The end of "civilization" as we knew it.

"Thus Blogged Anderson" finds that history--and George W. Bush and company--have played a very cruel joke on Isaiah Berlin's confience in human "progress":

Thus Blogged Anderson. : Berlin on Cheney: Picked up Isaiah Berlin's greatest-hits volume, The Proper Study of Mankind, and have even read the 1st essay therein, "The Pursuit of an Ideal," the overture as it were. One timely passage:

There are, if not universal values, at any rate a minimum without which societies could scarcely survive. Few today would wish to defend slavery or ritual murder or Nazi gas chambers or the torture of human beings for the sake of pleasure or profit or even political good--or the duty of children to denounce their parents, which the French and Russian revolutions demanded, or mindless killing. There is no justification for compromise on this.

Not so few as he thought, back in 1990 when he published the essay.

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do it now.