This self-generated departure tends to hide consequences of our acts until it's too late to deal with them successfully.
Naturally, one of his glaring examples of this situation is the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Gray demonstrates how it was planned intentionally long before the causes were manufactured for it. The planning was clearly utopian in that the intentions were delusionary and inappropriate.
Both governments declared their intention - based on false pretenses - to "extend democracy into the Middle East". This ambition was expressed without any perception of whether it would be welcomed. It's an underlying principle of utopian thinking, Gray observes, that a society can be re-created from within or imposed from the outside.
Utopian ideas have been seeded on infertile soil. There is a link, however, in that while we are generally taught that the Enlightenment thinkers were building a secular world, they were relying on Christian precepts to expound their ideas. Among other virtues of this thinking was that it seemed realisable within human timespans.
In the 20th Century, a wide variety of such proposals were tried, and Gray brings Marxism, the hippie communes of the s and the Fascist-Nazi movements into the same paddock. Once thought as a "Leftist" ideal, Gray is unsurprised that it is now the policy of choice of the "neo-cons" and their supporters on the "Christian Right".
Yet, it seems that no matter where on the political spectrum utopians arise, they continue to commit similar blunders. The goal blinds them to the perils of trying to achieve it and utopia becomes tragedy. It's easy to peg Gray as grim or dismal. That's a common label pinned on those who seek to have us confront reality and think more deeply about our decisions.
In this sense, Gray takes a long view of the role of Christianity in Western thinking. The shift of utopia from heaven to Earth, while seeming to provide improvement, was just as likely to introduce anarchy.
He compares two contemporary thinkers, Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, in their approach to this problem. Modern liberals declare the unrestrained State as the greatest threat to freedom.
Hobbes understood that anarchy was an even greater threat and government was needed to quell it. Spinoza, on the other hand, while unwilling to grant the state power to stomp on emerging anarchy, had a different proposal.
Humans are part of the natural world, and turning to the state for salvation of any kind was erroneous. His realistic view was that disorder and peace are natural cycles of the human condition. We must approach this situation realistically, without any fixed or unattainable goals to repress the one to gain the other. Such simplistic thinking can never succeed. Gray has offered an exceptionally rational set of pointers on avoiding such single-mindedness. Save us from salvation By Jim Coughenour Picking up where he left off in his genuinely iconoclastic book "Straw Dogs," John Gray turns his attention to the ineluctably human penchant for utopia and apocalyptic fantasy.
His style here is less abrasive but no less bracing. A British commentator recently wrote of Gray, "He is so out of the box it is easy to forget there was ever any box" - which fairly describes the intellectual jolt he'll deliver to readers dulled by boxy thinking.
The previous reviewer has done a decent job of describing the argument, but any summary misses the electricity that hums in Gray's sentences. Gray's unsparing synopsis of the neo-conservative fantasy that led to the debacle in Iraq will have patriotic Americans grinding their teeth in fury at the waste of American and Iraqi lives and the betrayal of American ideals.
He also lambasts liberals who delude themselves about "inalienable" human rights, and minces no words about born-again Christians who've sanctioned and supported the torture and carnage, which leads him to a grim conclusion: "Liberals have come to believe that human freedom can be secured by constitutional guarantees.
They have failed to grasp the Hobbesian truth A regime shift has occurred in the US, which now stands somewhere between the law-governed state it was during most of its history and a species of illiberal democracy. The US has undergone this change not as a result of its corrosion by relativism If the American regime as it has been known in the past ceases to exist, it will be a result of the power of faith.
Are unfeasible projects that cannot be known to be so, not utopian? Worse, he later hints at third, even weaker version, on which a project is utopian if it cannot be known to be feasible. Gray implies that abolitionism was non-utopian not because it was feasible, but only because its feasibility was knowable.
There is the further point that the facts Gray mentions are a pretty weak basis for knowledge of what is feasible. Previous societies have been without money, private property, and political hierarchy. Do we know then that we could abolish these things too? But projects like this are for Gray paradigmatically utopian and foolish. Similar problems beset his work on the concept of progress. In Straw Dogs he attacked the belief in social progress, but his definition of progress turned out to be very strong, only including permanent moral advancements.
Why not define progress more weakly as moral advancement and then say what is closer to common speech though less dramatic , that though there is progress, it will never be permanent, and will never reach perfection? In Black Mass, Gray shifts within the space of a sentence from the weaker to the stronger account, rejecting both, but for reasons that are contradictory. Actually, humanity cannot advance or retreat, for humanity cannot act: there is no collective entity with intentions or purposes, only ephemeral struggling animals each with its own passions and illusions.
But human affairs show no sign of being additive in this way: what is gained can always be lost If it is true non- vacuously, it is false that humanity cannot advance. But not all is bad, for many a nail has been hit bang on the head. There is the point on p.
Anarchists, for instance, are pushed into an absurd position, in which the source of human folly and woe is coercive authority, which in its violent defeat will release us into an age of natural harmony and mutual aid. The problem for anarchists, of whether political authority is a human institution and thereby a sign of human evil or not and thereby a sign of human impotence matches that had by believers in the Christian god: in both cases, the existence of evil in the world cannot be reconciled with the belief in an agent that is both powerful and perfectly good.
It is evil, external to human life, that has corrupted us, and whose destruction will redeem us. We will be glad if you will be back to us again. Philosophers once aimed to teach us serenity. Buddha smiled as he. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Go to Cart. In Thomas Mann's great, apocalyptic novel Doctor Faustus, there is a.
Black mass: apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia Even before you open John Gray's book, its cover tells you to be afraid, to be very afraid. Black mass: apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia Black Mass has ratings and 80 reviews.
Jim said: Picking up where he left off in his genuinely iconoclastic book Straw Dogs, John Gray turns his atte. Black mass by john gray - penguin books australia Black Mass.
Apocalyptic Religion And The Death Of It is founded on a pernicious myth of an achievable utopia that in the last century alone caused the murder of.
Black mass: apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia Mises Review 13, No. Black mass: apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia AbeBooks. Black mass : apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia Search for books, ebooks, and physical media Change Search Source.
Black mass : apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia Stanford Libraries' official online search tool for books, media, journals, databases, government documents and more. Shop with confidence on eBay!
0コメント