The 19th Century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote about characters who justified murder in the name of their ideological beliefs. For this reason, John Gray argues, he's remained relevant ever since, through the rise of the totalitarian states of the 20th Century, to the "war against terror".When liberalism becomes illiberalism.
BBC News Magazine
A Point of View: The writer who foresaw the rise of the totalitarian state
John Gray
"Dostoyevsky suggests that the result of abandoning morality for the sake of an idea of freedom will be a type of tyranny more extreme than any in the past. "
ReplyDeleteI'd put it this way: "Dostoyevsky suggests that the result of abandoning authority for the sake of an idea of freedom will be a type of tyranny more extreme than any in the past."
"the Russian nihilists of the 1860s were very different. They were fervent believers in science, who wanted to destroy the religious and moral traditions that had guided humankind in the past"
Darwin's "Origin of the Species" first published 1859.... so this jives...
rsp,
Morality and authority are closely linked. This is a basic problem for liberalism, which is anti-authority because freedom. Liberalism is about the autonomy of the individual as a law unto himself. This results in a paradox of liberalism in opposing perceived "illiberalism" in that liberals often seek to impose liberalism on others "for their own good." This is the fundamental rationale of the neocons in "spreading freedom and democracy" globally at the point of a spear. It ends up being not much different than imposing a religion or some other ideology at the edge of a sword.
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