Friday, February 27, 2004

Review of Herzl's novel Posted here Friday, February 27, 2004 at 9:51:56 AM     And read this from the New York Review http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16955 Theodor Herzl, founding father of the Zionist movement, was not a gifted novelist. Nevertheless, his novel, Altneuland (Old-New Land), is one of the most remarkable books of the twentieth century. Although Herzl finished it in 1902, the visionary ideas expressed in this "fairy tale," as he called it, belonged firmly in the century before. Altneuland is a blueprint of the perfect Jewish state, a technocratic Utopia, a socialist dream with all the advantages of capitalism, an idealistic colonial enterprise, a model of pure reason, a "light unto the nations." It also helps to explain the extremism of some of those who rebel against the dominance of what is widely regarded as the arrogant West. ... Altneuland is worth reading because it contains so much that is grand and hopeful about Western thought since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. From this kind of thinking came the Industrial Revolution, liberal democracy, scientific discovery, and civil rights. But the same Promethean dreams of European rationalists, taken to logical extremes and brutally implemented, often by nonEuropeans who wanted to catch up with Western progress, have ended in the mass graves of the gulag and the killing fields of China and Cambodia. Europeans justified their imperial conquests with claims of progress and enlightenment. Asian tyrants murdered millions with the same justifications. ********

Historical reality writ larger Posted here Friday, February 27, 2004 at 9:45:14 AM     The way the bigger picture was seen 20 years ago.. At the basis of the experienced dissatisfaction lie the general miseries that afflict human existence, enumerated by Hesiod as hunger, hard work, disease, early death, and the injuries the weaker must suffer at the hands of the stronger. This general potential of dissatisfaction can then be exponentially aggravated by the disturbances of personal and social existence through events with historical mass effect. To the class of these events belong a variety of phenomena. From the demographic side one would have to consider large population movements through migration and conquest, unsettling whether peaceful or violent, unsettling alike for conquerors and conquered; furthermore, sudden decreases of population caused by human epidemics, mass starvation caused by the spread of animal and vegetable pests, and increases of population beyond the subsistence level provided by the economic and technical potential of place and time. From the political-pragmatic side one would have to consider the vast destruction of ethnic cultures by the imperial entrepreneurs of the Ecumenic Age and the subsequent rise of imperial-dogmatic civilizations from the wreckage of the ecumenic empires. For the modern period one would have to add the creation of the power differential between the Western and all other civilizations through the intellectual, scientific, commercial, and industrial revolutions in the West, as well as the exploitation of the differential to the global limits; the decline of Western power and order through the internal conflicts caused by the rise of imperial nationalisms and of equally imperial ideological movements; and the resistance of the non-Western civilizational societies to the destruction of their own cultures by a Western global ecumenism. Voegelin Order in History vol 5 page 50 ********