Date: Fri, 27 Feb 1998 19:34:53 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Easy Virtue or Hard Choices


Hugh wrote:
>How about Abraham and Isaac or Agamemnon and Iphigenia??
>
>Here you can see the progressive aspects of bourgeois individualism very
>clearly. Abe and Aggie ideologized away the "hardness" of their choice by
>blaming it on God (in turn perhaps a progressive conceptualization as
>against the much vaguer and less comprehensible Fate). Of course the
>subversive element in the writers perverted the whole human sacrifice bit
>by letting Isaac and Iphigenia survive and gving Aggie at least hell for
>doing what a president had to do (which he also got for snatching Achille's
>war prize woman, poor sod).
>
>In bourgeois individualism the Lutheran Prodestant thing internalizes the
>ideology of brutal domination -- which is why Freud is so useful for
>prizing it back out again.

I feel lucky that I was not born in the West or Christendom. Age-old soul
business does provide a fertile ground for bourgeois morality.

Anyway, even in the West, it is a matter of emphasis whether you see
continuity or discontinuity. Marxism, however, forces us to pay attention
to when, where, and how qualitative changes take place.

>I think the alienated individualistic ideologization of "hard choices" is
>similar to the ideologization of alienated individualistic "goals"
>especially "ultimate goals", which is why I reacted the way I did to Sheila
>W's posting and was very surprised to see Yoshie's affirmative response to
>it.

I didn't see such a fixation with individualistic goals in Sheila's post.
Having a purpose or objective isn't necessarily individualistic. But even
supposing that you are right, Sheila's take is far more desirable than a
morality of Hard Choices; at least it wastes less time.

Yoshie




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