Hope
Open societies,
in their pluralism, create an anxiety
that brings about a reaction toward a fixed organic state,
which, then as now, serves both the interests
of an oligarchy and those of a frightened,
insecure population
looking to arrest change.We live, certainly,
in societies that are in many ways
inequitable, unfair, capriciously oppressive,
occasionally murderous, frequently imperial—-
but, by historical standards much less so
than any other societies known
in the history of mankind…….We forget that the actual waves of the ocean
are purely opportunistic, small irregularities
in water that, snagging a fortune gust,
rise and break like monsters,
for no greater cause than
their own accidental invention.
Review of The Illiberal Imagination
by Adam Gopnik
staff writer, New Yorker Magazine
