Saturday, January 16, 2010

The Zen of 'Avatar'


Blogtrawling has its rewards. I ran across this (paraphrased, italics mine) the other day on a 'support Palestine' site.
Avatar may well be the biggest anti War film of all time. It stands against everything the West is identified with. It is against greed and capitalism, it is against interventionalism, it is against colonialism and imperialism, it is against technological orientation, it is against America and Britain. It puts Blair and Bush on trial without even mentioning their names. It enlightens the true meaning of ethics as a dynamic judgmental process rather than fixed moral guidelines (such as the Ten Commandments or the 1948 Human Rights Declaration). It throws a very dark light on our murderous tendencies towards other people, their belief and rituals. But it doesn’t just stop there. In the same breath, very much like German Leben philosophers - presumably he means Schopenhauer, it praises the power of nature and the attempt to bond in harmony with soil, the forest and the wildlife. It advises us all to integrate with our surrounding reality rather than impose ourselves on it. Very much like German Idealists and early Romanticists, it raises questions to do with essence, existence and the absolute. 
For Schopenhauer, rejecting Hegel's optimism, human desire was futile, illogical, directionless, and, by extension, so was all human action in the world. I wonder if the same can be said of the Hegelian zeitgeist which the author alleges is evident in 'Palestine'. I don't believe it for a moment.  Hamas's only interest in the collective consciousness is in the subjugation of the masses and the destruction of Israel. So much for integration.

1 comment:

  1. No matter what the disguise, the cloak or the smoke screen, the outcome is the key. (When the words and the actions don't match, you ALWAYS go with the actions.)
    Groups like Hamas can say what they want (and people can say what they want about Hamas) but in the end, it is what IS that gives away the game.
    Hamas has proven irrefutably that the only zeitgeist they might engender in Palestine has nothing to do with what benefits the unfortunates living there. To think otherwise denies the reality of life in Gaza.

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