May 20, 2005

Horowitz -The End of Time

In a new FrontPage Magazine piece previewing his new book "The End of Time", David Horowitz reflects on life, love and death. It shows a side of Horowitz we haven't seen much, as he admits to writing in a different "voice" in describing a new love in middle age, his fight with prostate cancer, and an ongoing wrestling match between agnosticism and faith.

As much as life may have changed David Horowitz, one theme remains constant since he famously parted company with the radical Left more than 30 years ago. And that is the recognition of the human misery, repression and death that inevitably attend attempts at forced utopianism by "earthly redeemers" of whatever stripe...

The world we live in -- unjust, chaotic, and suffused with suffering -- is full of earthly redeemers. They are both secular and religious. These are people who cannot abide the life they have been given or who cannot wait to see if the end of their time on this earth will bring them a better in the next. These are the radicals who believe that without a divine intervention they can build a kingdom of heaven in this life, on this earth.

To realize their mission, both secular and religious radicals divide the world into two realms – the realm of those who are saved and the realm of those who are damned. Believers and infidels, oppressors and oppressed.

Therefore radicals are permanently at war; their lives are a perpetual jihad.

The fact is that we all long for a judgment that will make the world right. A God who will reward virtue and punish the wicked. Therefore, every God of Love is also a God of righteousness and death. And that is why the radical belief in a redemption in this world is the most destructive force in the heart of mankind.

I once shared this radical faith. Life was intolerable to me without a redemptive hope. This quest for a world transformed brought tragedy to me as it has brought tragedy to the lives of so many others. The Twentieth Century is a graveyard in which millions of corpses were sacrificed to the illusion of an earthly salvation.

No book I have read in the last 20 years affected me more profoundly than did Horowitz' autobigraphy Radical Son, both in terms of helping to understand the destructiveness of the utopian impulse, and also in getting a perspective on the 60's and the Vietnam era that I was too preoccupied and/or disengaged to grasp at the time. I have long admired him for backing his liberal principles with action and inspiring others with his words. Good luck David, with the new book, the relationship, and best wishes for continued good health.

Posted by dan at May 20, 2005 01:49 PM
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