A Senseless Utopia Versus an Insane Reality

A few years ago, when ethnic problems and national-state problems began to rise to the surface, a sociologist colleague told me that in this sphere there have been so many pathological turns that it was better to avoid it. His words seemed persuasive to me. And indeed it is the case that there are quite a number of nooks and crannies within us where in quiet times one does not have very much of a desire to look. Let the specialists work a bit, I thought, without excess noise and mutual hysteria. In the meantime, time will pass, wounds will heal, and life will become easier. Then we shall try to treat that which is morbid, dark, and instinctual in mass consciousness through open discussion. Unfortunately, we can no longer wait for this "then." We have reached the brink and beyond it lies disaster. Yugoslavia is showing us how things will look tomorrow; Lebanon with its civil war which has dragged on for twenty years shows us things beyond tomorrow—with the one difference that the population of the former USSR is a hundred times larger than that of Lebanon (285 million compared to 2-3 million), and hence the tens of thousands of dead Lebanese will translate into millions for us

Aesthetics · Consciousness · Dystopia · Epistemology · Political science · Population · Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Utopia · Demography · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Philosophy · Psychology