Hey, y’all. I have just recently returned from the NYC Mega Meetup. And I’ll freely admit to being somewhat on the too many side of my two or too many rule. It was a lovely event, invigorating both socially and politically. Good thing, since I’ve been feeling pretty politically depressed.

It’s fun to get out of the tubez and into the flesh!

Anywho, I mentioned this to the one and only Ms. Nightprowlkitty and she and I think that a Docudharma Meet-up is in order! Now, not only because New York is the center of the world (I keed! I keed!), but also because she and I both live here, we propose to hold a Docudharma meet-up in NYC.

So, who’s up for an NYC Docudharma Meetup?

Mid-week is best for a Manhattan venue–not too crowded. Npk and I are looking at November. How does Wednesday, November 14th work for people? Let’s figure out the who and the when and then we can take care of the where.

Out of the tubez and into the flesh, Docudharmists!

Being the first, perhaps, in an occasional series on various ethical tight spots. Together in the threads may we untangle and tangle the most intricate problems. Perhaps this will contribute, however obliquely, to The Manifesto Project.

What should I do?

If it were always absolutely clear what it is that we should do, there would be no need for “ethics” with various modes of making just and reasoned decisions.

Ethics and complication, ethics and uncertainty, ethics and danger, ethics and risk, they travel together. Called upon to exercise your ethical judgement, when there is a true test, it is because you find yourself in an impossible situtation, where none of the outcomes clearly announces itself as the right one.

The final paragraph of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930) always chills me:

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Man have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two “Heavenly Powers” eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee with what success and with what result.

Freud added the very last sentence in 1931, when Hitler’s threat had already become clear.

His use of language pointing to the present moment produces an uncanny effect, for while he is surely pointing to his own historical moment, the reverberation of the “present time” and “now” ensure that this foreboding ending forever taps on the reader’s particular historical moment, as if every age were a moment of crisis. And perhaps it is.