From the website The New Criterian. “The house is on fire.”
By Gary Saul Morson
Read it all.
The idea that truth and morality have no objective basis but are simply what power says they are, is, of course, also a key tenet of many current postmodernists. Society more and more teaches us to regard each other in terms of good and evil groups. No one seems more filled with hate than those who discover it in others. Could the answer to Courtois’s question be simpler than he suspects? Maybe the reason intellectuals often speak more harshly of Reagan than of Stalin is that a substantial portion of them actually prefer Stalinism?
Today one hears that neuroscientists will soon be able to read thoughts from the outside. What would Stalin have done with such technology? Perhaps my training as a Russian specialist distorts my judgment, but as I contemplate the ideas spreading from the academy through society, I fear, a century after the Russian Revolution, a tyranny greater than Stalin’s. Comrades, the house is on fire.