Nate's points taken. Maybe the story was boring to them, and the
students
simply didn't care.
My point was not that the story was boring ... it was that <IMHO>
authority kills. In America we kill in the name of entrepreneurism ... in
the old soviet bloc I guess it was for ideological purity. Perhaps we could
even make a case that the more authority people cede to govt. the more it
kills ... certainly authoritarianism is more deadly than democracy.
Stoning people to make the crops grow seems no less rational than a
single person driving their Eddie Bauer edition Jeep 4x4 to get to work from
the suburbs. Thus, I see The Lottery as propaganda that things are better
than they appear.
Someone ... Dennet? ... made the point that cultural relativism
stops at technology ... which would you rather ride in a plane built by
Boeing or a plane build by cargo cult aborigines? But, given that you
accept the scientific method, does that mean that the aborigines have
nothing to teach? Cultural Relativism <again IMHO> asks why a culture does
what it does without judging. Were the Eskimos barbaric for letting their
elders get on an ice floe and sailing out to the Bering sea? The people who
go to Kevorkian think not ... and in fact view the state of Michigan as the
barbarians.