Existential Choice in the Time of Trump, 3

Conscience and Human Judgment

Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sarrre

Third and last in a series.

1. The Hinge of Fate

2. Cognitive and Human Divides

3. Conscience and Human Judgment

Existential Choice in the Time of Trump

Existential Choice in the Time of Trump, 2

One might think a reasonable knowledge of the long history since antiquity of human barbarity would leave little room for further disillusionment.

Human beings may or may not have advanced to Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now and, at the price of totalitarian control, raised 800 million out of poverty since 1980 in China alone. But they have also produced, in little more than a century, two civilization-altering world wars, the Armenian Genocide, the Holodomor, the Holocaust, the Gulag, further tens of millions dead from China’s “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution,’ and lesser millions in the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia and the killing zones of Syria.

A reasonable knowledge of human nature also tells us that such focus on the worst – not in the world, dear Readers, but in ourselves – holds no place eithe…