Subj : The Game
To   : John Wilson
From : Frank Masingill
Date : Sun Oct 22 2000 01:39 pm

 -=> Frank Masingill wrote to John Wilson <=-

 FM> ... History, I count to be a recollection both of our personal
 FM> journey in consciousness from birth to death and of
 FM> recollection to the best of our ability of events in the life
 FM> and consciousness of Man.

 FM> I see as great error the application of personal and private
 FM> prejudices to the body of that history and the presumption
 FM> that those private prejudices inform us unerringly of what is
 FM> finally good and finally evil in that recollection.

 JW> May I semi-disagree?

 JW> In the first paragraph you seem to imply an acceptance of what
 JW> you scorn in your second paragraph.

 JW> In simple layman talk, I think (my private prejudice) that if
 JW> people paid attention to their instinct ("events in the life
 JW> and comsciousness of Man") we'd be a lot better off. Your word
 JW> "unerringly" remains, of course, a big fat problem :-)

        Let me illustrate.  You and I would be, I think, equally
opposed to mass murder (judicial or otherwise) for the purpose of
political reforms.  I don't mean to speak for you so if you don't
agree you can say so.  You probably WOULD agree if we're speaking of
the Hitlerian holocaust or the Stalin murders.  

        But what of the mass murders in the France of the Revolution
in the late eighteenth century when living human beings were hauled
before kangaroo courts and then off the the guillotine in droves
for the purpose of establishing an ideologically "pure" regieme? The
principles of the Revolution, "Liberty, Equality and Justice" became
established as rallying points eventually bringing representative
government to European society.  Was the evil of unjust mass murders
the price demanded for some ultimate good?   The Barbarian Invasions
that helped to end the Roman Empire certainly constituted a scourge.
Was the evil there without any measure of redemption in good?  

        I'm asking if we can KNOW, finally and irrevocably the
answer to such questions about history.  

        I don't mean, of course, those modern historians who
consider that immanent man has now emerged from the primeval swamps
of religion and philosophy with a lordly view of the past in which
an unerring judgement can be made.   I mean people who still live in
the knowledge that reality as a whole is not within man's purview.  

Frank

--- PPoint 2.07
 * Origin: Maybe in 5000 years (1:396/45.12)

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