Voltaire's Bastards

Brilliant EconTalk interview with John Ralston Saul author of book, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. Here are few quotes from the book:

• Not only have the humanities been singled out as the enemy of reason, but there has been a serious attempt to co-opt them by transforming each sector into a science. Thus architecture has become a quantitative, technological formation in which the details add up to the building. Even art history has been converted from a study of beauty and craft into a mathematical view of creativity. The new art historians are interested not so much in art or in history as in technical evolution. The social sciences, new creations of the mathematical obsession, are of course the principal example of the humanities deformed. The reduction of politics, economics, social problems and the arts to mathematical visions and obscure, hermetically sealed vocabularies may well be looked upon by those who come after us as one of the greatest follies of our civilization.
• Technology and knowledge advance with great speed. That is, or can be, good. Man, however, does not change. He is as he was the day the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer decided to go on speaking against Nazi anti-semitism knowing that this would lead him to a death camp,. He is also as he was the day he cheered in the Roman circus, the day he crucified Christ, the day he slaughtered the unarmed Valdesians, the day he opened the first gas oven at Auschwitz, the day he tortured rebels in Malaysia, Algeria, and Vietnam. In his last interview, the French historian Fernand Braudel ended by saying that although knowledge meant man had less excuse for his barbarism, he was nevertheless “profoundly barbaric.” There are no inherited characteristics to help us avoid repeating the actions of our parents and grandparents. We are born with the schizophrenia of good and evil within us, so that each generation must persevere in self-recognition and self-control. In ceding to the automatic reassurance of our logic, we have abandoned once more the powers of recognition and of control. Darkness seems scarcely different from light, with the web of structure and logic woven thick across both. We must therefore cut away these layers of false protection if we wish to regain control of our common sense and morality.