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| Speaker: John Madeley and some of the club members |
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| Bertie off to Madrid |
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| Dr Barbie Underwood: chair |
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| This is what philosoohy does to you |
| a little blurry ! |
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Picture: Phillip Medhurst
Abstract: | |
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This talk draws a ‘history of ideas’ connection between two
of the Philosophy Club’s recent major themes: the philosophy of religion and
utopian thinking and beliefs. It
addresses the claim made by philosopher and controversial essayist John Gray (eg.
in Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia(2007)) of a
direct historical connection between religious dissidence on the one hand and
utopian beliefs and thinking on the other – from Zoroastrianism and early
Christianity through the Anabaptist ‘revolution’ in Muenster twenty years after
Thomas More penned Utopia (1516) and
on to present times. While Gray is a
non-believer he is an open admirer of the wisdom he sees as nurtured and
maintained by most mainstream religious traditions. On the other hand, he excoriates utopian
thinking (in particular the Enlightenment belief in the possibility of
humanity’s moral progress) and what he takes to be the disastrous political
projects inspired by it in modern times (from the 1789 French Revolution, via
socialist, communist and anarchist experiments to American Neo-Con attempts to
create a New World Order). Many
questions arise: what is the significance of the long, trailing roots utopianism
has in religious dissidence including, in particular, radical sectarian sets of
ideas; how is it that these ideas have been domesticated and rendered
relatively harmless in adventist sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, while they
still remain politically relevant among some Evangelical Protestants,
especially in the USA; and does this even tell us something useful about David
Khoresh’s Waco and ISIS in Raqqa and beyond?
