Coggins7 wrote:Quote:
What seems to have happened is this. Islam is on the rise and we, or far too many of us, now find ourselves envying a culture which, in its family and tribal life, enjoys the benefits of asabiyah (Arabic: group feeling) and the communal solidarity that we have forfeited to the hedonistic and centrifugal effects of modernity. Despite the internecine violence between doctrinal camps in the Muslim world, the interior dynamic at the level of the social group is one of homogeneity and consensus identity. We, however, live in an ideological world that has traced a single line of development from Leninism to Feminism, turning the personal relations in which actual life is experienced into soulless and formulaic abstractions, whether on the ideological battlefield, in social legislation, in the cultural mosh pit or in the iridescent bubble of the university seminar.
Scratch:The portions I've bolded are so clichéd that you use them in virtually every other post. What's dumb about Solway's views is that he bashes abstraction at the same time that celebrates it. He yearns (ironically) for some Utopian notion of "asabiyah", which opens the door for him to go off on his various rants against Feminism, the "cultural mosh pit," the academy, etc, none of which can be totally and absolutely tied to anything even remotely resembling a loss of "group feeling." You, Solway, and your ilk apparently feel like dinosaurs whom the popular culture has left in the dust. I ask you: is this the culture's fault? Or your own?
All that I see here is that you have no understanding of what Solway has written and have made no attempt, as of yet, at such an understanding.
Frankly, Loran, I cannot see that *you* understand it, either. Solway is trying to address philosophical and political issues by flinging a bunch of literary quotes at the matter---a rhetorical technique which seems misguided at best. Sure, T. S. Eliot may have been conservative in some respects, but does Solway really think that quoting him in this context is a good idea?
(emphasis added)The persistent and intransigent shallowness of your analysis of what is ostensibly a lucid, philosophically serious and linguistically evocative set of observations regarding present western society bespeaks nothing other than the very kind of anti-intellectual ideological fanaticism with which the Left has been associated since the late Sixties.
"Ostensible" sounds about right. No wonder you bought into it so readily. LOL!!!
C'mon, Loran. A) I did not attempt an "analysis," and B) you are once again marching out your sad little cliches about the Left. Do you have anything new to say? Or anything which you haven't cribbed from actual thinkers such as Solway?
I would hope that any fault for the popular culture having left me in the dust could be compellingly ascribed to me, as the popular culture, for the most part, isn't worth the dust within which I've been duly situated.
Well then, hope no more, my friend! It is obvious that your conservatism is the reason behind your getting "left in the dust."