[MD] Boromir's Journey

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Steve,

> > Steve said:
> > "Small self" can tell a story about the evolution of value
> > patterns to give evidence that the world already has
> > gotten better than it once was which gives me hope for
> > the future, but for "Big Self" there is always only now in
> > all its perfect perfectingness.
> > ...
> > For example, a mother cries with a smile on her face as
> > she consoles her daughter who has just had her heart
> > broken for the first time. Everything is wrong in the world,
> > but will get better. Everything always is exactly as it
> > should be.
> >
> > Matt:
> > Ah--interesting.  But notice the condescension in the
> > smile: "if you only understood," while all the daughter
> > wants to give such knowingness is a big fuck-you.  Tell
> > the people living in shit, literally in the case of Indian
> > untouchables, and if they _don't_ give you a fuck-you, we
> > might want to wonder why not--don't you _want_ things to
> > get better?
> 
> 
> Steve:
> If the smile were condescending, the girl wouldn't keep going back to  
> her mom for comfort. But she does. I know for a fact that she does  
> because they are my hypothetical people, and they do whatever I say  
> they do! But I also think that people like the made up mother really  
> exist and that people are drawn to such people--people who are  
> completely engaged in the world (with hope) and also have a sense of  
> an imperturbable calm about them (faith). They can sympathize with  
> us, and we don't need to worry about dragging them down by our  
> sorrows. I think we all know people like that, and the words  
> "condescending" and "arrogant" don't come to mind when we think of them.

Matt:
Perhaps.  The notion of "teenage angst" probably looms 
larger in my mind than yours.

To me, the non-perturbation would _not_ be what I was 
going for in venting to a person.  I think of sympathy as an 
imaginative effort, on the analogy of "putting yourself in 
someone else's shoes," and if they just sat there serene, I 
would think there was a disconnect going on, at the 
least--either an unknowingness (not enough imagination) or 
a knowingness (oh silly person, you must transcend these 
ephemeral delinquencies).

Think, too, if Uncle Tom's Cabin or Native Son had met a 
host of serene, unperturbed smiles, reflecting an internal 
"everything is always exactly as it should be."  Wouldn't 
something have gone awfully wrong with our hopes for 
moral progress?

I don't doubt that there are people like the mother, and 
people drawn to these mothers.  And I like calm.  But the 
non-perturbedness does seem accurately named as "faith," 
and it seems to me diametrically antagonistic with the 
imagination required for real sympathy and actually being 
"engaged in the world."  I think we can keep the calm 
without the non-perturbation--it's just well-controlled 
perturbedness.

But again--like James' recurrence at the very beginning of 
Pragmatism to the reduction of philosophies to individual 
temperament, this difference likely boils down to my own 
perception of people.  And to my own perception of myself, 
as not having the immediate moral outrage at certain 
events/whatnot that people I admire have.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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