1985

Youth is part of a process, but it is important to the young that it be represented as a quasi-permanency, something static, almost spatial.

structure for building one. Bakunin made an idiosyncratic dialectic for his own use. History was moving towards the building of a better world, therefore new things were better than old. If you destroyed old things, new things came into being to take their place. Ergo, let us all start to destroy old things.

Hegelian definition of the human spirit – ‘an I that is a we and a we that is an I’ – seems to be reflected in Bakunin’s own ‘I do not want to be I, I want to be We,’ which in turn gives a meaning to Zamyatin’s title We.

Orwell failed to see that the terror would come about before a nuclear war could get started.

It is perhaps typical of Orwell’s wholly secular culture that he could see the possibility of evil only in the State. Evil was not for the individual: original sin was a doctrine to be derided.

But the capacity to perform the truly good act is related to a high degree of intelligence and knowledge. Progress may be regarded as a gradual increase in human capacity to understand motivation and free good intentions from the evil of ignorance.

If good is concerned with promoting the ability in a living organism to act freely, evil must be dedicated to taking such freedom away.

the good of music has nothing to do with ethics. Art does not elevate us into beneficence. It is morally neutral, like the taste of an apple. Instead of recognizing a verbal confusion we ponder an anomaly

The goodness of art, not of holy men, is the better figure of divine goodness.

Pelagius denied this terrible endowment. Man was free to choose salvation as much as damnation: he was not predisposed to evil, there was no original sin.