Some much-needed retrospective reflection is underway in academia, or at least in some corners of it. With it comes the relief of no longer having to blame myself for how awful that milieu was making me feel by the time I fell off the conveyor belt.

I am left with a lingering sense of my own cowardice, however. Having always thought myself a free-thinker—and, ironically, having been so greatly attracted to academia by its claims to being a harbour of free thought—I realise that I was led, by my desire to at long last belong somewhere, to acquiesce and affirm things that I didn’t believe to be true.

(Yes, lots of ironies in there, on all sides—and a nice chewy chunk of complicity, too.)

Anyway, this review at the NYRB is worth reading right through, especially if you feel yourself recoiling on the basis of the title alone. I’m clipping this particular bit, though, because of its direct address of an antinomy with which this blog has long been engaged:

Rieff seems confident that we are living at the end of the liberal democratic order. That confidence is based on a distinction he draws between hope as “a (non-falsifiable) metaphysical category” and optimism, which is empirical. If one is inclined, he says, one can choose to hope, but there’s precious little evidence to ground it.

Immanuel Kant drew the same distinction, though he called hope a moral category rather than a metaphysical one, and the distinction is important. Since hope is a moral category, it becomes an obligation. For if we give up hoping, we will be unable to act to avert any of the catastrophes that could bring the world down. Hope is not an inclination or an emotion; it’s a duty.

I think I stand more with Rieff than with Neiman, his reviewer, on the imminent demise of liberal democratic order. I also think that its ending may be a precondition of the formation of something better, and that believing so is my own moral obligation.