Civilization Is A Disease
Civilization Is A Disease
‘Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.’ George Bernard Shaw placed that line in ‘Maxims for Revolutionists’, appended to Man and Superman, and the sentence still shocks because it does not merely criticise modernity; it pathologises it. Shaw, a leading Fabian and public intellectual, belonged to a reformist socialist milieu that believed society could be engineered gradually and rationally from above. Yet that same rationalist confidence often shaded into something darker: population management, elite planning, and the fantasy that humanity itself could be improved by sorting, disciplining, breeding, excluding, and sometimes eliminating the ‘unfit’. Shaw’s line can therefore be read not only as a critique of civilization, but as an unwitting confession about one of civilization’s recurring diseases: the educated elite’s urge to redesign humanity. ([online-literature.com][1])
Comments (1)
I couldn't get on with it, sadly! I wanted to, loads of people raved about it ☺