In a moment of candor, I will say that a certain analogy has recurred to my mind several times. On a journey, a fellow, call him Jonah, is thrown into the water. He then not only manages to tread water for an extraordinary amount of time, but manages to get some solid reading and thinking done while in the water. He was tossed overboard near some trade routes, and the constantly passing cruise ships and cargo ships come to see him as part of the scenery. Occasionally, he'll have a brief philosophical discussion via semaphore with a passing crew, but the nights are a bit more difficult, as he needs to keep out of the way of the enormous ships. Eventually, he realizes that in being seen as part of nature, the logic of those around him has become that he should simply exist, to the extent that he exists, by doing what he is doing now.
Well. That was a difficult realization. For a while he tries to work the extensive list of his degrees and his experience into the semaphore conversations with the drunken passengers on the balconies of the silently passing cruise ships, but they don't seem to realize the significance of the claim, and are soon carried from sight.
In primitive societies, crime, most famously murder (cf. the sociological work Kelsen did for the UN ( I think) in the mid 20th century), is seen as just a part of nature. To the extent that you can defend against it, you do so using magic rituals; this is perhaps the source of the grotesque punishments of early modern courts. The realization of individual culpability and victimhood, which are based in individual moral autonomy, is not intuitive; it emerges with the progress of society. When we are civilized, we rise to this awareness. When people see an extraordinary situation as simply "the way things are," society has slipped a bit, and we're not far from some rather dark ways. Inscrutable events can only be addressed with extraordinary means.
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Stopped by the city museum. Peculiar place. This city is a very old situs, and there are some interesting 5/6 m. BC artifacts. There was a natural catastrophe about a half-century ago, and the city is largely presently defined by its reconstruction. Very interesting to see a relic or two from old Austrian/Ottoman days, not to mention the subsequent republic. Apparently once a world center of opium production, known for the potency of the stuff, three or four times that of comparable crops. Perhaps not entirely irrational to think that after many generations of abundant narcotics, even a century or two later, there might be a lingering bit of cloudiness in the social mind.
Clearly, limited curatorial resources. A 2/3 c. AD Venus Pudica, life-sized, still in the metal travelling box-frame, secured by a manacle around the neck. Nearby, some ancient pagan bas-reliefs on lead plates of perhaps a tutelary spirit named after the place (from what I could parse of the label). Layers of history, some of which perhaps aren't yet entirely in the past.
