SubscribeThe first stage in the evolution is contingent and cannot be contrived. In this first stage, the voice, by no fault of its own, finds itself trapped between two poles, two competing belief systems. And so this first stage necessitates the second: the voice learns to be flexible between these two fixed points, even to the point of equivocation. Then the third stage: this native flexibility leads to a sense of being able to "see a thing from both sides." And then the final stage, which I think of as the mark of a certain kind of genius: the voice relinquishes ownership of itself, develops a creative sense of disassociation in which the claims that are particular to it seem no stronger than anyone else's. There it is, my little theory—I'd rather call it a story. It is a story about a wonderful voice, occasionally used by citizens, rarely by men of power.
It's my audacious hope that a man born and raised between opposing dogmas, between cultures, between voices, could not help but be aware of the extreme contingency of culture. I further audaciously hope that such a man will not mistake the happy accident of his own cultural sensibilities for a set of natural laws, suitable for general application. I even hope that he will find himself in agreement with George Bernard Shaw when he declared, "Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it." But that may be an audacious hope too far. We'll see if Obama's lifelong vocal flexibility will enable him to say proudly with one voice "I love my country" while saying with another voice "It is a country, like other countries." I hope so. He seems just the man to demonstrate that between those two voices there exists no contradiction and no equivocation but rather a proper and decent human harmony.and have sorta since noticed him kinda trying to catalogue obama's attempts to navigate (or pivot) away from 'country first' patriotism to a particular non/post-partisan variety along the lines of 'practical wisdom' that barry schwartz has talked about, which i thought was pretty interesting, e.g. re jindal:
The point of the American founding was not that Americans are somehow better than any other people on earth, but that they had figured out a way to make government more amenable to freedom, stability and prosperity.also btw, speaking of alternate realities/timelines, ... wait, i actually had a point, we could be witnessing a zeitgeist in collective subjunctive consciousness, cf.
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posted by thebergfather at 7:41 AM on February 26