On the moral imagination, one spar
Mark Kohut
markekohut at yahoo.com
Tue Feb 28 12:04:15 CST 2012
On Sunday's "Up With Chris Hayes" show, there was a guest
who had written a book on whistleblowers called, I believe,
"Beautiful Souls". He told a story that he linked to his inspiration
for writing his book.
That story was about some German soldiers who opted out of killing
Jews in cold blood, who had been rounded up at a village and taken to a forest.
Alluding also to the Rwandan genocide, he spoke of his attempt to write about
people who acted as if they had alternatives against the day's narrow mores/morals
(that is the root, of course. Cf. Nietzche all over among others) .
"Those who exhibited a different moral imagination", he said....
Suddenly, with that phrase and his (unusual) Rwanda allusion and story, I thought I knew where
he got the phrase. Philip Gourevitch used it in:
"We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda" by Philip Gourevitch
to describe, with elaboration, of course, the failure to see beyond that Self-Justifying Puritan 'either-or', Saved or Evil....
You are the Demon incarnate,thinks the Other, so, can be slaughtered.
As you will remember, TRP seems to savage such mental and historical failures in many places in his work, but in Against the Day very
specifically in the subdesertine section where he scores Manichaeism, that dualism religion, in a Jonathon Swiftian kind-of way---(I am away from the book at the moment, but
will send some of those brilliant metaphors) ----even, comparable to Gourevich above, linking Manichaeism with the Crusades
and other historical slaughters. (section is in early 400s for any reading along)
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