John Gray reviews five of his favourite books at The Browser.
A few extracts from the conversation to whet your appetite:
“I would call a project utopian if it can be known with reasonable confidence in advance that it cannot be realised. Marxism and communism is an example – a highly industrialised society that abolishes institutions of property and market competition is, I think, actually impossible … [The] infantile fantasy of the omnipotence of thought is the root of utopian thinking, in both its millenarian and its meliorist forms, and the source of its danger.”
“What is distinctive about utopianism at the end of the 20th century and start of the 21st is that it has become centrist. In other words, for the first half of the 20th century utopianism was extremist, but now we have the utopian idea of building democracy in Libya or Afghanistan. So the utopian impulse – the impulse to achieve what rational thought tells us is impossible – has migrated to the centre of politics. That is connected with humanism and the idea of progress.”
“What I understand by humanism today – particularly in the strong secular forms in which it has developed – is the idea that there can be, through the efforts of politics, a semi-irreversible cumulative advance that hasn’t happened except in science and technology, in which gains that have been made in the past in human knowledge and society are conserved and multiplied over time.”
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[Via The Browser]The post John Gray on Utopia and Apocalypse appeared first on LibArts London.