You are viewing a single comment's thread from:

RE: Inventing Freedom: The Story of the Anglosphere

in #philosophy • 8 years ago

Thanks redq, but being English and educated about the development of the largest empire in history, I have misgivings about the concept of the Anglosphere as a solely positive thing. If it does exist, it was most definitely built off the back of war and massive global exploitation, both human and environmental . Cheers.

8 years ago in #philosophy by
$0.00
    Reply 1
    Sort:  
  • Trending
    • [-]
     8 years ago  

    Hi Chris, This, from the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner’s “The Ideology Of Catastrophe”, pretty much sums up my view:

    My point is not to minimize our dangers. Rather, it is to understand why apocalyptic fear has gripped so many of our leaders, scientists and intellectuals, who insist on reasoning and arguing as though they were following the scripts of mediocre Hollywood disaster movies.

    Over the last half-century, leftist intellectuals have identified two great scapegoats for the world's woes. First, Marxism designated capitalism as responsible for human misery. Second, "Third World" ideology, disappointed by the bourgeois indulgences of the working class, targeted the West, supposedly the inventer of slavery, colonialism and imperialism.

    The guilty party that environmentalism now accuses—mankind itself, in its will to dominate the planet—is essentially a composite of the previous two, a capitalism invented by a West that oppresses peoples and destroys the Earth.

    Environmentalism sees itself as the fulfillment of all earlier critiques. "There are only two solutions," Bolivian president Evo Morales declared in 2009. "Either capitalism dies, or Mother Earth dies."

    "Our house is burning, but we are not paying attention," said Jacques Chirac, then president of France, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002. "Nature, mutilated, overexploited, cannot recover, and we refuse to admit it."
    . . .

    We begin to suspect that the numberless Cassandras who prophesy all around us do not intend to warn us so much as to condemn us.
    http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303815404577331651761806744