Power and Morality 汉译

The 20th century -- the century of metamyths and of megadeaths -- spawned false notions of total control, derived from arrogant assertions of total righteousness. The religious man of pre-modern times, who accepted reality as God-ordained, had given way to the secular fanatic, increasingly inclined to usurp God in the effort to construct heaven on earth, subordinating not only nature but humanity itself to his own utopian vision.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

In the course of the century, this vision was perverted into the most costly exercise of political hubris in mankind's history: the totalitarian attempt to create coercive utopias. All of reality -- on the objective level of social organization and on the subjective level of personal beliefs -- was to be subject to doctrinal control emanating from a single political center. The price paid in human lives for this excess is beyond comprehension.

Adding them all up, somewhere between 167 million and 175 million individual human beings were deliberately extinguished through politically motivated carnage -- the scores of millions of soldiers and civilians killed in the century's wars, the further scores of millions killed in concentration camps, gulags, forced collectivization, ethnic transplantings, and killing fields decreed by self-deified dictators.

The tens of millions that were killed because they were perceived, for racial or social reasons, as unworthy of living within the earthly utopia—and the many millions more that were coerced into living within these systems -- all testify to the hypnotic appeal of the metamyths of Nazism that postulated the end of history and the attainment of perfection within utopias of total control.

The manifest failure of that endeavor has given way in the West to the current antithesis, which is essentially that of minimal control over personal and collective desires, sexual appetites, and social conduct. But inherent in the almost total rejection of any control is the notion that all values are subjective and relative.

In brief, this century has seen mankind move from experimentation with the coercive utopia of totalitarianism to enjoyment of the permissive cornucopia of today's America—from a passionate embrace of the absolutist metamyths of Hitler, Lenin, Mao, and their followers to careless toying with relativistic agnosticism.