Description:
Anthony O'Hear does not mince words: he believes we live in a time of spiritual and aesthetic barrenness, and he does not expect this to improve in the near future. The triumph of the Enlightenment and our anthropocentric faith in reason have, he argues, largely stripped our lives of meaning. Though we continue to struggle to answer the big questions, in O'Hear's assessment, "the meaning of life is just the little matter on which our official ideology of scientific enlightenment and liberal politics studiously refuses to pronounce; in place of anything like that, what we are offered are material prosperity, formal equality and political participation, and when these are not enough, drugs or therapy or yet more unrealizable political promises." In essence, the ideology of progress is a false mistress, and the good that is worth striving for is being steadily eroded by poststructuralism, deconstructionism, modern art, and the like. Whether you agree with him or not, O'Hear is always opinionated and informed, leaving the reader with much to ponder. He dismisses environmentalism, decries the liberalization of sexual morality (which has made women more "vulnerable" in his analysis), criticizes psychotherapy as pointless self-absorption, and regards equality as a misleading ruse: "Individuals, meanwhile, who for one reason or another cannot compete in society but who are fed on a half-understood diet of equality and human rights, become increasingly resentful and violent when they realize that they are never going to make the grade socially or economically." A provocative assessment of the religious, philosophical, and moral costs of the recent leaps in science and technology, After Progress is a passionate book on a timely topic. --J.R.
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