[lit-ideas] Re: The Iran Charade
- From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2006 21:33:43 -0800
Julie wrote:
Yes. But that would seem to [invite] the question of why more people seem
swayed by the emotions of fear and pseudo-patriotism than by the emotions that
produce pacifism. It was easy to rouse the country to war. The general population
seems far less readily swayed to pacifism.
This makes it sound as if pacifism were grounded in a set of emotions
opposed to fear (pseudo-patriotism isn't an emotion, surely) and that
it's because fear, etc., is more easily aroused in most (?) people than
are the emotions conducive to pacifism that the country was 'roused' to
war, rather than not.
A subtext of this and other posts seems to be that those who
support/supported the war were driven by their emotions, and not by any
sort of rational judgment. This is way too easy. First, one might note
that not going to war and advocating pacifism are entirely different
things. Real pacifists, like the Quakers and the Mennonites, don't pick
and choose; they are opposed to war, period. (See
http://www.bluffton.edu/~mastg/GCpeace.htm or just google 'mennonites
pacifism'). Advocating not invading Iraq might be a consequence of one's
being a true pacifist; but saying that this is the 'wrong war, at the
wrong time, in the wrong place,' is to advocate prudence, not pacifism,
unless one is a pacifist making a bad joke.
As for the emotions of the mob: being afraid of x, and trying to get rid
of x (spiders in the basement, it was, last night on AMC) strikes me as
entirely rational. In order for Bushco to get people to support the
invasion, it had first to make Saddamco suitably fearsome, i.e., to
instill a belief in people who then become fearful as a result of it.
The mob is no more no less emotionally driven than you or I. If David
Hume didn't say that, he should have.
Robert Paul
Reed College
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