I am never sure whether I should lament the state of the world or be complacent about it. For on the one hand everything is going to the dogs and on the other I am a happy man.
Part of my happiness derives, of course, from intimations of approaching apocalypse: There is nothing quite like them for cheering oneself up. That is why I bought a book the other day by Chantal Delsol, the distinguished French philosopher, called La haine du monde (Hatred of the World), in which she maintains that there is in modern, post-religious Prometheanism more in common than we might like to think with totalitarian regimes of the past. Admittedly, we have no state-organized terror, no gulags or concentration camps, this being a very important and significant difference that ought not to be forgotten. But on a philosophical level, at least, there is something in common between our totalitarian regimes and our democracies, as Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel discovered to their chagrin.
Part of my happiness derives, of course, from intimations of approaching apocalypse: There is nothing quite like them for cheering oneself up. That is why I bought a book the other day by Chantal Delsol, the distinguished French philosopher, called La haine du monde (Hatred of the World), in which she maintains that there is in modern, post-religious Prometheanism more in common than we might like to think with totalitarian regimes of the past. Admittedly, we have no state-organized terror, no gulags or concentration camps, this being a very important and significant difference that ought not to be forgotten. But on a philosophical level, at least, there is something in common between our totalitarian regimes and our democracies, as Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel discovered to their chagrin.
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