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maybe i should explain a little more what i meant earlier:
if you find yourself, say, watching an argument unfold between someone who believes in natural law and someone who doesnt, you can pretty well know, even before anyone really says anything, how it will go: for the folk who think there is a natural law, there wil be some kind of assumed order that shapes how all law either is or should be structured. this would function as a kind of given, on the basis of which their arguments would be constructed. if the other person does nto share this assumption that there is something like natural law, then he or she will take the arguments are being strange--based on a substitution of constructs rooted in relation to abstract principles that float about in space and time...from any other viewpoint, natural law arguments will take the person making claims on that basis into a space that does not have to take account of history in any straong sense. which would lead them to detach what they are saying from the world that others know about. it is a matter of assumptions and how those assumptions inform the direction and type of argument...
so say some folk on the right think that some god told them that being gay was evil.
for this to make any sense, you have to believe in this god and accept the sources of his or her wisdom and that these sources can be taken in a particular way, and that arguments drawn from these sources override conditions that might obtain in the history that human beings make.
if you dont accept the premises, the arguments will seem to run the speaker away from the reality other people know about.
that is why i reacted as i did to the form of argument prevalent in conservative ideology as the problem for those of use who oppose that political position, not the particular people who articulate their views of the world through arguments that use that particular form. this is why it is often so difficult to get conservatives to lay out the premises of their politics, i think--they tend not to work on the same level as those that might inform how others see political arguments.
cultural power is the ability to control/shape frames of reference.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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