Chrisanne’s Reviews > Politics of Hope > Status Update

Hope "implies a deep-seated trust in life that seems absurd to those who lack it. It rests on confidence not so much in the future as in the past. It derives from early memories... in which the experience of order and contentment was so intense that subsequent disillusionments cannot dislodge it."
-- Lasch

Religion is not he best way of understanding what is; its domain is in the realm of what ought to be. Nor is it an appropriate vehicle of power. Politics is the art of mediating between what is and what ought to be, and calls for compromises that faith cannot make.

Foreseeing the future, the prophets did not predict what would happen, but warned of what might happen in the hope that people would change.

As Harold Bloom has argued, those who find themselves late arrivals on a cultural scene create space for themselves by 'misreading' their predecessors: that is the oedipal way in which civilisations progress.

The most striking symbol of this is the role of memory in contemporary society, our ability to pass on to our children the knowledge of the great events, heroes and battles which brought us to where we are. Tradition societies lived with the past as an eternal present.

Dilemmas arise not because there are no moral absolutes, but precisely because there are, and because they can sometimes conflict... The conclusion we should draw is not that there are no objective duties, but that one of the great failings of the philosophical quest for a rational basis of morality has been its search for a single coherent set of principles that would unequivocally answer all moral questions.

These values will not speak to everyone. They never did. Nor will we live up to them all the time. We never do.

Adultery has no saving graces

For a government to identify one way of life as inherently preferable to another is the ultimate crime against the concept of the abstract individual and the procedural state, the self which is prior to its ends and the right which is prior to the good.

Dickens [saw] that a society that harms its children, whatever else it is, is not a place where one can live at ease.