There are two particular posts on this blog: one from last year and another from further back. Both ‘A perfectly good abstraction’ and ‘Me and American Patriotism’ are retrospectives on dialectics that have played out in my mind and my life.
Both of them also discuss ethics; distinct from philosophy. A philosophy can be a thought experiement, a belief or a way of life. Ethics are relatively simple: how we should behave toward one another. An ‘ethic’ is also a well-used way of denoting how people treat each other right now. Modes of behavior shared by large groups can denote the presence of ideas too diaphonous for meaning but thin enough to stretch far and connect much.
A widespread, unconscious attitude would match those proportions. While a given ‘ethic’ can also be an ideological commitment, they are often psychological. The mind of a given person may or may not make any connection between ideology and an unconscious attitude.
Speaking of all that: remember when I posted about Biden withdrawing from Afghanistan? I worried that I was being too critical of Biden and that I should be more willing to give points fairly.
I suspect I’ll continue writing about politics here but I don’t know that I will.
I’m not a sore loser and I don’t mind being wrong…but I may have been seriously wrong about some of the things I mentioned in those two posts.
I’m an American so I can’t help thinking about American politics and society in a provincial way. I took it for granted that Americans generally value the ethical enshrinement of the individual in the American Constitution. Consider many of the assumptions we make as we write: anyone is allowed to have any reaction to what I say but I am still allowed to say it. To call for someone to be deplatformed or for their message to be lumped into an ideological generalization is to discredit oneself. It testifies to a fear of ideas under discussion that can only be assuaged by throwing out the discussion.
Many Americans probably do value those things. But I made assumptions about scale.
AilixChaerea 