Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Tuesday, April 01, 2003 From Chris Hedges' War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (pg. 81-2): Until there is a common vocabulary and a shared historical memory there is no peace in any society, only an absence of war.…The search for a common narrative must, at times, be forced upon a society. Few societies seem able to do this willingly. The temptation, as with the Turks and the Armenian genocide, is to forget or ignore, to wallow in the lie. But reconciliation, self-awareness, and finally the humility that makes peace possible come only when culture no longer serves a cause or myth but the most precious and elusive of all human narratives—truth. For extra credit, compare and contrast this with Alan Moore's belief, expressed in From Hell, that all history is a fiction (I'll have to research this and get back to you later). Maybe I'm just confusing things by swapping the ideas of "narrative" and "fiction" (I'm tempted to say, which I think Hedges would sharply disagree with, that all narratives are, by definition, fictional) but it seems there might be something worth digging at there. Perhaps war is such a component of human life precisely because there can never be a common vocabulary (due to linguistic entropy) or a shared historical memory (maybe a shared agreement of history at best) and so the best we can hope for is precisely that: an absence of war. posted by Jeff Lester | 4:26 PM | |
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