My assessment of bourgeois society, after twenty years, is that it's fundamentally passive. You can see the ways in which it's passive, and they're numerous.
One is that people don't address issues directly as social issues. I'm sure I just read in Simone de Beauvoir's Force of Circumstances, that when she was in a colony, people did not wait until blood was spilled to separate a fight. In France, she said, they would not have intervened.
So it is in bourgeois societies all over the place. I've just come from an amazing conversion on Facebook, where some insistent gentleman I'd never met before urged that women should not violently, and with lethal force, stop a rapist in his tracks, whilst he was raping them, but rather wait until he actually had succeeded. Above all one should not kill a rapist. One is obliged to restrain him.
This urge to passivity, to a wait-and-see mode, when we all know how it's going to end up, is quintessentially bourgeois. My statement, "If a man tries to rape you, kill him", did not express any ambiguity regarding a rapist's intent. The intent is already present in the words, "tries to rape you". If it's just a misunderstanding, or if he isn't trying to rape you, don't kill him.
Exhorting someone to accept a sense of ambiguity, when there isn't any, is a fundamental posture of those representing bourgeois mores. Everything is always, necessarily, ambiguous, especially malicious intent, but not by virtue of the fact that the reality one encounters is ambiguous, or that any statements of fact have any inherent lack. Rather, one reads ambiguity into situations that are anything but unclear. One imposes one's interpretation of lack of clarity on a situation because one is afraid to face what is obvious.
Facing facts has the drawback that one may then be compelled to act. Acting is dangerous, because it immerses one in the mud and blood of the political world. How much better, to remain clean!
The false assumption that passivity is goodness is really just a stance of plausible deniability. I could go on and say it dangerously reinforces the rights of criminal to commit crimes, but who wants to go there? I plan to tread gently.
Bourgeois society! Personally, I find it suffocating even when it's not a jumble of evasiveness and incoherence.
If someone wants to make a clear statement into an incoherent one, I know that they have much to hide. They may be afraid of themselves, simply because they haven't tried and tested their own strength. They may not understand ethics, or the imperative to be engaged in the real world. Their fear of themselves may lead them to stand up for oppressors and violent individuals, for fear that changing the reality will make them feel uncomfortable.
One is that people don't address issues directly as social issues. I'm sure I just read in Simone de Beauvoir's Force of Circumstances, that when she was in a colony, people did not wait until blood was spilled to separate a fight. In France, she said, they would not have intervened.
So it is in bourgeois societies all over the place. I've just come from an amazing conversion on Facebook, where some insistent gentleman I'd never met before urged that women should not violently, and with lethal force, stop a rapist in his tracks, whilst he was raping them, but rather wait until he actually had succeeded. Above all one should not kill a rapist. One is obliged to restrain him.
This urge to passivity, to a wait-and-see mode, when we all know how it's going to end up, is quintessentially bourgeois. My statement, "If a man tries to rape you, kill him", did not express any ambiguity regarding a rapist's intent. The intent is already present in the words, "tries to rape you". If it's just a misunderstanding, or if he isn't trying to rape you, don't kill him.
Exhorting someone to accept a sense of ambiguity, when there isn't any, is a fundamental posture of those representing bourgeois mores. Everything is always, necessarily, ambiguous, especially malicious intent, but not by virtue of the fact that the reality one encounters is ambiguous, or that any statements of fact have any inherent lack. Rather, one reads ambiguity into situations that are anything but unclear. One imposes one's interpretation of lack of clarity on a situation because one is afraid to face what is obvious.
Facing facts has the drawback that one may then be compelled to act. Acting is dangerous, because it immerses one in the mud and blood of the political world. How much better, to remain clean!
The false assumption that passivity is goodness is really just a stance of plausible deniability. I could go on and say it dangerously reinforces the rights of criminal to commit crimes, but who wants to go there? I plan to tread gently.
Bourgeois society! Personally, I find it suffocating even when it's not a jumble of evasiveness and incoherence.
If someone wants to make a clear statement into an incoherent one, I know that they have much to hide. They may be afraid of themselves, simply because they haven't tried and tested their own strength. They may not understand ethics, or the imperative to be engaged in the real world. Their fear of themselves may lead them to stand up for oppressors and violent individuals, for fear that changing the reality will make them feel uncomfortable.
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