Great lecture by Kenan Malik!

He has written a great essay - his Voltaire lecture - here:

http://www.kenanmalik.com/lectures/voltaire_lecture_2009.html

It contains the following quote:

"If any event could demonstrate the folly of giving into unreason, it is surely Nazism and the Holocaust. Yet now it is regarded as an expression of too much reason."

KENAN MALIK.

Thanks are due to the Universe that someone is making this obvious, simple and correct point.

A point that people seem not to want to acknowledge.

----------------------

The same lecture includes the following points:

"‘Too much reason’. The very idea that there could be an excess of reason would for much of the past 200 years have struck progressive thinkers as close to madness. Even more so the idea that too much reason was a condition to be feared. But strangest of all would have seemed the notion that the madness of the Final Solution was engineered by a surfeit of reason."

Kenan Malik.

"The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues it was ‘the rational world of modern civilisation that made the Holocaust thinkable.’ For the philosopher John Gray, ‘Progress and mass murder run in tandem… As the hope for a better world has grown, so has mass murder.’ Western science, the historian Robert Young writes, ‘articulates a philosophical structure that uncannily simulates the project of nineteenth-century imperialism.’


I want to challenge such arguments tonight by rethinking the history of the idea of race and in doing so thinking again about the relationship between race, science and the Enlightenment."

Kenan Malik.

It is good that Kenan Malik is challenging "such arguments."
As they say in Spain "!ya era hora!".
About time to!

The statement "progress and mass murder run in tandem" by John Gray is particularly ridiculous.


--------------------------------------------------------------