Those wicked barbarians...Part II

I believe their is a kernal of truth in Foucault's idea that there is an exclusionary shadow that stubbornly trails modernity's history of inclusion. He carries his line of thought from Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra) who in his reading of the gospels makes the point that it was the "good and just" who murdered Jesus not the "wicked." The "good and just" could not understand Jesus because their "spirit was imprisoned in their good conscience" and they crucified him because they construed as evil his rejection of their notions of good. Foucault lifts up "the rational" and "the civilized" (Madness and Civilization) in much the same light as Nietzsche's "good and just." For Foucault "civilization" is a smooth destroyer of those things inside and outside of itself that it construes as "immoral" and "barbarous."

Think what you might about Nietzsche and Foucault, they raise a good point here that the "moral" and "civilized" self all too often relies on the exclusion of the "barberous" and "immoral" other. The "moral" and "civilized" self looks upon the "barberous" Muslims that suicidally killed Americans and says "You are wrong" from an imiplied position of "I am right."

As Jesus so prophetically asked in front of his audience, "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?"

PS: I borrowed this strand of thought from Miroslav Volf.