cleyre.
http://praxeology.net/VC-DI.htm
Thoughts?
wat0n wrote:Blaming foreigners who did evil deeds around here decades ago is easier than taking responsibility and reforming now.
I appreciate this point of view. You can see the quandary though. On the one hand, directly criticizing and placing responsibility on the individual is insensitive to the conditions that potentially drove the person to that behavior. "Stealing is wrong," without understanding the circumstances that led to the theft, for example. But on the other hand, constantly apologizing and making excuses for the behavior of others can be perceived as elitist and paternalistic, and to some extent is elitist and paternalistic. Also, it hinders our own sense of control over our situation. I like what I recently read in an article from Mother Earth by Voltairine de Cleyre.
Voltairine de Cleyre wrote:DI.5 It is thus that the so-called Materialist Conception of History, the modern Socialists, and a positive majority of Anarchists would have us look upon the world of ideas, – shifting, unreal reflections, having naught to do in the determination of Man’s life, but so many mirror appearances of certain material relations, wholly powerless to act upon the course of material things. Mind to them is in itself a blank mirror, though in fact never wholly blank, because always facing the reality of the material and bound to reflect some shadow. To-day I am somebody, to-morrow somebody else, if the scenes have shifted; my Ego is a gibbering phantom, pirouetting in the glass, gesticulating, transforming, hourly or momentarily, gleaming with the phosphor light of a deceptive unreality, melting like the mist upon the hills. Rocks, fields, woods, streams, houses, goods, flesh, blood, bone, sinew, – these are realities, with definite parts to play, with essential characters that abide under all changes; but my Ego does not abide; it is manufactured afresh with every change of these.
DI.6 I think this unqualified determinism of the material is a great and lamentable error in our modern progressive movement; and while I believe it was a wholesome antidote to the long-continued blunder of Middle Age theology, viz., that Mind was an utterly irresponsible entity making laws of its own after the manner of an Absolute Emperor, without logic, sequence, or relation, ruler over matter, and its own supreme determinant, not excepting God (who was himself the same sort of a mind writ large) – while I do believe that the modern re-conception of Materialism has done a wholesome thing in pricking the bubble of such conceit and restoring man and his “soul” to its “place in nature,” I nevertheless believe that to this also there is a limit; and that the absolute sway of Matter is quite as mischievous an error as the unrelated nature of Mind; even that in its direct action upon personal conduct, it has the more ill effect of the two. For if the doctrine of free-will has raised up fanatics and persecutors, who, assuming that men may be good under all conditions if they merely wish to be so, have sought to persuade other men’s wills with threats, fines, imprisonments, torture, the spike, the wheel, the axe, the fagot, in order to make them good and save them against their obdurate wills; if the doctrine of Spiritualism, the soul supreme, has done this, the doctrine of Materialistic Determinism has produced shifting, self-excusing, worthless, parasitical characters, who are this now and that at some other time, and anything and nothing upon principle. “My conditions have made me so,” they cry, and there is no more to be said; poor mirror-ghosts! how could they help it! To be sure, the influence of such a character rarely reaches so far as that of the principled persecutor; but for every one of the latter, there are a hundred of these easy, doughy characters, who will fit any baking tin, to whom determinist self-excusing appeals; so the balance of evil between the two doctrines is about maintained.
http://praxeology.net/VC-DI.htm
Thoughts?
Last edited by grassroots1 on 02 Jan 2012 04:38, edited 2 times in total.