King of the castle: Choice and responsibility in the modern world PDF
Preview King of the castle: Choice and responsibility in the modern world
BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY KING OF THE CASTLE Choice and Responsibility in the Modern World Digitized by the Internet Archive 2015 in https://archive.org/details/kingofcastlechoiOOeato KING OF THE CASTLE Choice and Responsibility Modern World in the Gai Eaton PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE IMPERIAL IRANIAN ACADEMY OF PHILOSOPHY THE BODLEY HEAD LONDON SYDNEY TORONTO © Gai Eaton 1977 isbn o 370 30062 9 Printed and bound in Great Britain for The Bodley Head Ltd 9WBow Street, London WC2E 7AL by & J Mackay Limited, Chatham Set in Monotype Imprint Firstpublished1977 CONTEXTS Introduction, 7 1 Unreal Cities, 23 2 The Cost of Wealth, 43 Liberty and Obedience, 62 3 4 Man in Society, 88 Man 5 as Viceroy, 114 6 Knowledge and its Counterfeits, i< 7 The Only Heritage We Have, 165 8 What We Are and W here We Are, Suggestionsfor Further Rinding, 21 'Now/ said she, 'I know the cause, or the chief cause, of your sickness. You have forgotten what you are/ BOETHIUS INTRODUCTION If, by some strange device, a man of our century could step back- wards in time and mix with the people of a distant age he would have good cause to doubt eithertheirsanityor his own. Mountains, forests and the blue sky would look familiar enough, but they would not be seen by the people around him in the way he saw them. Their physical features might be the same, but their meaning would be different. He would know what common sense is and what constitutes human normality. So would the people- amongst whom he found himself, but their common sense would differ from his and their normality might seem to him abnormal. Questioning everything they took for granted and amazed that they should be so unques- tioning in their assumptions, he would find that all he took for granted was brought into question. His 'Why:' would be met with their 'Why?', and he would not know the answer. From our present position we can see how limited were the beliefs and ideas of earlier times and other cultures, how many avenues were left unexplored and how many opportunities missed. It is easy to suppose that, in changing our perspective, we have escaped from the limitations inherent in human thinking and human vision. Vet our faculties and our senses are the same. We are not a new species, and to compare our own world view with any other is merely to compare different kinds of limitation, as though a man tunnelling his way out of prison were to emerge within the perimeter, exchanging one cell for another. So it must always be unless the prisoner learns that freedom lies in quite another direction, never through the tunnel of time. Like those who came before us we have chosen—or had chosen — on our behalf certain particular objectives out of the multitude of possibilities open to man and, like them, we ignore everything that seems irrelevant to our purpose. This purpose is determined by the assumptions we take for granted, the axioms which seem to 7
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