tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post6567782726879758888..comments2024-03-28T11:33:16.271-05:00Comments on Adventus: The Duty to ChooseUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-35496325145732014732017-06-13T10:17:27.871-05:002017-06-13T10:17:27.871-05:00Well, that's a lot more than Wonder Woman to d...Well, that's a lot more than Wonder Woman to digest, isn't it. I'll certainly be thinking about it for a while now. What drives the plots of the plays, the aspects of duty, would seem to be a kind of secular or social proxy for the moral obligations of The Law and The Gospel and put into, I can't help thinking of it, as the survivals of European pagan culture - something which I think still motivates large parts of it. To some extent that's also what motivates the action in the Hebrew scriptures and about as much the New Testament. Perhaps it's inevitable that among human beings, even those trying to live up to the commandments of the scriptures, that day to day living will require much of our action to be conditioned by secular (or pagan) life and culture. They talk about how Buddhists in Japan deal with the underlying Shinto culture and how in Korea Buddhism and Tibet Buddhism is conditioned by the older cultural habits and traditions of those places.<br /><br />Democracy and even a Republic, such as Rome had, was based in, to some degree, duties to others, though mostly to other men of the governing class, as opposed to a ruling class. Modern democracy can't exist without those obligations being spread equally over the population, it will die when those obligations are narrowly admitted to. Margaret Thatcher (a devoted Darwinist, by the way) in her declaration that there was no such thing as society was narrowing that emanation of obligation radically, in Trump it's clear that American Republicans have done the same. I think that is a result of the denial of the radical egalitarianism of the Gospel and the Law, which defined moral obligations to the Alien. In one of his online lectures, as I recall in answer to a question about "chosenness" as in "chosen people" Brueggemann makes not of the short passage in Isiah, 19 around verse 25 when he prophesies that God will call the enemies of Israel, as well, his chosen people, even as the Egyptians and Assyrians worship together - there is a mention of a highway between the two, not a wall. <br /><br />I think the concept of duty in the plays is wider or narrower and that makes all the difference. In the characters who have the narrowest sense of duty, it defines their moral status. In the case of Lear it sets off a calamity that destroys his kingdom, his family and his only child who loved him, who was faithful to him. And in the United States, I think democracy survives or dies based on how broadly an effective majority and, so, the elected government, sees as comprising moral duty. <br /><br />At least that's what I've got right now, on short notice. <br /><br />You might want to read the cruel and merciless Carlyle on the New Poor Law in the third chapter of his book "Chartism", in which he mentions the old poor law from Elizabeth. How your theme in this post would relate to his great-man theory of history and his hostility to equality and democracy, I'll have to think more on. <br /><br />I'd go into how, if you assume that Bacon wrote the plays, his own political position and legal jeopardy after his fall could play into this but that's for another time. What happens if you assume Marlowe or Oxford wrote them, I'm not sure. I won't go into what conclusions the documentary legacy of the Stratford fellow would lead to in regard to his sense of duty but he sure didn't seem to have much of one to his wife. Or his clearly less favored daughter. As to his friends and associates, he wasn't any Timon of Athens, either. The Thought Criminalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01381376556757084468noreply@blogger.com