October 1, 2023
Dr. David Fialk, Editor / Publisher
Kids these days have no sense of history. They think that nothing important happened before online connectivity, that the world before the internet was in a prehistoric Dark Age. They can't imagine a life worth living without their social networks and news feeds.
It's shocking, but not hard to see why. Put yourself in their place; try to imagine life before electricity.
Yes, today, when the power goes out, you can light some candles and cook dinner on a gas stove. It's pretty romantic, for an hour or so. When we are forced to, we can do without radio waves, cellphones, television, computers and blenders for a while. But once the food in your freezer starts to thaw all the charm of roughing it goes away.
Electricity is our generation's internet, the sine qua non of our oldster culture.
There were other game-changing cultural innovations along the way. The Greeks gave us democracy. The Romans brought us bureaucracy, government strong enough to maintain a far-flung empire. Capitalism was a huge advance over mercantilism, where the crown controlled the economy.
I imagine that every age has thought of itself as some final flowering of humanity, the cat's meow culturally. Today there is a popular academic notion that we have arrived at the End of History, that our liberal democracy is society's perfect end stage. Things have been decided. All that is left is to fill in the details and mop up.
This terminal attitude is reflected in the popular conceit that all the pieces of the scientific puzzle have been identified. The big picture is clear. Everything is more or less in place. All that is left is to tweak some arrangements, fill in some gaps in our knowledge, discover some fine points. Sure, the Human Genome Project failed to provide the expected results, but once Zuckerberg's new initiative to catalogue all human cells reaches its goal, we'll be able to just "turn off" disease. I'm old enough to remember when the internet was going to set us all free.
Individual know-it-alls are insufferable. Societies that know it all are dangerous. The mercantilist king, the communist politburo, the World Economic Forum, the disinformation czar, however well-meaning, cannot work as well as collective human intelligence. You just can't tell where that next world-changing innovation is coming from.
Knowing that there are things, close and important things, that you don't know is the beginning of wisdom. Munich was the first city to take in its municipal water supply from miles upriver, and to release its waste miles downstream, thus eliminating the deadly scourge of cholera. We're not still pooping in our drinking water, but it's beneficial for our public health to consider what we ought to be paying attention to and aren't.
I think that ours is a crisis in meaning.
Kids these days are taught by their postmodern college professors that there is no meaning. Society is only a quest for power. Any system, except for postmodernism, of course, is just trying to gain power over you: achievement, punctuality and 2 + 2 = 4 are racist concepts; men and women don't really exist...
Science operates quite unfairly on a Presumption of Atheism, grossly contorting itself into unscientific theories such as the multiverse to ignore the implications of the unbelievable mathematical precision, the fine-tuning, that makes the existence of our universe possible. Then, you don't hear much about it, but the scientific community agrees that Darwinian Natural Selection works for making small changes, but fails to explain larger innovation. You can make small adjustments around a "peak of functionality," but once you step away from that peak ten or so mutations you descend into non-functional chaos, the protein just falls apart, unfolds.
The world did not evolve from nothing as a random, chaotic power-grab. Animals rely on cooperation much more than dominance. Chimps murder and eat their despotic rulers.
Sir Fred Hoyle
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