In the Spring of 1939, at the the New York World's Fair, Modernity or Scientism (the words are totally inter-changable) promised the deserving parts of the world a future of Four Freedoms: eventual freedom from material limitations, from catastrophes like the weather, from dependence upon lesser breeds and beings and, above all , from uncertainty.
In Fall of 1945, another set of Four Freedoms - originating from a speech given by FDR in January 1941 - seemed to offer all the world's human beings a more credible and attractive life --- if equally set at some distant date in the future.
But also in the Fall of 1945, a few people, on the way to becoming post-modernist, were beginning to ask whether even those Four Freedoms were an adequate or accurate rebuttal to Modernism's Four Freedoms.
Today, to be fully post-Modernist and to be fully post-Scientism , to be fully in the Twenty First Century , is to totally accept the permanent existence of material limitations, catastrophes, uncertainty and the right of existence for lesser breeds and lesser beings.
So there we have it : the rise and the fall of Scientism, from apogee to nadir ....
On Oct 16th 1940, Gotham's concrete jungle rescued the NATURAL penicillin stone its (British) builders had rejected and gave the world's first antibiotic shot. Alexander Fleming's ARTIFICIAL penicillin (ironically from leafy green Oxford !) won a Nobel but failed morally and technically. Instead Manhattan Natural radiated hope to a world tired, huddled and wretched. On its 75th, let's remind terrorist Ramzi Yousef about a Manhattan project that saved far more lives than the A-Bomb ever killed.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment