It is not only the word ‘enlightenment’ that is routinely pressed into the polemical service of the present; various enlightenment thinkers are also dragged into court to produce condemnations of islamofascism etc, before being returned to the oblivion and indifference appropriate to anything genuinely different from Today. The latest is Thomas Paine – & the intellectual sloth (and borderline plagiarism) with which his ventriloquist, C.Hitchens, makes him mouth various unexceptional platitudes is exposed rather lethally by John Barrell. He begins by quoting CH as follows: If the rights of man are to be upheld in a dark time, we shall require an age of reason.’ That’s it, isn’t it – the dark times, the islamofascist threat, are vile anti-bodies injected into our jaded imaginations, our etiolated ballet box world, so that we might once again discover democracy and 'our way of life' as precarious, threatened and (therefore) all the more prized.
In a world where economic and political power are increasingly unaccountable, democracy etc need to be re-thought and transformed from within, not simply given booster jabs from conjured external threats. What’s required is not an external demon which affords us a false measure of the value of our democracy etc, and consolidates its present state, but the intellectual and political work, the resetting of parameters, that allows us to measure the insufficiency of that present state, and make it, thereby, the object of radical transformation.
1 comment:
The atomic mass of CH can be estimated from the fact that he was paid by The New York Times to review Gore Vidal's latest volume.
The question has to be asked: an external demon appears to have been exactly what was required by large numbers of USian voters for the past several years. Now they're not so sure. But who, or what, can enable them to see what you have offered as being required as what is required.
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