Free Thinking : The nation

From the UK, philosopher Jonathan Rée

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1. What does progress mean?

   • Jonathan Rée
   • 31 Jul 06, 06:12 PM

   For centuries, people have been using discussions about freedom and progress as excuses for offloading their opinions about different countries and the wonders or horrors of their political systems: freedom and progress in India, in Iran, in the Soviet Union, or Britain, or France -- but more than anything else, freedom and progress in the USA.

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1. Welcome to this weblog

   • Jonathan Rée
   • 31 Jul 06, 06:07 PM

   
   There doesn't seem to be any scheme of human improvement that hasn't disappointed the hopes that once rode on it. Take free-trade, or free-love, or representative democracy, or compulsory education, or national self-determination, or dietary reform, or co-operation, or the separation of powers, or pacifism, or rational dress, or planning, or civil rights, or sky-scrapers, or birth-control, or socialism, or nuclear power, or naturism, or trade unionism, or suburbia, or feminism, or the rule of law: in its time every one of them has been celebrated as the herald of universal happiness, before getting tarnished by too much reality. All of them have failed to live up to our requirements. Is there still any hope for hope, I wonder; or is hopefulness another lost cause?

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