With a laptop on my lap in an already-too-hot living room. 19:46 GMT, 11 August 2018.
"Aw, shit, now there's another one I need to fix," this most recently read. Meanwhile the window of time I can edit it slowly shuts: sooner than I'd like, I suppose. For I moment I wonder if there's some obligation for me to explain my failure to post more frequently, but soon reject the thought as only a diversion from the first purpose for this edit that came to mind. I'd meant to record the ideas I've heard from two friends in the past twenty-four hours, though in my current circumstances we'd call doing so a diversion of its own while leaving the reason of that truth go unspoken.
To the best of my recollection, the first of these friends described the political divide--or, more generously (and perhaps also more accurately capturing real conditions) described the variety of political ideologies--in the United States as a result of the difference between appeals to an innate sense of justice and fairness, mapping these to certain contradictory or antagonistic cultural or linguistic patterns embedded across a plethora of ideologies that take root in different individuals and different communities because, for various reasons, those individuals and communities found the appeal worthy of their favor.
Later, the second of these friends proposed his own idea in a manner more specifically interpersonal, but which I nonetheless could not help comparing to that of my first friend: instead, he described not just everyday conditions like conversation and rapport but also relationships like shared ideologies as the result of an agreement consisting of nothing more than "good things are good and bad things are bad"--though with the agreement of course residing in what acts and beliefs each one finds "good" or "bad."
Combine them both, and I suppose we've got a schema along the lines of, 'Political ideologies appeal to an instinct innate in both individuals and communities--the sense that fairness is good--but in doing so, employs a propaganda strategy embedded in language itself which, if it's successful, causes the community or the individual to view a given ideology as its predecessor: the foundation on which either must stand, since all language must precede them both, and which therefore takes precedence over interpersonal relationships--enters into a relationship with a subjectivity, and may so exile even one's neighbors into the condition of Other.'
I laugh when I read over what I've written, just thinking to myself, Back when I studied ethical theory, I considered myself an quasi-realist, but now I can't even say whether my friends' ideas have anything in common with that. Nonetheless,
though relativists and realists can agree that certain statements are true within a certain discourse, a quasi-realist investigates why such discourses have the structures that they do.
Reading that, I can only wonder whether the different structures of discourses within different political ideologies account for what incompatibilities might exist between individuals and communities subscribing to a diversity of ideas about both the obligation to fairness and what constitutes 'the good.'
