privelege

We think of certain moments in our lives as being representative of the whole story. There is a story, there has to be one. Nothing is quite as essential as believing there is a category of things, places knowledge...that is essential, real, primary. We privilege that arc of our lives or those particular sentiments, thoughts, behaviour over all others: this is me...all the other times I wasn't really myself. Of all the selves I could have been this was it. Or that " me" was all thought, all will, not the frail, uncertain, and changing body.

We privilege our own situation, too. The times we live in are the defining ones. It's a turning point, a time of crisis or glory but always a time that is central to the unfolding of human history. One expression of this is our inability to imagine other people in different times or places as being genuinely happy or satisfied. Our lives will always appear to us as the best. We live in the best of times, the worst of times. I am the first man, the last man.

We privilege certain people over others. There's a central class or group and then there are the outcasts, the marginals, the " lower" types. There's no " up" without a " down"; no centre without a periphery. The damned and the saved...

The trinity of centre/ hierarchy/ origin doesn't always have to hold. At times we have imagined each person to be a centre and sometimes we' ve  believed in many gods.

This sometimes gets extended: humans are at the apex of all life and deserving of greater rights. The earth itself is the great pivot on which the whole universe turns.

Or if we are not the centre, or at the centre, where all the action takes place, then we imagine some other, fundamental place or being that represents this carved out area of privilege: God or Eden or utopia or home being the real deal, the sacred, the central realm that resists change or dissipation. We will walk through the door and things will fall into place, come together, make sense again. The fractures will be healed and we' all be whole again. The music stops, finds its resolution, the image comes into focus, two people meet...to find a centre that was previously lost...is there any other story we tell ourselves?

To have a centre, an origin...what would it be like otherwise?

On the other hand, aren't large parts of modernity opposed to this view. If there is only sovereign becoming then we posit a centre/ origin, construct the foundations ourselves and they are only provisionally fixed points. Don't Darwin and Freud work to de-centre us? Democracy, too? If the centre is everywhere then why bother talking about centre? Also: a rose is just a name, red is just a secondary quality. Our lives are brief and full of jumble. What holds them together? Is there a fixed, given stable central identity any more or do we have to accept the fragmentary position we find ourselves in? Value doesn't inhere in things or places any more..it is just 'lyingly added'. That is the summation of our predicament, then, and the full blown consequences of accepting a floating world is that we, too, become insubstantial, drifters, nothing but a "thinking reed".