Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP - Archives

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: April 11, 2003
Latest Update: April 11, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Gottfried Keller and German Romanticism

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, April 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

Literature is not normally included when we speak of attitude change and presuasion theory. That is because we separate social theory from literature as different disciplines. It is precisely that separation into disciplines that keeps us from seeing the broader patterns that might remind us of the interdependence between the agency of the individual and the structural context in which that individual functions.

This essay just kind of spilled out because I referred in the photo story of the Fall of Baghdad to the French romantic manifesto in Victor Hugo's Preface de Cromwell. Having spoke of the Preface as though everyone would immediately recognize that reference, I realized the context of lived experience for that world was a good fifty years old, and that most of you would, quite reasonably, not get much, if anything, from the reference. But I didn't want to just scrap the reference. It is precisely these references that many of us older folks have in our apperceptive masses that make up what we used to call our "liberal arts education" and that permit us to see the broader gestalt. (Look up the dictionary explanations of "liberal arts" and "gestalt".)

Merriam-Webster Dictionary Search:

What had just popped out of my apperceptive mass, as I contemplated the demolition of Saddam's statues by jubilant U.S. troops and "liberated Iraqis" was the impossibility of dichotomy. Things are almost never "black" or "white;" they're ever changing shades of gray. I felt all the emotions one might feel at a football game when my team is winning, and we stole the costume of their mascot to parade it as a victory symbol. It was fun; it was exhilarating. But it left out a lot of deep thought on the real structural context. (We do that with real football games, too. Remember the mother who put out a contract on her daughter's rival cheerleader? That's what I mean by loss of a controlling sense of reality.)

Because it's my job to try to accustom you to a controlling sense of reality in which we don't demolish one another's uniqueness and wonder as humans, I pulled myself back from celebratory feelings and asked what have we won? No simple answer. We've eliminated a tyrant, who, to the extent I have accurate information, did horrible things to his own people and to others. Yeah, team. But along with the conquering soldiers I see rioting mobs, plundering and running without apparent control. I hear reports of new troops being brought in to develop some sense of civic order. So this isn't a football game we won. There are no orderly neighborhoods and infrastructure to go home to. This is chaos for the Iraqis. There are no police to call for protection and security. There are no firemen about to aid; the hospitals are full; news of their loved ones in the Iraqi miliary (not necessarily by choice) may not come for long weeks; maybe never.