Saturday, November 9, 2013

Wisdom Of The Week

"The most awful thing, would be to feel that I’d agree with the things I’ve already said and written—that is what would make me most uncomfortable because that would mean that I had stopped thinking.”

Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview by Jonathan Cott. 

An insight from John Gray's  Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings, the book I am currently reading:

It is important to understand that faith-based violence has not been limited to totalitarian regimes. Starting with the French Jacobins, it has been a pervasive feature of modern democracy. It is not only revolutionaries that have turned politics into a crusade. Liberal humanists who say they aim for gradual improvement have done the same. Like the utopian projects of the far left and right, the liberal ideal of a world of self-governing democracies has spilt blood on a colossal scale.

Even in Britain — supposedly the home of a sceptical, pragmatic approach to government — politics has been understood in terms that derive from religion. The Thatcher experiment is an example. I cannot count the number of times people have asked why I ‘stopped believing’ in Thatcherism. The assumption is that there was once a body of thought that could be described as ‘Thatcherism’ — something I never encountered as a participant observer at the time. More to the point, the question assumes that politics is like religion — some parts of Western Christianity, at any rate — in requiring belief in a creed or doctrine. My view was quite different. Politics is the art of devising temporary remedies for recurring evils — a series of expedients, not a project of salvation. Thatcher was one of these expedients.

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