How Political Idealism Threatens Our Civilisation
CIS Lecture
Thursday, 29 October 2009
Professor Kenneth Minogue
Running Time: 45 mins
Political idealism is the passionate belief that a new social system can solve the major problems of humanity: problems such as world poverty, war, national aggression and many others. The ideological versions of political idealism in the twentieth century - communism, nazism, fascism and their variations - were discredited by violence and oppression, but the idea that we can create One Right Way of life, usually in collectivist forms, remains entrenched in our thought. This idea always lies at the heart of non-Western civilizations, such as Hindu castes, Muslim Sharia and the traditional obedience structures of the Chinese dynasties. Most of our current forms of political idealism seek a right ordering that will leave no one oppressed or excluded, and therefore no one will have grounds for overturning the system. The remarkable thing, however, is that millions from all over the world are fleeing their own One Right Way in order to get into our free and disorderly Western form of life, and they aren't doing it just for the cash. The problem is, then, to discover just how our Western modernity is distinguished from any form of the One Right Way.
