Old arguments live on. Even if the arguments used by a group are completely refuted and the group nearly destroyed and dispersed, somehow the emotional energy of those arguments seems to have a life of it's own. Like a "Demon" or spiritual being, this load of emotion manages to find it's way to influence formation of new groups with the same emotion, and slightly different arguments.
This thought impressed me while discussing the history of scientific racism, eugenics, and it's related expressions. In the period from 1888-1920 scientific racism included the notion that groups expressed genes in such a way that the groups could be classed as superior or inferior by the genes they expressed. This notion was coupled with anti-semitism by Northern Europeans and that is what ultimately came to be expressed in Nazism. Everyone claims that Nazism was permanently destroyed and refuted in WWII, yet I keep finding disturbing reminders that the Germans weren't the only avatars of those ideas and that they are neither dead nor gone -- just morphed into new forms.
Moreover every negative idea exists as a counter to other negative ideas. Thus there should be no comfort that the people who had similar ideas to the Nazis should have been their most ruthless opponants during WWII. Nor should it be a comfort that the modern avatars of anti-semitism live within a brother semite (ethnicity and language-wise) culture.
I guess we have to accept that as part of the good and the bad of human nature. It is comforting that if bad ideas never die, neither can good ones be killed. If bad ideas oppose and cancel, good ideas can create resonances and synergies. Bad ideas are delusional, false, illusional [by definition]; and usually based on outright lies or distortions. That makes them self-limiting. When bad ideas are based on a kernal of truth that makes them defeatable by defeating the kernal of truth they are based on. That is enough for now. It's not a depressing subject after all.
Chris
Posted by cholte at December 2, 2005 05:56 AM