A moral philosopher examines the cycles of suffering that perpetuate violence
Jonathan Glover’s new book, on the seemingly intractable nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict, quotes George Orwell on the Spanish civil war: “Everybody believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side without ever examining the evidence.”
This could have been written today, amid bipolar thinking and pressure to take sides, where people’s identification with the facts can reflect their political predilections. Glover wrote the bulk of his study before the recent horrors, though it is published with a foreword addressing them. Not surprisingly, it is still deeply relevant. We have seen these tragic cycles of violence again and again in the past; they continue on an even more horrific scale today. Glover is a philosopher and author of Humanity: a Moral History of the Twentieth Century, which took him 10 years to write and involved careful scrutiny of acts of human barbarism and the ethical questions surrounding them.
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