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Politics and Ordinary Life

 Politics today saturated with ideology....The ideologue believes in political solutions, changing the world fundamentally, overhauling the system, being on the right side of history, choosing progress, overcoming the nightmarish past... The activist mindset demands that people take sides on an infinite variety of issues - the underlying assumption being that one side contains the makings of a total solution - whereas resistance to "enlightenment and progress" augurs only backwardness and ignorance...Resistance, as such, of course can turn into a series of counter-moves with the same underlying assumptions about the omnipotence of the political...Draining the swamp is a rear-guard reaction to progressive promises. But at some point - usually in the midst of swinging wildly toward one side of the pendulum - we all bump up against the - terra incognita - the inscrutable aspect of reality - the underlying complexities which compound all political busybodies...This in itself should be the moment at which humility kicks in, where wonder and awe expose the feebleness of perception - here is the realm of the ineluctable that art is designed to probe ... a realization that the deeper problems are never fully solved - but only partially glimpsed...

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