The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #51974 Message #793785
Posted By: Amos
29-Sep-02 - 11:10 PM
Thread Name: BS: Discussion 2: Dissent = intelligence??
Subject: RE: BS: Discussion 2: Dissent = intelligence??
No, it does make you smart to disagree with the majority. Nor does it make you smart to agree with the majority. They are totally independent variables. We have demonstrated plenty of times in the past that an American majority has a problematic degree of right thinking in it -- sometimes a lot, sometimes too little.
The hard issues for anyone to come to terms with, right or left, include the disproportion between Bush's determination and promotion of military attack and the number of facts he has presented in support of the vision.
The air around these issues is thick with flights of rhetoric, emotional and often whingeing or frothing depending on its place in the spectrum. None of that has any bearing on what an intelligent appraisal is or could be.
Patriotism is not jingoistic in and of itself, but mobs in any context tend to be. I have heard jingoists suggesting that Afghanistan should become aparking lot at our hands, and I quail to think they are citizens under the same principles as I am. I have heard bleeding hearts insist that "we deserved it", which is equally absurd, equally extreme, and in a perverted way, equally jingoist.
There has got to be found a middle ground along which we can move away from vioent solutions and haul the rest of the world with us, willy or nilly, toward a planet that is, at the very least, in communication and seeking better processes for itself, in human terms and in terms of other organisms to boot.
Personally, I admire Barbara Kingsolver greatly as a writer, and admire her for having the gumption to stand up against what she sees as mass double think.
But that doesn't mean she is portraying the whole picture clearly.
A