(no subject)

[solitary_summer]

50bookchallenge: #3: Teddy Kollek with Dov Goldstein, Jerusalem und Ich

I picked this one up at work and honestly didn't expect to actually finish it, because 400+ pages of political memoir is usually not exactly my kind of thing. But once I started I found the style and personal voice compelling; it's unpretentious, direct, very passionate and balanced as far as I can tell - equally critical of arab and jewish narrow-mindedness and fanaticism. Rather then dwell on generalisations, the book offers a detailed insight into life in Jerusalem from the perspective of communal politics, the uneasy coexistence of the different ethnic and religious groups, but also more 'mundane' matters like communal building projects, budget problems, struggles with the Israeli government. It's also - maybe most of all - a plea for democracy, tolerance and mutual respect in order to make it possible for everyone to live in this city Kollek loves so much.

But one can't quite help reading it with a melancholy feeling, because sadly I think much of his vision is lost on today's world, and I'm not only talking about Israel. It's too complex, too much relying on 'old-fashioned' concepts like patience and compromises; mutual respect. The tragic irony is of course that personally I believe that this would indeed be the only way to assure a lasting peace of any kind.

A dying breed of politician in today's world - a firm belief in personal responsibility, politics of long-term aims and small steps rather than flashy catch-phrases and easy pseudo-solutions, the conviction that a democratic state owes it to itself to treat all its citizens according to its principles.

Comments

ah well

[un-crayon-rouge.livejournal.com]

>>But one can't quite help reading it with a melancholy feeling, because sadly I think much of his vision is lost on today's world, and I'm not only talking about Israel. It's too complex, too much relying on 'old-fashioned' concepts like patience and compromises; mutual respect. The tragic irony is of course that personally I believe that this would indeed be the only way to assure a lasting peace of any kind.<<

I so agree with that. Wisdom against information, is how I usually think about it. No one knows what wisdom is anymore, or what it would be good for. Information is power, and it's nothing - just like money.

Re: ah well

[solitary-summer.livejournal.com]

Good point. We are being fed all those bits & pieces of information, facts and factoids - Informationsgesellschaft & such - but how to process it, make sense of it, to go a step beyond mere accumulating...

[ Which reminds me, I think there is a passage in one of Mary Renault's novels, where (roughly paraphrased) her Plato criticises Aristotle for being forever obsessed with the 'how' of things and never progressing to the 'why''. Now for some reason she doesn't seem to like Aristotle, and so that's maybe neither here nor there, but the sad thing is, I believe today we've regressed from the 'how' to the 'what'... and 'how much'. ]