![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Aug. 14th, 2006 03:36 pmToday in my English class I found myself in the extremely unusual position of arguing for personal responsibility.
If you know my politics at all, you're probably aware that I consider the desire to attribute individual responsibility the product of either a desire to alleviate social, group, or cultural guilt and responsibility; or a product of humanity's most base instincts, particularly the desire for revenge. I also believe it's ultimately unproductive because in the quest to blame an individual, at no point is the effort made to prevent the repetition of the fault by others. (I want to make sure I don't sound like an unsympathetic asshole here. The needs and desires of victims' families to see justice done are of their nature one-eyed and I don't think consideration of that should be part of the legal justice system. But I also want to acknowledge that I have never been, and nor has a close friend been, victim of sexual assault, abuse, or violent crime; I'm aware my views are idealistic; and I'm also aware that I sound like, well, an unsympathetic asshole. I'm really, really not, honestly; but I also think there's a lot of time spent, socially, on the emotions of the victims and the victims' families, and I don't see the need to reproduce that here.)
That said: today I found myself arguing for the personal responsibility of Frankenstein's monster, a view directly opposed to the main thrust of the text. I also became very frustrated with the lecturer's extrapolations of Mary Shelley's critique of humanism (some of which is accurate and some of which I judge to be unfounded and based on her own fears.)
( The adventures of Frankenstein and a test-tube baby )
If you know my politics at all, you're probably aware that I consider the desire to attribute individual responsibility the product of either a desire to alleviate social, group, or cultural guilt and responsibility; or a product of humanity's most base instincts, particularly the desire for revenge. I also believe it's ultimately unproductive because in the quest to blame an individual, at no point is the effort made to prevent the repetition of the fault by others. (I want to make sure I don't sound like an unsympathetic asshole here. The needs and desires of victims' families to see justice done are of their nature one-eyed and I don't think consideration of that should be part of the legal justice system. But I also want to acknowledge that I have never been, and nor has a close friend been, victim of sexual assault, abuse, or violent crime; I'm aware my views are idealistic; and I'm also aware that I sound like, well, an unsympathetic asshole. I'm really, really not, honestly; but I also think there's a lot of time spent, socially, on the emotions of the victims and the victims' families, and I don't see the need to reproduce that here.)
That said: today I found myself arguing for the personal responsibility of Frankenstein's monster, a view directly opposed to the main thrust of the text. I also became very frustrated with the lecturer's extrapolations of Mary Shelley's critique of humanism (some of which is accurate and some of which I judge to be unfounded and based on her own fears.)
( The adventures of Frankenstein and a test-tube baby )
