Archive for May 1st, 2009
Blindness of Certainty and Illusion of Justice.
I just came across this book, Power and Global Governance: Edited by Michael Barnet and Raymond Duval. In it, I read the following quote attributed to Steiner, 1961 which I thought I should share with you in light of what has happened with our politics to date.
Words carry us forward towards ideological confrontations from which there is no retreat. This is the root of the tragedy of politics. Slogans, clichés, rhetorical abstractions, false antithesis, come to posses the mind. Political conduct is no longer spontaneous or responsive to reality. It freezes around a core of dead rhetoric. Instead of making politics dubious and provisional in the manner of Montaigne, (who knew that principles are endurable only when they are tentative.) Language encloses politicians in the blindness of certainty or the illusion of justice. The life of the mind is narrowed or arrested by the weight of its eloquence. Instead of becoming masters of language, we become its servants.
Steiner 1961.
These words, though written over four decades ago STILL clearly define what we are experiencing in Kenya today.
