{"id":2604,"date":"2002-07-16T20:12:16","date_gmt":"2002-07-16T20:12:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=149"},"modified":"2002-07-16T20:12:16","modified_gmt":"2002-07-16T20:12:16","slug":"serendipity-sorry-about-the-misspelling-dave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2604","title":{"rendered":"SERENDIPITY (sorry about the misspelling, Dave…)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read Harper\u0092s<\/u>, although I\u0092m unlikely to renew as I\u0092m finding little recently that evokes more than vague interest.
\nLast month, they had a noxious and self-exculpating essay by Stanley Fish; I\u0092ve been trying unsuccessfully to think up something to say about it, then last night I picked up something to read from one of the many open boxes. George Orwell: a collection of essays<\/u>. And in it, a brilliant essay called \u0091Looking Back on the Spanish War\u0092. He said, clearly and brilliantly, what I\u0092ve been struggling to articulate to myself:<\/p>\n

I know it is the fashion to say that recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is particular to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could<\/i> be truthfully written. In the past, people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case, they believed that \u0093the facts\u0094 existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a substantial body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Brittanica<\/i>, you will find that a respectable amount of material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would always be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as \u0093the truth\u0094 exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as \u0093Science.\u0094 There is only \u0093German Science,\u0094 \u0093Jewish Science,\u0094 etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past<\/i>. If the Leader says of such and such an event, \u0093It never happened\u0094\u0097well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five \u0096 well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs \u0096 and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I heard Fish lecture once, and while I\u0092ve always thought that the Derrida-istas were primarily an academic joke, when I saw him I got a faint whiff of evil.
\nThen I realized that he really reminded me of the antagonist in a funny academic novel called \u0091Satan, His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kessler, J.S.P.S.\u0092<\/a>, a smug department head in league with the Devil. Hmmm….not a bad description, even for someone like me who doesn’t believe in brimstone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read Harper\u0092s, although I\u0092m unlikely to renew as I\u0092m finding little recently that evokes more than vague interest. Last month, they had a noxious and self-exculpating essay by Stanley Fish; I\u0092ve been trying unsuccessfully to think up something to say about it, then last night I picked up something to read from one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2604"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2604\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}