reported by Aristotle when some students arrived at the home of Heraclitus, eager to see the great sage and cosmologist. They found him -not
on a hilltop gazing at the heavens but sitting in his kitchen or, perhaps, on the toilet (for there is a philological dispute at this point!). He looked
at their disappointed faces, saw that they were about to turn away their eyes, and said, "Come in, don't be afraid. There are gods here too."
Aristotle uses this story to nudge his reluctant students out of the shame that is preventing them from looking closely at the parts of animals.
When you get rid of your shame
, he says,
you will notice that there is order and structure
in the animal world.3"
So too, I think, with realism:
the failure to take an interest in studying our practices of analyzing and reasoning
,
human and historical as they are, the
insistence that we would have good arguments only if they came from
heaven
-
all this betrays a shame before the human.
On the other hand, if we really think of the hope of a
transcendent
ground for value as uninteresting and irrelevant, as we should, then
the news of its
collapse will not change
the way we do
things: it will just let us get on with the business of
reasoning in which we
were
already engaged
.
AT: Genocide Impacts
Democracy checks extermination impact
O’Kane 97
Prof Comparative Political Theory, U Keele, Rosemary, “Modernity, the Holocaust and
politics,” Economy and Society 26:1, p 58-9
Modern
bureaucracy is not 'intrinsically
capable of
genocidal
action'
(Bauman 1989: 106).
Centralized state
coercion has
no natural move to terror.
In the explanation of modern genocides it is chosen policies which play the greatest part, whether in
effecting bureaucratic secrecy, organizing forced labour, implementing a system of terror, harnessing science and technology or introducing extermination policies, as
means and as ends. As
Nazi
Germany and Stalin's USSR have shown,
furthermore, those chosen policies of
genocidal
government turned away from
and not towards
modernity
. The choosing of policies, however, is not independent of circumstances. An
analysis of the history of each case plays an important part in explaining where and how genocidal governments come to power and analysis of political institutions
and structures also helps towards an understanding of the factors which act as obstacles to modern genocide. But it is not just
political factors
which
stand in the way of another Holocaust
in modern society. Modern
societies have
not only
pluralist democratic
political
systems
but also economic pluralism where workers are free to change jobs and bargain wages and where independent firms, each with their own independent
bureaucracies, exist in competition with state-controlled enterprises. In modern societies this economic pluralism both promotes and is served by the open scientific
method. By ignoring competition and the capacity for people to move between organizations whether economic, political, scientific or social, Bauman overlooks
crucial but also very 'ordinary and common' attributes of truly modern societies. It is these very ordinary and common attributes of modernity which stand in the
way of modern genocides.
