Today I am sick of:
Received wisdom.
Sick of my own, of course. But I'm especially sick of other people's. And most particularly extra-super-especially sick other people who repeat other people's as though it was their own.
It occurs to me, as I sit here overhearing a member of the Committed Left regurgitate the List Of Why The War In Iraq Was A Bad Idea into the lap of a hapless Asian with a moderate command of English, that some people's minds are nothing more than intricate cut-and-paste multimedia devices. Snippets of ideas and phrases and visual argument flow in through the eyes and ears and are jumbled around into some sort of vaguely coherent structure which in turn generates a mishmash of output that is judged based on the level of social discomfort caused by its release into the world.
Forget the output's nearness to Truth, and don't judge the potential of this or that string of premises to approach the Truth. Does saying it make you feel good? Does it make ya feel righteous? Say it with me now, Saints! Yayus! Can ya feel the love of your fellow travelers? Can ya get a pat on yer political back when ya stand up to the stupidest members of the opposition? Can ya build up yer moral self-worth by turnin' yer ideas into the default standard of human decency? Can ya banish that knot of despair in yer gut by callin' out in time with Those Who Think Like You? Can ya feel th' powuh, can ya get down with it, can ya convince yerself that ya've got it allll down, that ya've got the lock on truth, that ya know how it is? Yay-us! Then come on down, come on down to the pulpit-ah, and accept the Ideology into your hearts and minds-uh, it's waiting for ya, it's here for ya, it wants to heal you of your uncertainty, it wants to make ya into a great sack of credulous meme-breeding pseudo-intellectual protoplasm!
There is, quite simply, no escape. We've reached critical mass in this country, where Those Who Are In Charge Of Ideas and The Rest Of Us have achieved a near-polar opposition. Those Who Are In Charge Of Ideas have a monopoly on the tools of idea propagation--the media is a vast substrate for the promotion of a certain set of concepts, and the universities are, likewise, an agar hostile to the growth of any dissimilar set. The mind of the People is weak and abused and ready for infection, battered into pustulent submission by imagery that passes for thought and rhetoric that passes for argument.
While we lie in bed smeared with Vapo-Rub and shivering with the pale sweat of incipient fever, waiting to see which viral load will infect us and take us as Western host, the Eastern corpus struggles with its own virulent sickness...we're all going to end up puking, because that's the essential nature of the monkey, isn't it? Gather, form into groups, establish comfort, seek ease the way that water seeks the low places. Duty is difficult, and honor is so hard that even those who lay claim to it are liars. So much simpler to tell ourselves that by easing the lives of as many monkeys as possible we are, in fact, doing good.
That's the civilized way of committing cultural suicide: corpulent solicitiude disguised as ethical behavior. If we can just make everyone comfortable, we'll achieve Utopia.
Nonsense! Great stinking heaps of it, scattered throughout the world, masquerading as the Ideas of politicians and professors and right-thinking citizens. Snot-yellow satin-sheened wobbly piles, all of it, pus that needs shoveling into the incinerator.
But no.
Can't do that.
Wouldn't want to discomfit anyone, now would we?
