I didn't write yesterday because it felt wrong not to acknowledge the date in my subject matter, yet I felt that the blogosphere hardly needs another reflection on 9/11 and what it means to this blogger.
After all of it, though - isn't it still just incredible to think that human beings deliberately crashed jet aircraft into skyscrapers and that thousands of other human beings died because of it? I think that we moderns have so subscribed to ideas about survival as the primary instinct (Freud's death wish gets more play on the pathological side of things) that it's hard to imagine a different drive. We just give it the shorthand of "religious fanaticism" so that it's labeled and boxed up into a tidy package and stigmatized and thus we don't feel we have to understand it. The undesirable Other, in short.
I am thinking of this idea of what is "naturalized" in our collective culture and thnking, because Stuart Hall makes the point that liberalism as a political ideology is directly related to late 17th and 18th century ideas about scientific inquiry - man as having a natural instinct to compete and amass (Adam Smith) and as having the natural right to do so (Locke). I don't know if his formulation is new with him, or whether he's just summing up the late 20th century view of liberalism.
Posted by otto0114 at September 12, 2004 9:14 AM