|
|
Foreword
As I sit down to write these words of introduction to Joshua Shaw’s excellent book on Emmanuel Levinas, the morning’s news is filled, as it regularly is, with stories about the plight of the victims of floods and tornadoes, about the hopes and suffering of war-torn peoples, about violence in neighborhoods and schools, and in general of the troubled, uncertain lives we live in our society and elsewhere around the world. The twentieth century saw the invention of modern warfare and a scale of violence and catastrophe previously unknown, and we are its heirs. For all their successes, modern science, advanced technology, and bureaucratic sophistication have provided us with nothing less than more efficient tools to injure and annihilate; and religion, for all its advocacy of decency and humanity, has also cultivated fanaticisms that live on the violent hatred of those deemed enemies of what is holy and right. It may be that the vocabulary of crisis is overused, but who can deny that it is appropriate. We are in a bad state and one that does not promise to abate.