Stephen Chan – The End of Certainty
This book from Stephen Chan aims to approach different arguments from a multi-layered platform. He asks us what a magical realist novel would look like as an intellectual essay? The answer is, rather pompous and self serving. That is not to say there aren’t some important contributions to this book. He meshes together what has been discussed at the end of each chapter and connects it to some area of international politics. This is done expertly and concisely, but leaves you wondering as to why you needed the previous 22 pages of the chapter in the first place?
He draws on areas of religion and the arts to formulate an idea of society, cherry picking where it suits and leaving other parts of the dissected thought aside. He argues against utopia by advocating his own interpretation of utopia without seeing the contradiction.
When Chan speaks about his own experiences in war zones or working with medicine sans frontiers he is at his most unarmed and easy going. When he gets into discussing the varied levels of thought of other philosophers he has a tendency to become disjointed and borderline unreadable.
The End of Certainty is definitely a riposte to the two “great” right-wing, neoliberal tracts of the late 20th century; Francis Fukuyama’s End of History and Samuel P. Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilisations, both of which Chan pulls apart with great clarity and in fierce opposition to their right-wing attitude towards progress, itself a misnomer.
One of the most important areas of the book is showing how modern, and to a lesser degree, bygone western philosophers ignore a huge amount of thought by choosing only western sources for their own learning and are thus redundant in their ability to spread knowledge about any civilisation but their own. His prose is beautiful at times and baffling at others. He is clearly a much cleverer person than I could ever hope to be, and it is in this assurance that he misunderstands his audience. There are phrases such as “and we all know that…” before going on to say something we don’t all know, things that perhaps only someone with a classical education would know. There is supreme arrogance in the writing. The message is a good one, although as I say, utopian in the extreme without knowing it, but the way of putting it across is almost impenetrable, which is sad, since at times the book shines with a perspicacity that it required more of.
Sarah
redosiris
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