Character


Kalamu ya Salaam's Questions Regarding American Character



Questions:  The fundamental issue is simply: can we, as human beings, control ourselves; specifically, can we Americans control ourselves?  Is violence so deeply and indelibly enmeshed into our character that there is no hope of our society existing without egregious acts of social violence against ourselves and others?  Can we control ourselves?  Can anyone or any force control us?  Thus far, our government has not [done] so, nor has our religion.  Is there any solution or must we perforce of the American character just have to learn to live with and tolerate violence?



From Salaam's  email ("some quick thoughts on violence") to Jerry Ward, dated 8/13/2017





Responses when answers do not suffice:  An unorthodox belief drives my responses: the human animal is fundamentally evil and violent but endowed, by virtue of " relatively free will" with remarkable potential to be fundamentally good and peaceful.



 The human animal has left evidence in multiple forms of its predisposition  to worship evil and its  reluctance to manifest goodness.  The veracity of my belief is neither absolute nor immune to doubts; it swims against the tide of speculations.  It depends on a mission impossible for a single human mind ----the gathering of a bazillion historical examples to make the case that from the emergence of homo sapiens on the African continent to 2017,  the evolving of the human animal (i.e., its physical and cognitive changes in biology and cultures) pits the essential power of evil and hatred against the relative power to manifest goodness and love.  Manichaean vision is Manichaean vision is Manichaean vision.



 My belief prevents answering Salaam's questions.  It doesn't, however, preclude  responding to them.  Uncertainty is an option but not the only one.



R#1:  Human beings cannot control themselves.  Americans cannot control themselves.



R#2:  Before the 15th century in a Western configuration of time, there was no American character. American character is an offspring of the continual and continuous violent, capitalist raping of indigenous space, the so-called Western Hemisphere. The child is the invention of theft, dispersing of European diseases, genocide, racism and colonization, unchained greed and  accidents,  tainted religiosity and unregenerate hypocrisy.



R#3:  Hidden dimensions of how Salaam uses the word "character" expose themselves in readings of the foreword of Constance Rourke's American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931) and of the definition of character offered by the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd edition, 1999:



character, the comprehensive set of ethical and intellectual dispositions if a person.  Intellectual virtues ---like carefulness in the evaluation of evidence --- promote, for one, the practice of seeking truth.  Moral or ethical virtues --- including traits like courage and generosity ---dispose persons not only to choices and actions abut also to attitudes and emotions.  Such dispositions are generally considered relatively stable and responsive to reason. (130)





R#4: As Rourke and Salaam use the word, character is an abstraction, a metaphor of another metaphor named the body politic.  The metaphors are drenched with humorous and non-humorous violence.



R#5: Nature as chaos rather than as the proof of natural law  is the force that can control us.



R#6: There is no solution to or resolution of the implacable violence of American character.  A few of us are existentially condemned to detest it and to do battle with it minute by agonizing minute.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            August 27, 2017




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