From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Sun Nov 24 2002 - 16:58:37 GMT
Hi Everyone:
In today's NY Times Books is a review of "A Moral Reckoning" by
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen who takes the Roman Catholic church to task
for its moral failure during the Holocaust. But what caught my eye were
the following passages from the first chapter of the book:
"In the vast realm between the sound bite of media talk shows and op-
ed pages on the one hand and the technical discourses of philosophical
and theological tracts on the other, the serious investigation of issues of
morality and judgment is rarely to be found. . . . Our moral culture is
degraded partly by the flipness of our public culture, partly by the
abdication of many people in the academy of their obligation to engage
moral issues, or engage them in a way that both meets a high standard
and is accessible to those who are not professional philosophers . . .
People who are not guided by religious values often seem reluctant to
enter this realm, the realm of religion par excellence. Whether out of
distaste for engaging religion or out of a belief that, without a religious
grounding, they are at a serious disadvantage, those who could talk the
talk have left much of the turf of serious moral discussion to the
religious."
Besides the unspoken (and mistaken ) assumption that morality is
strictly limited to social matters, Mr. Goldhagen's failure to acknowledge
the "serious investigation of morality" made "accessible to those who
are not professional philosophers" by Robert Pirsig is a classic example
of the "cultural immune system."
"What it always means is that you have hit an invisible wall of prejudice.
Nobody on the inside of that wall is ever going to listen to you; not
because what you say isn't true, but solely because you have been
identified as outside that wall."(Lila-(4)
I'm shocked, shocked that Mr. Goldhagen, an intellectual of sufficient
radiance to be admitted to the pages of NY Times Books, is either
ignorant of or choses to ignore our hero.
Platt
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