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"for all our wealth of historical experience, we do not know how to think about victimhood. almost everything one might say would be unfair, self-serving, undignified, untrue, self-deluding, contradictory, or dangerous."
thinkin nietzsche and pity atm, hope she gets to it
the best religion, therefore, with peace in view, is the one into which one is born - the one most established in one's country and the one which one is most used to. this is not an attempt to disregard the enormous faults of existing ideologies and institutions.
is it, rather, the recognition that the alternatives are no better. it is the conservatism of universal disgust, if it is conservatism at all.
for in what sense can one be said to support an existing order of affairs if one cannot think of anything to say on its behalf except that it is there? it is an act of perfect dissociation, but not necessarily a retreat from the public world.
i am pretty fond of "the conservatism of universal disgust" as a phrase, but politically it's disastrous and the perfection one achieves is the pathetic purity of ideological complacency.
the anti-anti-hypocrite stance is well-taken but is dragging
oh my god this whole book is dragging im so bored
in fairness the rest of the chapters after snobbery do seem more interesting
rorty did more to make me sympathetic to anti-cruelty, shklar is so uninspiring