Sunday, 19 January 2014

Introspection via Essay

I continued to read the essay where i had previosly qouted and commented on in a previous research blog post, and the person writing said something that really gave me pause for thought, what it said in the essay was "How Butler portrays politics is intimately related to her vision of human nature as a biologically-determined entity. The public arena of politics, where dialogue and dissent occur, is nullified in most of her novels by her construction of permanent states of emergency, which pre-empt any full exploration of moral and ethical dimensions of political decisions; there can be no room for real debate when the very survival of the individual or group is at steak. Furthermore, the relationship between ruler and ruled is never egalitarian for Butler, but is always a matter of dominance and submission consistent with her essentialist view of human nature. In Dawn, for example, the aliens unilaterally appoint Lilith to leadership position. Since human nature is for Butler a known, finite, and unchanging entity, she cannot view human politics other than deterministically; not as an open-ended series of unfolding events latent with possibility, but as a process whose result is foregone and predictable. For her, human politics is not an arena for the exercise of choice or freedom, and it offers no opportunities for the improvement of the human condition." and this made me realise that previously i had always assumed that human nature was an unchanging thing that was set in us, only now do i realise that just as we as animals are constantly changing and evolving so is our nature, so the idea that deep in the future we could be smarter more enlightened beings is not completlely out of the question as i had previously though.

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