Re: <nettime> A Puff Piece on Wikipedia (Fwd)

[Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>]

Keith Hart wrote:

>I think I was saying two cheers for the liberal enlightenment and what it
>bequeathed us, if we would acknowledge our inheritance.

I am ever amazed and puzzled by Keith's confidence in the liberal 
enlightenment. I must say I don't share it. Acknowledging that 
inheritance seems to me like buying with one's spiritual faculties 
into a status quo of inequality, oppression and domination with which 
we are, to be sure, objectively complicit, by force of sheer 
powerlessness. Such an abandonment of the ability to discern reality 
from desire is, to me, unbearable.

Similarly, Michael Goldhaber appears to me eminently reasonable, and 
perhaps lacking in historical imagination. Is a civilization like the 
current one replaceable? What could possibly motivate people to 
answer in the affirmative? Kermit Snelson's justifiable concern with 
the state of the Union, whether that lamentable state is attribuable 
to Leo Strauss or not, rather bears out the limits of Michael's 
reasonableness. For many years, worldly Americans have nodded their 
heads, quoted statistics, and pointed to demographic, economic, and 
psychosocial explanations that make the decay of our democracy appear 
quite plausible and "normal." And look where that has got us. On a 
road which appears, in many ways, to defy reason.

still waiting for a little less consensus,

Brian Holmes

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