Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Mon 03 Aug 2009 11:06 AM PDT
Whats Wrong with Fundamentalism Part 1: Slavoj Zizek
William Butler Yeats, this
arch-conservative, was right in is diagnosis of the XXth century, when
he wrote: "...The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / the
ceremony of innocence is drowned; / the best lack all conviction, while
the worst / are full of passionate intensity." (The Second Coming,
1920). The key to his diagnosis is contained in the phrase "ceremony of
innocence," which is to be taken in the precise sense of Edith
Wharton's "age of innocence": Newton's wife, the "innocent" the title
refers to, was not a naïve believer in her husband's fidelity - she
knew well of his passionate love for Countess Olenska, she just
politely ignored it and staged the belief in his fidelity... In one of
the Marx brothers' films, Groucho Marx, when caught in a lie, answers
angrily: "Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?"...... (see link above)
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