Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Bringing an appetite to the cannibal banquet

We'll know something about the direction of the Modern world in a week from now, a something that might tell us if we are committed to continuing the pursuit of individualism or if we are lapsing into communitarianism, the usual and seeming natural state of humanness. Will individualism triumph in the up-coming election on Tuesday, or will we slip into the comfort of the eternal fasces of sadism? Who will stand and who will fall?

Politics is something of a spectator sport, a blood sport, and a nasty game, a dirty one, in which power meets power, and lives are made or lost according to the whims of the masses. Tatian, an early Christian philosopher, calls it all "The cannibal banquet of the soul."

Well, we have to eat.

Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904). "Pollice Verso."

Juan Luna y Novicio,"The Spoliarium." (1884)

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