Haiti (Catch all)

[Tom Kratman]

Hi Tom,



Probably inevitable; at least if you buy into Levy Strauss (Anthropology, not jeans ). Still, I'd rather fight against the self-fulfilling prophecy trend, at least as much as possible.



LOL - I remember once asking a friend what my security jacket said. his response was that it said "Known subversive, but we don't know what type!". Along the same lines (hey, all anthropologists are story-tellers), I remember spending a couple of hours chatting with Montgomery McFate over cocktails. Part of the chat, inevitably, moved into politics and I told her I was a "right wing conservative". I then had to take about 20 minutes to explain that that meant something totally different from her expectations.

Honestly, a large part of the reason why I reject the right-left binary opposition model comes down not only to the self-fulfilling prophecy effect, and that's a pretty bad one (if we ever get together for a few pints I'll tell you some stories...) but, also, to the implicit metaphysics behind the entire model. That would probably lead us into a really strange turn of discussion...



LOL. Back when i was teaching Intro to Anth, I used to describe English as a polymorphously erotic language that would roll anyone for anything .

Actually, I happen to really like English as a language - as you say, "unequaled vocabulary, subtlety, scope, and poetry". I have no problems with it mugging other languages for words or just making them up because they are cool and "fit" the concept. At the same time, I get truly pissed with people who treat English as if it was a nickle and dime, statue of Venus hooker and don't realize that they have picked up intellectual clap from their activities (hey, I've had to read a LOT of first year papers.... !).

So, let's get back to that lovely word "sovereignty" for a bit. Remember the infamous, and eponymous, phrase "Let them eat cake" from the French revolution? It plays back into the comments I was making about cultural expectations. In the West, as Machiavelli so astutely noted, our sovereigns are first amongst equals. Other cultures have other models like the God King model so beloved of the Middle east (and didn't Gilgamesh have to go through all sorts of hoops to get THAT established! Three parents?!?!?!).

But there is always a "contract" of some form built in; a "balance of terror" if you will, that seems to go back to well before we had writing and, possibly, to before horticulture (no, not Hobbes, this is from Sahlins Stone Age Economics ). We (as a species) would, I suggest, tend to reify our "contracted wills", for want of a better term, onto something - a deity, a clan, a monarch, a concept, etc.. These reifications, in turn, are the focus (not source) of "sovereignty" and, as long as they follow the cultural rules for reification, including the inevitable changes that happen over time, they are "legitimate" in that culture. If they get too far out of touch with the culture, they will inevitably loose legitimacy and, probably, their lives.

Neologisms...Ah hates me some neologisms. Sometime remind me to discuss the crime of linguistic matricide, the calculated, premeditated murder of one's mother tongue.

I'm reasonably equipped to at least discuss the legal and practical aspects of sovereignty. The cultural aspects are outside my skill set, sadly. That said, that sounds about right.

Let me posit something. The key philosophical question is and always has been "What is the nature of man," generally meaning, "Is he perfectable, or at least improvable, by breeding (nature), training (nurture), or none of the above?" Few people think about the question, of course, but nearly everybody _feels_ about it.

Now consider the whole smorgasbord of things we (at least when we're not tilting at windmills) think of as liberal/left wing. How many are driven by the usually unreasoning assumption that man is malleable by training/education/environment? Maybe the better question isn't how many are, but how few are not. Many? Any? Think Lenin's 'New Soviet Man.' Think the original draft of the Port Huron Statement ("man is infinitely perfectable'). Think rehabilitation / psychological-psychiatric treatment (as opposed to punishment) for criminal behavior. Think about the psychological scars on those poor, spanked children! Think about - horror of horrors! - the IQ/Academic Potential testing that expressly refutes this...and how much the left hates that testing and classification. Don't forget to include in there the intellectual sleight of hand, popular these last couple of decades, that man is already naturally perfect and good, and only our badwickedevilnaughtybadbadbad society turns him from that - yes, that's just another way of saying man is completely malleable, through non-genetic means.

On the other side is the notion that man is perfectable only by breeding. Beyond the Nazis (and, yes, I'm aware of the argument that they were a left wing movement. I don't buy it; similar behavior can arise out of apparently diverging goals, when there's a higher goal - perfection); these seem rare. Still, they exist and have existed, openly or tacitly.

I suspect that those are the two far points that define the line or spectrum, which is why - whether I were to go and reinvent the concept or not - I still think the left-right spectrum would continue to exist as an effective, albeit imperfect, model.