Here is a very good, if lengthy, commentary from Brink Lindsey on NationalReviewOnline -
[url]http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-lindsay092801.shtml[/url]
Selected quotes rom the column -
"The atrocities of today's terrorists are the last shudder of a historical convulsion of unprecedented fury and destructive power. It was spawned by the spiritual confusion that accompanied the coming of the modern age, and consists of a profound hostility toward the disciplines and opportunities of human freedom. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire we thought we were done with totalitarianism. But it lives still, and lives to do harm. As we prepare once more to face this old and dangerous adversary, we need to reacquaint ourselves with its origins and nature."
It is unsurprising that, in all the wrenching social tumult, many people felt lost — adrift in a surging flux without landmarks or firm ground. The deepest thinkers of the 19th century identified this anomie as the spiritual crisis of the age: Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, while Max Weber wrote of society's "disenchantment." But it was Karl Marx who traced most clearly the connection between this spiritual crisis and the economic upheavals of his day. As he and Friedrich Engels wrote in this breathtaking passage from the Communist Manifesto:
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…
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"Thus did industrialization beget a massive backlash — a reaction against the dizzying plenitude of open-endedness, a lurch toward some antidote to the jarring, jangling uncertainty of a world where 'all that is solid melts into air.' The Industrial Counter-revolution was protean and, in its many guises, captured minds of almost every persuasion.[b] But in all its forms, it held out this promise: that political power, whether at the national or global level, could recreate the simplicity, certainty, and solidarity of preindustrial life. The appeal of that promise powered a disastrous century of collectivist experimentation.[/b]"
Eric The(PimpingForTheNationalReview)Hun[>]:)]