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Aug. 22nd, 2014
Having turned aside communism and Christianity, Camus conceives of another track for one’s political ambitions in the Cold War environment.
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He tried to sketch a path for reform that would reduce the risk of a general conflagration. Key to this was abandoning any hope of revolution. But he still sought a “relative utopia”: pursuing world unity and international democracy. National boundaries had become meaningless because “there no longer exists any policy, conservative or socialist, which can operate exclusively within a national framework.” The point was to minimize domestic politics, which today were limited to “administrative problems,” and to use the peace movement to create an international social contract. This was the conclusion, Camus asserted, of “all contemporary political thinking that refuses to justify lies and murder.”
-- Ronald Aronson, “Camus and Sartre”
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But of course lies and murder are what turn the political world, rendering his thought more interesting than relevant, at least in the short and mid-term. Maybe our world is trying to evolve in this direction, but 70 years later, in the throes of Islamist terror and Russian expansionism, it looks as hopeless as ever, and even domestic politics do not look so tranquil and merely administrative.
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He tried to sketch a path for reform that would reduce the risk of a general conflagration. Key to this was abandoning any hope of revolution. But he still sought a “relative utopia”: pursuing world unity and international democracy. National boundaries had become meaningless because “there no longer exists any policy, conservative or socialist, which can operate exclusively within a national framework.” The point was to minimize domestic politics, which today were limited to “administrative problems,” and to use the peace movement to create an international social contract. This was the conclusion, Camus asserted, of “all contemporary political thinking that refuses to justify lies and murder.”
-- Ronald Aronson, “Camus and Sartre”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
But of course lies and murder are what turn the political world, rendering his thought more interesting than relevant, at least in the short and mid-term. Maybe our world is trying to evolve in this direction, but 70 years later, in the throes of Islamist terror and Russian expansionism, it looks as hopeless as ever, and even domestic politics do not look so tranquil and merely administrative.
Old Accounts
Aug. 22nd, 2014 05:41 pmThat was a little scary. It had been a long time, over a year, since I tried to get into my Yahoo account, and I was a little iffy on the password. It took a few tries. I was also worried that my account might have been deleted, as I still have a lot of nice e-mail there that I may want to work with later.