Is there a room where democracy, and other discussions, take place? I imagine there is one always, but I think there isn’t.
Is there a room where everyone has a place, do we even want one? Don’t we go into a room to hear some one speak or sing. We, hear, the one. What is the origin of this assumption? That a meeting is just a crowd gathered to hear the one? There was no discussion on the Mount. And if there was it was not recorded. It is all “verily I say unto thee.” But who art thou? The incomplete, the wrong or the naive? Like in All Quiet on The Western Front: the lead actors run through explosions while irrelevant extras get killed. Who are these irrelevant extras? In the business they are called background.
What if the town hall meeting was just that. A meeting. “Say your piece.” Does grandpa or uncle ruin thanksgiving? How? Does his reactionary thinking upset everyone? Is he bringing in his grievance? Really. Is he used to going into a room where one man or woman expresses his grievance for him, gives it a local habitation, a shape, a name? Draws conclusions he is reluctant to, about the evil intent of others, and agrees on conspiracies abounding. Don’t we all doing that when we say “this is whats wrong with the world today? And why? And they are responsible. I know a lot of people convinced that the wrong is this or that. I do. I am convinced. Though I did realize, just now, that the wrong doers all have their piece to say. And should they they might not graduate from feeling to doing. They might think their plight was shared. They might be less sure who to hate.
Can they say their grievance, individually, specifically? Do we have this skill? Do we value this exploration? Or is it easier to hang with the generally angry, unified and comforted by the warm bodies. Concentrating on the enemy du jour.
There is the remarkable example of the objectors to CRT. They may even admit that their community has done some nasty deeds in the name of itself, in the past, but they will insist it is wrong to upset them by pointing it out. This is quite an admission. “Don’t tell me about the sins of my fathers, it makes me feel bad and we’ll never get along therefore.”
Their grievance has become their discomfort. And there is no philosophy in their philosophy that says they can forgive themselves by telling the truth. There is no commandment: thou shalt not lie to thyself. It goes: thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Huge difference.
This morning I thought that my civilization is, largely, based on fear of the other: another person, race, gender, same gender, language, accent, location etc. I say mine only because it is what I know, mine is over ‘ere, in the west. I have heard it is as fearful in the east. The south, the north.
There were some interesting events long ago though: the Aztecs and Inca welcomed the Conquistadors.
Why? It seems they were impressed. Some of us, I read, were impressed by them. It does put paid to the assertion that “everybody thought that way back then.” Or the claim that racism is human nature when it is mainly cowardice.
And in my room they should say it, “speak the sounds that hold the pain.” It would sound different. Does it happen in religious rooms? Or AA meetings?
I am only asking. We seem infatuated with rooms of listeners and one speaker.
Anyway, I wonder why we do that, are we looking to be seduced? When we try love relationships aren’t we hoping for a kind of integration. A two way integration.
Don’t the poets talk of the great courage this takes? Isn’t this risk the best of life?
Socrates and Euthyphro, great story: virtue is that which the gods love, says Euthyphro.
Ah, says Socrates: isn’t it that the gods love that which is already virtuous.
When someone says homosexuality is a sin because god says so, I have no response. This person is hiding what THEY feel behind what someone else might feel. If the same person could tell me what they feel is personally wrong with homosexual love I can hear that. That person will say it is wrong, for them. Then anyone can say: ok, don’t do it. It is wrong for you. But not for them. Can you live with that?
This person has found their own voice. Has not huddled behind something written down as the word of god, that they agree with. They have become Socrates, an adult, not Euthyphro, a child.
It strikes me too that the discussions I encounter are mostly participated in by Euthyphros: Intellectuals.
I think this is by dint of habit and not necessarily all of them. Glenn Loury is a person I might disagree with often but he is magnificent in his process, and I think, in himself. But the sheer habit of reading books as if they were gospel, of absorbing Rousseau or Montesquieu, realizing their beguiling “way” and being seduced by it, seems to be the way of most intellectuals. I really thought it would be different! I hoped so! Maybe they are out there but no-one will publish or film them. It seems a function less profound than carpentry: if I think this and write that I will be successful. Dear old Plato, the first intellectual, according to the quoters, still sat at the lap of Socrates, real or invented, and quoted. So the tradition begins in unoriginality.
In my imagined room these people and their expressions are useless. They do not deal in what they feel. Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson are obviously very afraid. That is what they feel. And their thoughts soothe the afraid: that is their achievement, the one to the many: “You’re alright Jack!”
They “stay home.” Surrounded with security that everyone who does not agree with them is wrong. Their skill is in proving others wrongness. Security like swaddling. In my room nobody is wrong, even they.