06.15.09
Shadia Drury on Grand Narratives
Canadian political philosopher Shadia Drury, a long-time critic of the late neocon guru Leo Strauss has a very interesting piece in the latest issue of Free Inquiry, which is published by the Center for Secular Humanism. In “Against Grand Narratives” (sorry; not available online), she argues that “Since the triumph of Christianity over the pagan civilizations of Greece and Rome, the West has suffered from the inability to affirm life in the world without an overarching purpose to give it meaning and make it worthwhile.” The Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Muslim provided such grand narratives as part of an effort to “destroy the pagan view of life as an endless cycle” and replacing it with “the cyclical view of history with a linear view that has a magical beginning, an arduous middle, and a very splendid finale.” In the aftermath of the Enlightenment, reason ended up replacing the religious narratives with “an array of secular, but equally grand tales — liberalism, Darwinism, and communism are heirs to the grand narratives of monotheism,” according to Drury. “All assume that human history is not static or cyclical but linear,” with human history being “a meaningful drama moving slowly but surely toward a climax.”