"Obviously I don’t want bad things for society, but it seems to me that the only escape from the sociological illusion is to give other people the same freedom that we give ourselves."
That's a beautiful conclusion! If you came to that in an hour-long blog post, you shouldn't be worried about completing a worthy manuscript.
Most of the really great books contain multitudes enough for innumerable variety of good and evil and everything in between. The Bible would perhaps be the central example of this, but there are those too who argue that every kind of political totalitarianism emanates from The Republic, so Plato's not off the hook either. It's important to wrestle with the angel, but at the end of things you really do just have to trust your reader, so I think you've gotten to where you need to go! I really look forward to the book.
I can't think of these things on the same level as you, but couldn't it make sense to say—if overnight we were to retroactively scrap the Great Books and reassemble the canon out of completely different works, someone like BAP would anchor his political pursuits within it regardless? That is—cultural preferences are formed after political ones? Which interpretation needn't dismiss the validity of a rigorous aesthetic sense: there is certainly a *thing* which distinguishes Dostoevsky from Colleen Hoover, though please don't ask me to define it. People have been using the Bible to rationalize every political tendency imaginable for thousands of years; it seems reasonable to see BAP as continuing that project.
I don't know if a canon that was just Frantz Fanon and Toni Morrison could support BAP's project. It's realistic to read Plato as a defense of tyranny, it's harder to read Toni Morrison as a defense of white supremacy. Some books just don't support some readings.
"Obviously I don’t want bad things for society, but it seems to me that the only escape from the sociological illusion is to give other people the same freedom that we give ourselves."
That's a beautiful conclusion! If you came to that in an hour-long blog post, you shouldn't be worried about completing a worthy manuscript.
That is so generous. Thank you!
Most of the really great books contain multitudes enough for innumerable variety of good and evil and everything in between. The Bible would perhaps be the central example of this, but there are those too who argue that every kind of political totalitarianism emanates from The Republic, so Plato's not off the hook either. It's important to wrestle with the angel, but at the end of things you really do just have to trust your reader, so I think you've gotten to where you need to go! I really look forward to the book.
Yay you are really my audience. Just you. And my wife might read it too :)
I can't think of these things on the same level as you, but couldn't it make sense to say—if overnight we were to retroactively scrap the Great Books and reassemble the canon out of completely different works, someone like BAP would anchor his political pursuits within it regardless? That is—cultural preferences are formed after political ones? Which interpretation needn't dismiss the validity of a rigorous aesthetic sense: there is certainly a *thing* which distinguishes Dostoevsky from Colleen Hoover, though please don't ask me to define it. People have been using the Bible to rationalize every political tendency imaginable for thousands of years; it seems reasonable to see BAP as continuing that project.
I don't know if a canon that was just Frantz Fanon and Toni Morrison could support BAP's project. It's realistic to read Plato as a defense of tyranny, it's harder to read Toni Morrison as a defense of white supremacy. Some books just don't support some readings.