Re: Shaming Redux (was Re: [Fwd: Culture and Technology (was Re: Abortion, Killing etc)]

[Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 30 Aug 1999, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:

>Andy, with all due respect, views and ideologies (liberal or otherwise)
>cannot do jack shit, cause or cure acne, let alone alter our lives in any
>way.  It is the government and corporate policies that atomize us - the
>organization of work, residence, transportation, leisure etc.

So you are convenient subjectivist, I guess, one who attacks the
"grievance industry," for "racism creationism" and "holocaust
creationism," and so on, but then turns around the same day and denies the
importance of ideas. (Have you ever seen the film Mouse Hunt, where Nathan
Lane and Lee Evans, in a pathetic attempt to trap a very intelligent
mouse, lay a room full of snap-traps only to find they have snap-tapped
themselves?) If ideas cannot do "jack shit," as you say, then why is your
battle against ideas? Why does ideology exercise you so much?

You might consider how the deep and obvious contradictions in your
thought, unmanageable even across two back-to-back posts written to a
single individual, call your approach to social theorizing into question
(I have always questioned it, but it seems you have impressed at least one
person on the list).

On this matter of "ideas never do anything," I must wonder aloud the merit
of such a claim. So it was government and corporate policies that caused
German fathers of young German boys to make Jewish boys strip naked, dig
their own graves, and shoot the boys in the back of the head? Could the
government in a handful of years make ordinary Germans over into mass
murderers? Did the corporations cause German fathers to kill naked Jewish
boys? Or might the deep anti-Semitism of the German people, where Jews
were viewed as a virus infecting the German race, had something to do with
the collection of pictures and the taking of trophies of Jewish women and
children as they went about saving the Aryan race? Ideas are very
important. It is partly because of ideas that we do not live in a
socialist society.

Of course ideas don't do anything by themselves. What an incredibly
trivial statement. But people operate on the ideas they have about things.
False ideas lead to false practices. You cannot on the one hand chalk
everything up to collective subjectivity, crying out about the injustices
of the "grievance industry," and then turn around and announce that the
ideas people have in their heads are meaningless. Your false ideas--that
racism and the Holocaust are mere grievances--have led you to engage in
the BEHAVIOR of propagandizing this and other lists about taking a stand
against the evil "grievance industry."

Andy