ABSTRACT
This quotation reflects a view of civilised man that departs radically from that adopted by classical political, and legal, theory and doctrine. Certainly it is difficult to deny many of the suggestions made: of a dream in ruins, of civic apathy, of asocial patterns. The development in the quotation of a need to return to ‘the killing eye and the dreams of death’ places the character speaking it – a corporate psychiatrist with a skewed and grand vision of applications for his art – a man for whom the moral life is dead and the opportunity to mastermind a large scale social experiment is all. Yet the rationale of mankind he offers – with utilisation of the biological nomenclature ‘homo sapiens’ diverging from that normally adopted in philosophy – of the ‘reformed hunter-killer of depraved appetites’, partly rehabilitated but with ‘a taste for cruelty and an intense curiosity about pain and death’ is a sharp yet feasible departure from the vision nurtured in law. The reliable, stable ‘reasonable man’ for whom depraved appetites are harboured only in the thoughts and actions of deviant minority ‘others’ squares poorly with the generic ‘reformed hunter-killer’. Instead, this text suggests, the boundary between ‘natural curiosity’ regarding deviance and adoption of deviant behaviour is blurred, for society is engaged in a complex web of activities and interests which implicate us all, passive and active. Whatever potential for the pursuit of goodness might have obtained has become subsumed by consumerism and transient gratifications.
