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Ex nihilo nihil fit.
(Nothing happens by itself)last / next slide
The enlightened society has had an unsolved problem for
150 years now - more than one.
It has never fully re-oriented itself.
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| When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness (Alexis de Tocqueville 1805-1859) |
Who was the contemporary of
Charles Robert Darwin 1809 – 1882
Karl Heinrich Marx 1818 - 1883
Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius 1822 - 1888
Note the dates.
"The LORD giveth, and the LORD taketh away"
- "European" man before about 1870.
"The Lord can stay where he is. I can make it all by myself"
- "European" man after about 1870.
In their hubris, “Westeners” of all denominations overlook the fact that they do not "make" anything, but only transform it, so that their work is subject to entropy; the one thing humans can "make" is something immaterial like money, i. e. invoke debt.
A glance out of the window will show two things:
First, man has not created his surroundings; and secondly, the universe is by no means sinking into chaos, but has blossomed every day anew since the beginning of time - according to our own timeline around 13.5 billion years ago – in "divine", i. e. not man-made order; an order that we feed upon (Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life, 1944) and which is not subject to entropy.
Is that important?
It is essential for survival. Modern man has put himself in God's place, but cannot meet the requirements; as noted, his work is subject to entropy and is therefore dependent on external sources – a fact he has more or less tried to ignore and deny since 1850.
Unlimited energy leads to infinite exhaustion, and after only three great generations, the old religions return.
But how, if not through God, but purely physically, does this vital order arise?
You will find my thoughts on this here, and I've been feeling like Icarus for some time ...
In the beginning, there was fire
(The Second Promethean Revolution)
Some 25,000 years ago, man tamed fire, to keep warm, prepare his food, and slowly change the makeup of his surroundings.
Some time later, around 250 years ago, in the mechanical industrial revolution, culminating in the development of the heat, fire or combustion engine, Europeans in the recently-global "West", brought about a social upheaval which seems to have settled without ever having been fully understood; indeed, the next revolution, digital or biological, may hit its society unprepared.
Unbelievable benefits were reaped in an incredibly short time; but every medal has its flipside, with consequences perceived as unpleasant and dangerous; and the quest to escape these has led to a constant flight forward, seeking to find solutions for current problems in some unknown future.
Up to then, for thousands of years, mankind had lived in a system where known solutions from the past could be re-tried; but the situation had changed so thoroughly that these were no longer viable.
But what was lost was never replaced.
Not that it wasn't tried:
A hundred years after the decisive development of the steam engine by James Watt in the years 1769 and following, it seems the people in the industrialized nations began to realize what unprecedented, almost limitless potential lay in these new machines; in and around the two decades of 1850 - 1870, some endeavored to get a theoretical grasp of the new situation they as humans now found themselves in: Among other things, they would, from now on, be active as producers and not just as recipients; this put into question the necessity of God as a creating and giving being.
The second expulsion from the Garden of Eden was taking place, but this time voluntarily, out of misery and into self-created abundance. An emancipation (or was it one?), the reason for which had yet to be determined; and that from an ever increasing accumulation of newly found knowledge.
These deliberations covered the areas of religion, economics and science - which necessarily overlap: science, roughly spoken, examines what holds the world together, economics, what actions in it are necessary, religion ensures the cohesion of the community.
All three are basically superfluous, as any anthill will show; however, humans, due to their intellectual makeup, are dependent on them to function socially.
That said, and each in their own field of research, it was Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Rudolf Clausius, among others, that set out to form a new world view from the leaps and bounds of scientific and technical progress of their time; and while Darwin and Clausius were scientists in their own right, if so in new areas of research, Marx was a journalist and philosopher out to interpret (and as he said, change) what he found wrong in modern human society.
The decisive impact of these three influential contemporaries will be discussed in the following.
Strangely enough, and to this day, while their ideas were often accepted, they were not really and consistently implemented; and where they were, they often showed themselves to be incomplete to the point of inusability, and their consequences to be paradoxical and destructive, while people held on to their superstitions.
Despite the unprecedented new possibilities, Utopia did not arrive.
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