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hanging from that abstraction the thread of the city

A Modern Catechism

If I ask you how old the world is you should know the answer.  If I ask you how long modern man has existed you should know the answer.  If I ask you the unit of the measurement of light you should know the answer.  But you don’t.  The story of the modern world is not a story.  Since the story consists in facts about the nature of reality, facts of physics, of medicine, biology and so on and a fact by itself is inert.  No consequences are implied by it beyond a kind of take it or leave it indifference.  If I don’t know how old the earth is, what difference does it make?  60 million years?  60 billion?  Concerning the basic facts of the world about us then, why bother knowing their catechism if sense has to come from circumstantial need? What is the story of no story?

Freedom’s Failure (2)

After all, look at me.  Have I changed?  I wear my hat.  Grey as dust.  Can I?  No?  Yes?

Freedom’s Failure

To what degree can an act be pessimistic?  And is it something one should think about, how much of a failure that act is likely to be?  Should the idiom be: Fail again, fail better?  One sets out to change the world but in the end it is the trivial that commands one …

Reason’s Idiots (2)

A C Grayling on God is not Great.  [Independent on Sunday, 24 Jun 07.] He behaves in the usual way; cheers from the sidelines someone who has the rational steadiness to realise folly when he sees it.  But one has to question how this can be rational: “Hitchens … answers the weary canard that the secular tyrannies of fascism and communism have as bad a record as religion.”  - But he doesn’t seem to at all!  If what is at stake is rationality and fact, then – fact and rationality must be observed.  Fascism and communism produced the bloodiest times in human history; along with the First World War, and neither was that a religious war.  The problem that thinkers like Grayling, Hitchens and Dawkins have to deal with is that if they want to speak about human cruelty and violence originating with religion they need much stronger arguments.  They face the paradox that if – as they also want to say – the basic human impulses that brought about the arts and so forth would still exist, even if all religious sentiment had been removed from mainstream culture – well why not the same for cruelty and violence too?  Clearly if it doesn’t need religion to invoke these impulses then the entire argument is redundant.  So that the project of getting rid of religious belief wouldn’t make any difference!  Which brings us back to square one.  Religion is not evil!