clash of cultures 2

I don’t think that Bob knew you and those people were going to be viewing the sunset over lake Michigan and that the leaves would be still with no wind, but it all goes to show about how a song can mean different things to people and how that doesn’t mean that one set of people are wrong about it.

The first time I heard Mr Tambourine Man it was by the Byrds, what beautiful music, and then I think I was in a record store when I first heard Bob sing it, and I was all like, who the hell would want to listen to his version?

Yes cultural relativism was what I was talking about. I knew there was a phrase, but it wasn’t coming to mind. I think I would pull the lady out of the fire too. But what if some vegan Hindus or Buddhists were visiting Beaglesonia and they saw you about to plug a deer and blew a whistle and scared it away, and maybe took your gun away and destroyed it to keep you from killing again?

What difference would it make if she wasn’t British educated or if England ruled India at the time? Would it have been okay for them to burn her then if that was the case, but not if it were otherwise? I think the difference is in who is looking at it. If an Indian of the time was looking at it, it would be right in both cases, and if we are looking at it through English eyes it would be wrong in both cases.

Well it’s a difficult matter, it’s not like we could just sit under the broad banyan tree and hammer out our differences in the crucible like I am always recommending, because both cultures have different axioms and there is no logical way to reconcile them.

Let’s go back to the case at hand. Did those guys have a right to print their insulting cartoons? It certainly wouldn’t have been allowed in medieval times, or early on during the reformation, and maybe even as late as the 1950s. Remember the censorship trials over Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Howl? How quaint that all seems now. What if they were printing insulting racist stuff? Well I wouldn’t like that, but I think I would allow it. That kind of stuff is generally so stupid that I think bringing it out in the open helps the anti racist side.

But the real issue here is that they killed those guys. if they had protested at the site, written letters to the editor, hired a lawyer, we would have had a spirited debate and one side would have won and the other lost, and everybody would still be alive. And isn’t that the point of democracy, not that it leads to good government, but that it allows people to settle their differences without killing each other.

I was thinking of getting into western civ, maybe tomorrow.