Anarchy, rebellion, and Chomsky

            On pages 23-24 of The Banquet Years, The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I, Roger Shattuck writes, "The atmosphere of permanent explosion in artistic activity is evidence not only of anarchistic tendencies but also of the fierceness of its experiments.  New reviews appeared, principally La Vogue . . .  the long-lived Mercure de France, and the Natanson brothers' Revue Blanche. . . The Salon des Independents outgrew one building after another with more and more work from young painters, while ethnological museums were being filled with astounding art from Africa, the Pacific, and Egypt.  The new Schola Cantorum brought back old church modes, and composers began to collect the ancient songs of France.  Modernism coincided in significant fashion with primitivism.  Gauguin's 'flight' to Tahiti in 1891 may not have produced his best work but it reveals the integrity of his desire for another vision.  Anarchism itself can be seen as a form of political primitivism trying to return to an earlier stage of social evolution.  What one can overlook most easily in all this demonstration is its stubborn purpose to change the aspect of both life and art.  There was a connection and a difference between the irrepressible frivolity of the upper classes and the resolute gaiety of young artists.

            "Deep down at its center of gravity, however, the center turned slowly despite all this ferment.  It changed its pace for no man.  Artists who strained forward into the future found that their fresh trail was rarely being followed in a prosperous and complacent France.  In response they did what was only natural: they banded together for support.  They constituted what we have come to call the avant-garde, a 'tradition' of heterodoxy and opposition which defied civilized values in the name of individual consciousness.  They developed a systematic technique of scandal in order to keep their ideas before the public.  It amounted to an artistic underground, which began to break through to the surface in the latter part of the Banquet Years."

            COMMENT:  The "scorn and hate of every hierarchy of society" carried over from politics to art.  Artists, much like the political agitators, were not so much interested in a better system as in expressing their "scorn and hate of every hierarchy of society."  The political agitators ended up under the guillotine or in prison, but the artists, were inclined more toward the pen than the sword.  They concentrated upon scorn rather than hatred.  They wanted not only to produce something new but to shock the "powers that be" out of their complacency.  Why?  Why does the young son of today come home with a spiked hair cut and an ear-ring?  Why does the young girl come home with a tattoo?  They get noticed.  They get attention. 

            If Shattuck is right in seeing anarchy as not merely a reaction to the status quo, but as a seeking after the primitive, we can ask whether this is a good thing.  I don't know whether Anarchists ask themselves this question.  If one is caught up in the anticipated shock when mom sees that tattoo, the daughter may not have asked herself whether it is a good thing.  They step beyond "art for art's sake" and seek "art for shock's sake."  Not merely that, of course, the best of them wanted to be good, to be genuinely creative, but they enjoyed being shocking as well, and perhaps shock was all the lesser talents had going for them.

            I paused in writing this to eat dinner, and while eating watched the first part of a Netflix movie, Against the Dark.  Steven Seagal tells his fellow vampire hunters, "we're not in this to determine who's right and who's wrong, we're in this to determine who lives and who dies."  While the French Anarchists probably didn't pose the same threat that the vampires did in the movie, the threat did exist.  The French Anarchists did kill people and the French state didn't bother overly much with the idea of whether the Anarchists might be right, they determined that they should die.  They were a patent threat to French people, especially French leaders; so they were sent to the guillotine. 

            The threat of modern day Anarchists, the anti-Americans such as Noam Chomsky is not as severe.   He is a political agitator to be sure, but he isn't given to violence.  He isn't in it for the shock value like the Anarchist artists, the Avant-Garde, he truly hates America and sides with its enemies whenever possible.   One of the distinguishing marks of the American Anarchist is to hold American guilty in the present for sins committed in the past, and Chomsky has all those old sins memorized.   Chomsky hasn't the ability to step back and wonder whether all nations do or have done similar things to what America has, and he hasn't the ability to see improvement in America. 

            Furthermore he isn't willing to exercise that part of his social contract which allows him to immigrate to another nation should he so choose.  Why doesn't he leave?  Surely it isn't good for him psychologically or physically to stay in a nation he hates so much.  I can answer that question for him.  All nations are pretty much the same, that is, they have human beings in positions of authority, humans with a representative number of flaws -- flaws like everyone else has.  They make decisions which may be wrong.  Chomsky thinks it was wrong of American to remove the Saddam regime, for example.  His opinion wasn't universal.  The pros and cons were argued before the American people.  There were good arguments for removing Saddam.  Chomsky later wrote a book called Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance, in which he refers to America's invasion of Iraq as a monumental crime.  George Bush was just like Joseph Stalin.  He wrote his book in 2003 when his arguments seemed plausible to some.  He was convinced Iraq would go from bad to worse.  Like so much of what Chomsky wrote, he was wrong.  Iraq is turning out to be what George Bush hoped it would be, a fledgling democracy, perhaps a democratic example to other nations in the Middle East.  Saddam Hussein had been a threat in the region.  I won't revisit the details, but other nations were afraid of him.   Now he is gone and Iraq is well on its way toward being a democracy.  Is Chomsky interested in that?  I suspect not.  I doubt that he will write a sequel entitled, "America's sacrifices for the good of Iraq and the Middle East."

            My point here isn't that the Anarchists should agree with me, but that they should understand that there were potent arguments of America doing what it did.  America isn't "guilty" simply because Chomsky assumes that it is.  He makes his assertions about America's guilt time after time, but he presents no argument.  He tells us invading Iraq is wrong, therefore America is guilty.   Is he capable of wrestling with the pros and cons of invasion as Kenneth Pollack did in The Threatening Storm, the case for invading Iraq?  That doesn't seem to be one of Chomsky's skills.

RE: Chomsky in the light of French Anarchism.

            Billy Blogblather (see his comments below) introduces some interesting considerations.  He writes, "No one has authority over anyone but that one agrees by the will of another or of some groups."  I'm not absolutely sure what that means, but it sounds like the individual is free to abrogate the social contract he has with his nation if he disagrees with it.   Billy says that he has no intention of abrogating his, but that may be a personal decision.  His "principle" if he has created one, seems to leave that open to the individual.  Correct me Billy, if I'm wrong.

            Without studying the matter exhaustively, what I have studied suggests that every nation has done something that some citizens object to.  According to the Billy Blogblather principle (assuming I understand it).  Those citizens, much as the French citizens who resorted to Anarchy, have the right to abrogate their social contract and take some sort of action against their nation.  The French Anarchists of the 1890s liked to throw bombs at their leaders.  Noam Chomsky likes to go about the world giving speeches.

            Interestingly, Chomsky, and Billy, aren't concerned about America changing its ways and doing better in the future.  They both hold America to account for past sins.  Most Protestants believe there is no unforgiveable sin, but that isn't the case with Chomsky and Blogblather.  They reserve the right to severe their social contract (should they choose to, which they don't) based upon past sins -- sins America no longer commits.  Of course there are new sins they object to, but are they not being inconsistent by bring up past sins?  Every nation has bushel baskets full of those.  We who admire Liberal Democracy admire its ability to correct its mistakes.  Look, we used to believe in Slavery, but we don't any more.  Shouldn't we get some credit for abrogating slavery?  Not by a long shot, say Chomsky and Blogblather.  Don't forget Wounded Knee either.  So what would it take, Chomsky Blogblather, for you to become reconciled to Liberal Democracy such that you quit bringing up those past sins.

            As to acquiring a "compassionate moral code," we are quite a bit more compassionate than we used to be.  Also, for example, what is "compassionate" by one person's standards may be "criminal coddling" by another's.  We get to vote on all those matters and if our representatives represent us and the Supreme Court doesn't overrule us, our opinions become law.  Surely you aren't saying that if we get out voted, our social contract with our nation is null and void.

Lawrence

Billy Blogblather has left a new comment on your post "Chomsky in the light of French Anarchism":

And #2 daughter was right. No one has authority over anyone but that one agrees to abide by the will of another or of some group. And that agreement can be rescinded at any time. Most of us no longer believe in the divine right of kings or any other ruler -- even of God many would say. This seems to me to be the bedrock value of liberal democracy. I can yell "fire" in a crowded theater, I can blow up buildings because I'm angry, I (as a nation) can invade countries because I desperately need their resources. I can make $300 million dollars a year while millions go under nourished. It's liberal democracy. I wouldn't have anything else. Except liberal democracy with a compassionate moral code. I think this is all that Noam Chomsky ever argued. The military evil we unleashed in Latin America and Vietnam, the economic evil we unleashed in the US through slavery and Jim Crow, these are but the most egregious offense against our credo of equality, justice and (the French, god love 'em) fraternity. For the sake of money this nation has committed many crimes. We've not starved millions as Stalin did in the Ukraine, nor as Mao executed after the Revolution or during the Cultural Revolution, we have no Babi Yar to account for -- well, there's Wounded Knee and The Trail of Tears and many other massacres, but they were just Indians and that was long ago. Bunches of blacks got hanged, but that's all history now. Over all, we're quite a Christian nation. Love your neighbor and all that. Chomsky bickers. He seems to think that we have had other motives in mind besides Justice, Equality, (and yes, the French again) Fraternity. All Chomsky is asking is that we stop being idiots at look at what's going on. But when you're comfortable, why should you do that?

Chomsky in the light of French Anarchism

            Knowing that Noam Chomsky was an Anarchist didn't inspire me to go off and study Anarchy, but I ran across an interesting mention in Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years, The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I, (written in 1958) Shattuck begins his book by describing how everything is going well.  Oh yes, there was the death of Victor Hugo, the affair of General Boulanger, the Dreyfus affair, the constant dueling and fist-fights, but there were the salons and cafes and Sarah Bernhardt and everyone in France seemed to be having a giddy good time, with one exception. 

            "The most turbulent force of all is almost forgotten.  Anarchism had been seething for many years in the south, principally in the industrial city of Lyon.  Its way was prepared by the surge of antimilitarism after the war of 1871 and by the fresh memory of the Commune.  Traveling inexorably northward, the libertarian movement finally shook Paris in a series of bomb explosions and controversial trials.

            "'Anarchists come from the most varied backgrounds.  But a specific mentality links them -- the spirit of revolt and its derivatives, the spirit of examination and criticism, of opposition and innovation, which leads to scorn and hate of every commitment and hierarchy in society, and ends up in the exaggeration of individualism.  Decadent literature furnished the party with a strong contingent; in recent years there has been, especially among young writers, an upsurge of anarchism.  (Maurice Boisson, Les attentats anarchistes.)'

            Boisson wrote in 1931, but his description seems to fit Chomsky rather well.  There was much in France at the time we might look back and criticize or make fun of, but French people seemed to enjoy being French.   Freud  told us that one of the things a nation does when it thinks extremely well of itself is build a gigantic phallic symbol.  It was in 1899 that they built their Eiffel Tower, the tallest man made structure in the world for half a century.  But Anarchists as Boisson's description tells us are never happy in happy times.  Shattuck continues, "First Ravachol, with five murders behind him, blew up the homes of several magistrates in 1892.  He was caught in a restaurant, brought to trial, and let off with penal servitude for life.  Then another jury, intimidated by public outcry, reversed the decision and sent him to the guillotine.  The end of the same year Vaillant, of illegitimate birth and hysterical disposition, tossed a weak bomb full of nails into the Chamber of Deputies from the visitor's gallery.  None of the deputies was killed, and Vaillant, pleading in his defense that the bomb was intended only as a 'warning,' quoted Darwin, Spencer, Ibsen, and Octave Mirbeau in support of his doctrine.  After his execution he was widely acclaimed as a martyr.  At a literary banquet the evening of Vaillant's bombing, the polemical critic Laurent Tailhade was interviewed about the violence in the Chamber.  'What do a few human lives matter,' he replied' 'si le geste est beau?' Two years later he lost an eye when a bomb exploded in the restaurant where he was eating, and the next morning's paper chastised him with his own Nietzschean sentiments.  Yet his sympathies were shared by many."

            "A few weeks after Vaillant's death, a young intellectual of good family named Emile Henry exploded a bomb in the Cafe Terminus in the Gare Saitn-Lazare.  He had to be saved by the police from being lynched on the spot.  The trial brought out the full challenge of anarchist convictions.  Judge (in red robe): 'your hands are stained with blood.'  Henry: 'Like the robes you wear, Your Honor.'  His coolness on the stand allowed him to discuss the precise chemical composition of his bomb and regret that it had not taken the lives of more victims.  He died bravely under the knife crying, 'Vive l'anarchie,' and it was discovered that he had spent his last days in prison reading Don Quixote."

            Shattuck provides some other examples, which I will skip, then he writes, "By 1894 most sympathizers realized that the defiance of the anarchists exceeded defensible bounds, and the outrages died out quickly.  But their effects remained.  Anarchism served not only to unsettle the political smugness of the Third Republic, but also to challenge any formulated aesthetic. . ."

            The challenges to the formulated aesthetics of the time are also interestingly described, but, as far as I know, Chomsky has not engaged in anything equivalent.  Still, one can't but help but be aware of the faddish changes in clothes and music as each new generation resents and rebels against the previous.  Is it of the same spirit as anarchy?  A better question might be to ask whether " the spirit of revolt and its derivatives, the spirit of examination and criticism, of opposition and innovation, which leads to scorn and hate of every commitment and hierarchy in society" isn't derived from something like sibling jealousy.  My number two daughter often said to the number one daughter, six years her senior, with great heat, "you're not the boss of me." 

            Do the Anarchists have some system that they think is better than Liberal Democracy.  Chomsky says that he does.  But I doubt that anyone takes his system seriously.  What he does better than anyone else is to tell all and sundry, "you're not the boss of me."  He heaps scorn and hate upon every commitment of the American Liberal Democracy.  Every exertion of economic or military success is opposed by Chomsky who in effect says, "you are not only not the boss of me, you ought not to be the boss of anyone else."  Chomsky phrases his scorn and hate much better than my number two daughter did, but my daughter was only a child at the time.

R. G. Collingwood, is he still worth reading?

            In the current issue of the London Review of Books is a review of History Man: The Life of R.G. Collingwood by Fred Inglis.  The review was written by Mary Beard and entitled "No More Scissors and Paste."  It is not available on line.

I'll quote a bit from it and comment below: 

            "For all the engaging enthusiasm of the book, two important questions about Collingwood’s achievements and his academic profile remain only half convincingly answered. First, how important is The Idea of History, the posthumous book which remains his most famous work? Second, what was the connection, if any, between the two academic sides of his career, the Romano-British archaeology and the philosophy? What, in other words, does the Roman Inscriptions of Britain have to do with The Idea of History, let alone the Essay on Metaphysics?

            "The Idea of History has had some very distinguished supporters. By his own account, it was the book that inspired Quentin Skinner at the start of his own historical career – and Skinner of course went on to give his own distinctive spin to Collingwood’s slogan about all history being a ‘history of the mind’. And, if only in the absence of much competition (it is a classic, as Collini has observed, ‘in a field not over-supplied with classics written in English’), it used to be the theoretical standby of undergraduates reading history at university, or of sixth-formers wanting to do so. It still appears on general bibliographies and is warmly recommended to their pupils by ambitious schoolteachers (though when, a few years ago, I asked a group of about 50 third-year students studying history in Cambridge whether any of them had read it, not a single one put up their hand). . . ."

             "Rereading The Idea of History after some 30 years or so, I found myself less impressed than I had been as a student, or at least more counter-suggestible. His image of the mindless, unquestioning narration of ‘scissors and paste’ history, and of generations of historians being content merely to stick one source after another, now seems very largely a self-serving myth. It did not require the birth of narratology or the return to fashion of ‘grand narrative’, to realise that historical narration is always selective and always posing questions about the evidence. No history – not even the most austere chronicle – has ever been as unquestioning as Collingwood paints his imaginary methodological enemy. . . ."
            COMMENT:  Beard implies that Collingwood's work on History and hermeneutics was hardly worth doing, that he wasted time stating the obvious or attacking straw men.  I have a very different opinion from having read Collingwood.   If he spent time stating the obvious, why is it that previous works of history, say prior to 1895 have the very flaws that Collingwood described -- a mere stating of facts without drawing us into the events of the time?   I once spent quite a lot of time reading works of history about the Middle Ages.  I don't recall if Norman F. Cantor was a fan of Collingwood, but in his Inventing the Middle Ages, he demonstrates that works of history written prior to about 1895 are no longer worth reading.  Historians prior to that time didn't know who to write them.   So if Collingwood was stating the obvious, it wasn't obvious to historians who wrote prior to 1895.
            Mary Beard is certainly qualified to write about history -- at least about certain segments of it.  She is "a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge and classics editor of the TLS. Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town won the Wolfson History Prize for 2008."  On the other hand we know something else about this particular historian: (The following is from Wikipedia)  "Shortly after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, Beard was one of several authors invited to contribute articles on the topic to the London Review of Books. She opined that many people, once "the shock had faded", thought 'the United States had it coming', and that '[w]orld bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price' (the so-called 'Roosting Chickens argument'). In a November 2007 interview, she stated that the hostility these comments provoked had still not subsided, although she believed it had become a standard viewpoint that terrorism was associated with American foreign policy. '
            That Beard was wrong about 9/11, and I sincerely believe that she was, doesn't necessarily mean that she is wrong about Collingwood, but I believe she was wrong about him as well -- at least insofar as works of history written about the Middle Ages.  Perhaps historians who wrote prior to 1895 about Pompeii were more perceptive.  I wonder how much Mary Beard has read by or about Collingwood besides The Idea of History and this biography by Inglis; which she finds too adulatory.
            As to the subject question,  Mary Beard believes that Collingwood is dated.  I on the other hand share the opinion of Inglis, Skinner, Collini and others that he is still worth reading.

The River at dawn

We had an usually day at the river yesterday – which might be of modest, puzzling, interest.  Ginger will be 7 and Sage 5 in May and we’ve been going down to a dry river bed several times a week for the past several months, but the weather has been getting warmer so I decided to try getting used to going down there shortly after dawn.  At noon when we usually go down, we rarely see anyone, but that wasn’t true of dawn – at least not yesterday’s dawn.

As I drove the Jeep down a rutted path toward the river we saw a man and woman with at least 8 tiny dogs or puppies (I initially had the impression they were small dogs and not puppies, but upon thinking it over I am not so sure).  I had the impression they were all the same breed but I was too far away to see what it was.  The small dogs were scurrying about so it would have been difficult to count them.  They also had one large German Shepherd, presumably to protect the small dogs from coyotes and feral dogs – if the couple was familiar with the area – or, perhaps it was the GSD’s pups.  The man stopped at the crest of a hill and scowled back toward us as we continued on away from him and his brood.

Since it was a bit cold I decided not to head under the oak and poplar trees as we usually do but to stay out in the open, walking up stream (a figurative term since there was no water in the river).  We weren’t 15 minutes into our hike before Sage started barking furiously – something she has never done down there before.  I checked to see what she was barking at and on the other side of some bushes saw a young man walking along holding a paper up before him – looking to neither the right or the left as he walked along.   I have no idea what he was up to, but it didn’t strike me as threatening.  I called Sage too me and the three of us (Ginger was already near me) entered some brush away from this strange fellow.  This is a bit remarkable in view of a past discussion I started on the matter of Ridgebacks becoming “soft.”  Ginger and Sage were definitely softer than my previous Ridgeback, Trooper, but Sage has shown signs of rising to the occasion when some sort of protection was required – at least in her opinion.  Ginger, on the other hand, has never shown any sort of protectiveness – other than producing a steady stare at strange behavior; which seems to be unnerving to some people. 

Ten or fifteen minutes later we popped out of the brush.  I looked back and this fellow was now following in our direction.  I assumed that his car was up on the road East of us; so I veered off toward the South to give him a wide berth.  Also, we walked on far enough to give him plenty of time to get to his car if that is where he was going.

At one point on the way back I saw that someone had tacked a paper plate on a tree and painted a large dot in the center of it.  Upon inspection I could see several 22-sized holes in it.  The paper showed no signs of being weathered; so it was probably tacked up that morning.  A bit further along I heard some gun fire.  Did the target shooters hide in the brush until we passed by.  That doesn’t seem likely else Sage would have nosed them out and barked at them.  Was he the strange fellow holding the paper up before his eyes.  Perhaps the paper was a target.  Perhaps the gunfire was from another location.

On the way out, not too far from the Jeep, I saw a piece of deadwood lying in the sand that I thought might be turned into a hiking stick; so on the way back I stopped and cut off the piece I wanted.  When I finished and looked up I could see an old pickup truck perhaps a hundred yards behind us.  It looked as though it had been heading in our direction, but seeing us there, the driver decided to turn about and avoid us.  But as he did so, he got stuck in the sand.  The truck had a tarp over the back.  I don’t know what was under it or why he wanted to avoid us.

The sun was nice and warm by the time we got back to the Jeep.   I can’t say for sure that the girls saw any rabbits.  At one point they chased after something I thought might be a rabbit, but a moment later a roadrunner scurried out of the brush and took briefly to the air.  Once the girls saw him doing that they gave up.

Britain's Lobbying Scandal

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/03/23/uk.lobbying.scandal/index.html

Some might say that I should have rather implied (as CNN did), that this is the Labour Party’s scandal.  The Tories are certainly in a position to take advantage of it.  But I’ve been reading Edward Said who while he has a special brief for the U.S., would swear a pox on all the Liberal Democratic houses. 

And there are others who claim that Liberal Democracy provides increased opportunities for corruption on the part of those who lead in business, government and the military.  And yes, it is possible for anti-Democratic activists to wax indignant when they encounter a scandal like the above.  The response I would make to them is that there is no form of government that is free of scandal and corruption.  And totalitarian forms of government aren’t immune, although they might seem to be because they are able to censor their presses.  A story like the above wouldn’t appear in a nation with a totalitarian government.

We are probably all aware of the corrupting influence of temptation.  Even the fictitious person who has never given in to temptation knows the sound of its siren call.  And “power” is an especially corrupting temptation as all nations know.  But what form of government handles its corrupted officials quite so well as the Liberal Democratic?  None!  It is being handled precisely right in Britain (if the CNN article is accurate and I assume that it is).  The press was permitted to engage in its interesting “sting” (and will suffer no repercussions, I trust) and once the four MPs were shown to be willing to sell their influence, they were suspended by the Labour Party.

The political careers of these corrupt MPs seem to be over.  We see unremitting attacks against Liberal Democratic forms of government coming from China, the Russian Federation, and various Muslim nations.  Let them pretend they have no corruption in their governments if they can, but let us strive to remove (as Britain just has) corrupt officials as soon as they are discovered.   Our system will work as long as we continue doing that.  Their systems will work, presumably, as long as they can keep their scandals hushed up.

Re: Edward Said and Serial Killers

allard has left a new comment on your post "Edward Said and Serial Killers":

Lawrence, you wrote

'Would we have fewer or less fearsome monsters if we followed Heidegger’s advice and turned back from chaos in order to seek authentication in our traditions? I’d like to think so.'

Is there any way that this could be expressed other than as a tautology?

Do you have any evidence, any evidence at all, that we could have sought 'authentication in tradition' and yet the number of serial killers remain the same

If you can't imagine that, can't conceive that it is logically possible that that should occur, you owe your readers an account of the connection you see between our not having done that, and the recurrence of serial killers?

So far, this is just hand waving.

Thanks, and best regards.

al

A few minutes later he left another comment:

allard has left a new comment on your post "Edward Said and Serial Killers":

I wrote

Do you have any evidence, any evidence at all, that we could have sought 'authentication in tradition' and yet the number of serial killers remain the same (roughly as it is now); that is, is it some sort of logical truth that this could not happen?

RESPONSE:

Allard,

Do I need Positivist-type evidence to assert that if Moral Authority is eliminated from a society, immorality will increase? 

Edward Said describes and applauds the removal of standards and traditions.  Traditions in the major sense that Said describes, the “Humanism” exemplified by “The Great Books,” the great works of Literature and Philosophy that we “traditionalists” lay claim to in the Western tradition. 

Edward Said was an opponent of the “Western Tradition.”  He was an opponent of Western standards.  He enjoyed the dilution of standards exemplified by the inclusion of the multiplicity of cultures and standards in each nation.  He welcomed the dissolution of the Western Tradition.

I applaud the spread of Liberal Democracy in the world; which means that the world is becoming more and more “multiculturalist,” that doesn’t mean that each nation of the world would be well off if it turned itself into a mini-world – that is that it became as multiculturalist (within the nation) as the world is outside of the nation.

One of our losses, if this tendency continues, is “the place of authentication” that Heidegger describes – not in the Positivist terms that you demand but as something the people he wrote for understood.  There is surely something good in the traditions of each nation in order for the citizens of these nations to love them.  Do you love France?  Why?  You answer that sort of question by delving into French tradition, picking and choosing until you find your authentication.

As to why we are seeing a proliferation of Serial Killers in the world, I believe it is associated with a lessened belief in and adherence to “standards.”   I do value the Heideggerian “place of authentication,” but I make Said’s ideas the rheostat for the increase of serial killers.  He wasn’t the cause, but be applauded the dissolution of the Western Tradition with its standards, and further applauded the multiplicity of beliefs and traditions within each nation.  Let all beliefs, languages, opinions have an equal say, Said implies.  But if we do, I ask, what standards shall we live by.  Said can’t produce any, if all the variations of the world have an equal say. 

The Serial Killer like the Atheist can then ask, “with so many standards (or religions) out there claiming to be the true one, how shall I find the right standard (or religion) to select.”   Quite right, Hannibal – better make up your own.