echoes

[Doug Millison]

Even the ironists of the Enlightenment (Voltaire) had confidently predicted
the lasting abolition of judicial torture in Europe. They had ruled
inconceivable a general return to censorship, to the burning of books, let
alone of heretics or dissenters. Nineteenth-century liberalism and
scientific positivism regarded as self-evident the expectation that the
spread of schooling, of scientific-technological knowledge and yield, of
free travel and contact among communities would bring with them a steady
improvement in civility, in political tolerance, in the mores of private and
public business. Each of these axioms of reasoned hope has been proved
false. It is not only that education has shown itself incapable of making
sensibility and cognition resistant to murderous unreason. Far more
disturbingly, the evidence is that refined intellectuality, artistic
virtuosity and appreciation, scientific eminence will collaborate actively
with totalitarian demands or, at best, remain indifferent to surrounding
sadism. Resplendent concerts, exhibitions in great museums, the publication
of learned books, the pursuit of academic research both scientific and
humanistic, flourish within close reach of the death camps. Technocratic
ingenuity will serve or remain neutral at the call of the inhuman. The icon
of our age is the preservation of a grove dear to Goethe within a
concentration camp. 
http://books.guardian.co.uk/firstchapters/story/0,6761,494705,00.html

from, Grammars of Creation by George Steiner