Serendipity is a wonderful thing … probably should be studied on a larger scale.
On Tuesday I was talking to an industry group about whether they can make strategy and find competitive advantage in capital S sustainability (hint: they can’t!). Then this afternoon I come across this delightful little post. (Thanks Maggie’s!)
It is a humorous and THOUGHTFUL way to wind down the week.
I’ve said here and other places that we now live in the Age of Received Wisdoms, where we believe all manner of hogwash to the point of choosing self destruction over progress. David Warren gives us great historical perspective on the phenomenon…
This is an old story; I taught a course on it once. The same thing happened in the ancient world, to dismember an earlier development of empirical science in the Hellenistic age, centred finally on Alexandria. By the time of the Roman Empire, it was quite dead. The focus of all work was now on applied technology; scientific thinking had, not in contrast to this, but by the same oppressively practical habits, turned to astrology, alchemy, and other fanciful researches. Science had succumbed to scientism, and its results were now the product of “consensus.”
It took more centuries than ten for the idea of demonstrable scientific truth to slice back out of the cocoon of superstition — a large, still mostly unknown history that, in turn, connects the renaissance of the twelfth century with the baroque renaissance that led to such as Newton, and Pasteur.
Yet no sooner had that been achieved, than the gnostic impulse was re-asserted. By the nineteenth century, the “just so stories” (of Marxism, Darwinism, Freudianism, etc.) were back in play, masquerading as empirical science, and we began again weaving our way into a sack of darkness, under the direction of scientistic high priests, girded about by “consensus.”
Please laugh just a bit this weekend!
I’m curious who is defining Darwinism? Outside of a subset of American geneticists, the term isn’t considered regressive or negative.
Mike, nice to see your comment. I think “Darwinism” is defined academically and culturally as a “settled” idea, and thus as a ideological cudgel with which to beat down anyone who either questions the idea or wants to try to prove the science. I think that is Warren’s point.