You have a way of dissecting the body of our experience in a fashion not unlike that of Da Vinci…showing us the parts, and their relationships, such that we feel the grittier aspects, the palpable, musty, odorous day to day existential life of it…

descriptions such as yours are valid because they make further political theorizing possible

i agree whole-heartedly with the picture you have painted…and yes, we have created an artificial world, and some of us have souls that extend past its edges…it reminds me of a video game map…there are times when, players, because of a glitch, slip out of the boundaries of the map, and realize that all those objects in the distance are actually flat images with nothing behind them…other games use boundaries like swamps or cliffs, so that if you dared move out past your prescribed arena, you die….the world we live in uses a mixture of both….

The idea became more interesting with the notion that the anxiety arises from the expectation, whether conscious or not, that some benevolent force will supply the solution–and the accompanying fear that perhaps said force won’t come through each time a new problem seems to surface. I got the sense, driving in that predictably long train of morning traffic, that this force we’ve come to rely on is modernity itself–the systematized everything that frames our consciousness and expectations, the most recent version of which was only introduced to the market of experience during the twentieth century and refined most completely in the past half century or so.

So I propose that, regardless of the freedom many imagine they have to reach back to the God of history, to the forces of nature–whatever they may be–that govern the universe, the historical fact is that we actually only reach so far; our imagination is securely confined by this solid punctuation mark affixed neatly at the end of history. It is its own universe, its own self-contained reality and consciousness, and we have no real and substantive experience of its limits, its historical boundaries–though, in the abstract, some of us can imagine such things.

If, then, the mundane problems I face in the course of a day or week, or even of a lifetime can pale when I think of the quality of life and benefits that accrue with this modernity package that I’ve been lucky enough to inherit, it is also true that the solutions I imagine for the more nameless problems–the struggles and mysteries that do not get addressed when I reach into the murk of this modern bubble around me–do not exist, at least in this version of consciousness. Living and thriving in this bubble demands a profound denial of a life–a form of life–that very few of us have the courage to even acknowledge could exist.

That’s a bit of a ramble, but I’m glad I got to shake up that salad in my head.

The message seems to hold true particularly for the time since, say, World War I. A good history book on this topic comes to mind: Lloyd Ambrosious’s “Wilsonianism.” As far as philosophy goes, well, I think you’ve got this covered. The message smacks of Nietzsche, Fukuyama, Leo Strauss, and others.

thanks for the suggestions…i will check those out.

the challenges you mention are interesting precisely because they coincide with my growing beliefs about how violence and gender are deeply related, but not in the usual sense.

what i mean, speaking to point #2…i believe that we are experiencing a long process of female liberation. i am a male feminist. i believe genders are tendencies that are often body-bound, but not always. many many male artists are gifted with strong female energy, as I have been my whole life, working mostly in the last 10 years to come into a more balanced understanding of my masculinity.

my reasons for saying all of this is that I believe the female energy has been oppressed for thousands of years, since we abandoned tribal life…and this feminine spirit has not only been repressed in women’s bodies, it has also been repressed in men, leading to over-masculinated cultures, where men have been kept from engaging in the nurturing and intimacy that small communities depend upon. the ‘male’ type has caused a great deal of suffering to young men too.

so, this imbalance leads to the kind of internal rage, that makes violence more likely. so, there’s this aspect of your comment that i want to support. i believe the next transformative moral leader will be a woman.

but, i also want to point to something that has been difficult for pacifists. pacifism has often suffered from trying to be more than a ban on murder, on killing…and this leads to a pacifist world view, where pacifists try to keep themselves from engaging in conflict of any kind. i am not that kind of pacifist. in fact, i believe the ban on violence allows us to have the kind of passionate conflicts out of which real learning and understanding can take place. as long as we limit ourselves, and have an absolute boundary on physical force, we are then free to engage in the kind of passion and emotion that can be both therapeutic and transformative…but, as it is, we are frightened of emotion, because of the lack of boundary…does that make sense?

i sometimes play violent video games, i sometimes watch movies with violence in them…i certainly wish there were more non-violent items of culture out there, but i have come to terms with keeping pacifism simple, so that i can stand strong in my beliefs against the creation of weapons and their use. outside of that, i think non-violence as relational theory is suspect, and i have seen it used to manipulate.

all my best, and thanks for participating…
ken

What if the collective dream we should have is to all write ourselves in for President on election day? That might be a wake up call. I doubt it though.