marzipan

exploding dog shares my pain

Arts & Letters Daily is my new interesting thing. I've wasted several hours on it already. on that site I found a neat article called The herd instinct. Which in turn made me think. gasp. I know.

Specifically, a chunk of Sandall's essay got me spinning:
when René Descartes wrote in the 17th century that “We
ought never to allow ourselves to be persuaded of the truth
of anything unless on the evidence of our reason” he
intimated (for those able to understand) that the emotionally
held collective beliefs of culture, imbibed and imposed and
punitively enforced from infancy, are not to be trusted.

My thoughts made a few jumps to get to the point where I wonder why we work so hard to protect cultural diversity. Every day I work up here, I do my best to follow the cultural ideals of this place. I don't always agree, and some of what I'm protecting I actively disagree with. So why do I protect it?

it's a weird conundrum. the first time i remember feeling the tension between a group's right to exist and self-determine, and the rights of the individuals in that group was back in 1997. that was when the first reports on the lives of women in afghanistan first entered my consciousness. i would have been loathe to wipe out any culture, up until that point. but at that point (this point?), i would have been happy to ride rampant over those men who oppressed their women so fully that the women began to oppress each other and themselves. because fundamentally, my reason has persuaded me that all people have equal rights.

The best thing for each of my students would be for them to get out of this town - go get a southern education, get trained for a good job, learn some personal responsibility, and then come home (if they want). This place would be a paradise if it worked better. But the best thing for the culture here is for students to stay, go out on the land, live the old way as much as possible.

I guess this is what is called cognitive dissonance. I don't want to wipe any culture out, and yet when I look closely, there isn't much in a lot of cultures that I think should be spared the blowtorch. The thing is, and I'll say it again, you can't ride two horses with one ass.

It's a Friday night, and I've got nothing to do. So I'm reading Harry Potter. Ah... escapism.