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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (78661)	3/1/2003 12:08:33 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 281500

John, didn't you say a few months ago the world had not improved in the last 100 years? No. I think you may be referring to my use of Eric Hobsbawm's quote in his classic The Age of Extremes: The History of the World, 1914-1991. Hobsbawm starts the book with quotes from "Twelve People Look at the Twentieth Century." They include Isiah Berlin, Primo Levi, Rene Dumont, William Golding, Ernst Gombrich, Yehudi Menuhin, Raymond Firth, and others. His quote from Berlin sums up some of the others and is the one which he begins with: "I have lived through most of the twentieth century without, I must add, suffering personal hardship. I remember it only as the most terrible century in Western history." Primo Levi says: "We who have survived the Camps are not true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion which I have gradually come to accept by reading what other survivors have written, inlcuding myself, when I re-read my writings after a lapse of years. We, the survivors, are not only a tiny butalso an anomalous minority. We are those, who through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned worldless." Golding says: "I can't help thinking that this has been the most violent century in human history." I consider Menuhin's comment particularly appropo: "If I had to sum up the twentieth century, I would say that it raised the greatest hopes ever conceived by humanity, and destroyed all illusions and ideals." There are other opposite things: the progress of science, the increasing equality for women near the end of the century. Is this what you had in mind? It's a strange question you make, Michael, because the general view that serious conservatives wish to have of themselves is that of dour, hard headed realists about something called "human nature." And they think that liberals are much too sanguine about it. God help us, say the conservatives, liberals tend to think "human nature" is socially produced and malleable. Not afflicted with "original sin", not basically greedy, etc.