This was presented on the same page as Night, an essay by him. In it he outlines his thoughts about the time when most of us fall into blissful sleep. He has a very different perspective of the night and the terrors large and small which he copes with; he suffers from a motor neurone disorder .
I was interested and intrigued and looked up an adaptation of a lecture given at New York University on October 19, 2009 which is to be found at this link from the New York Review of Books; Volume 56, Number 20 · December 17, 2009.
What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?
The article, a plea not to abandon the benefits of the collective provision by government, concludes with the following:
A social democracy of fear is something to fight for. To abandon the labors of a century is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come. It would be pleasing—but misleading—to report that social democracy, or something like it, represents the future that we would paint for ourselves in an ideal world. It does not even represent the ideal past. But among the options available to us in the present, it is better than anything else to hand. In Orwell's words, reflecting in Homage to Catalonia upon his recent experiences in revolutionary Barcelona:I share the fear that we can so easily dismantle and forget the importance of the collective.I believe this to be no less true of whatever we can retrieve from the twentieth-century memory of social democracy.There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.
Nevertheless, I believe there are many of us that keep tapping away at the process of creating the commons and demonstrating its benefits.
Good Stuff!
