Wednesday, August 17, 2022
No Longer Communities
Donald Davidson, "Some Day, in Old Charleston," in his Still Rebels, Still Yankees and Other Essays (1957; rpt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), pp. 213-227 (at 226):
Newer› ‹Older
Communities that accept such perversions of the beautiful and the gallant are no longer communities in any true sense. They have passed into a state of social disequilibrium and instability that makes them exceedingly dangerous. If they do not know what use ought to be made of beauty and gallantry, and, still worse, do not care what use is made of these so long as impressive material results are obtained, there is nothing to stop them from perverting and using as an instrument of power anything that can be so perverted and used. They are mobs, made vastly more dangerous than the ordinary spontaneous mob because, though spiritually mobs, they retain the rational organization supplied to them by science and education, and can thus use chaos itself as a form of power.
