This week in my questions I decided to look at Hume's view of all sentiment being right versus a modern phrase that invokes something similar: Everyone is entitled to an opinion.
Nicole raised a very good point in class when she said that some opinions could be dangerous, or at least indicate that the person who held those views was dangerous. While it's impossible, outside of science fiction, to read or control a person's innermost thoughts, a person whose opinion was that women should be seen and not heard is not going to be able to keep that idea to themselves. This is absolutely true. We then moved on to a discussion of dark thoughts or urges, and what the appropriate reaction to them would be. This is very interesting to me at the moment because I am currently reading Shirley Jackson's short story collection Just an Ordinary Day, which follows Jackson's general ouvre in that it addresses the suffocation of the small-town housewife, random or seemingly uninspired violence, paranoia, and alienation. As you probably know, Shirley Jackson is the author of the famous short story The Lottery, which is about a small town where one person is selected anually by a random draw to be stoned to death. This story recieved some of the most vehement negative feedback in the history of The New Yorker, with many readers cancelling their subscriptions or writing hate mail to Jackson. Even her own mother criticized the story for its bleak take on small-town life. Now, it's considered a staple of American literature. This story closely examines the "dark urge". It is shocking because it asks us to put ourselves in the place of someone who would willingly, for the sake of tradition, kill their own neighbor in such a cro-magnon way as stoning. I read another story by her which illustrates the concept even better. It's called What A Thought, it is very short, and I think this quote says it all:
"She knew that if she asked her husband to take her to a movie, or out for a ride, or to play gin rummy, he would smile at her and agree; he was always willing to do things to please her, still, after ten years of marriage. An odd thought crossed her mind: She would pick up the heavy glass ashtray and smash her husband over the head with it... The idea of smashing the glass ashtray over her husband's head had never before occurred to Margaret, but now it would not leave her mind. She stirred uneasily in her chair, thinking: what a terrible thought to have, whatever made me think of such a thing?"
The story explores the dark urge as Margaret thinks about killing her husband in various ways, all while they are sitting at home and talking to each other in a very normal way. Not only can she not stop thinking about it, she actually becomes frightened of what she might do. While telling herself she loves her husband, she plans out specifics such as what she will say to the policeman, casting herself as a tragic figure and even thinking about how sad she will be once he's dead. It's almost like she has no control over the dark urge that comes upon her. Everything she looks at becomes a weapon, and even as she hates herself for doing it, she actually ultimately kills him.
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