I think there's something to your comment Adrian. Obviously there's no need to reinvent the wheel. As far as technology goes, we still have several major 'breakthroughs' that are much anticipated: fusion, hydrogen engines and (maybe this is just me) teleporting. Environment and our reaction to it should insure that our technological wishlist will always be long, and current ingenuity shows promise of making progress on it. Philosophically or intellectually it seems to be a different matter. The intellectual 'environment' or paradigm plays a large role in determining the quality of thinking each generation does. The predominant materialist ideology of today is dogmatic, simple and not likely to stimulate much good thinking or writing among us.

For dogmatic, take for example the intelligent design controversy. I myself, for no real reason considering how little I understand the debate, think evolution operates by natural selection. There are a lot of people who don't, and I know some of them. They are not creationists or fundamentalists, they recognize merely that materialism (some wags call it scientism) may not be sufficient to explain our origins. So they think maybe god had a hand in evolution. Whatever. What's telling is the preposterous reaction of the establishment. All the Ivy league presidents 'courageously' rushed to denounce the ID advocates. There was no real engagement from any with ID's strongest arguments.

Also, our current consensus seems simplistic. Those who claim the metaphysical and supernatural have no place in the public realm forget Marx, who once said that the smallest human unit is not one but two. To exclude anything from the public square is to exclude it altogether. In ages prior to ours, cultures acknowledged a metaphysical reality, the contemplation of which lied behind much of the best art and philosophy. What about our cultural institutions? Take the NYT. The New York Times website has many categories on the left side of the page. They offer an interesting lens for how The Times, "the parish paper of secularism" views what's 'fit to print'. When categories like 'Crosswords', 'Home and Garden', 'Fashion and Style', 'Dining and Wine' and the especially redundant 'Sports' and 'Olympics' all make the cut, the exclusion of 'Religion' is especially striking. I for one would be happy to compromise for "Spirituality" if they put a space between 'Cross' and 'words' --so it would be Cross Words-- that would give it an intersting meta-journalistic element of irony.

So instead of great works, we have great un-works. The best texts of modernity seem to deconstruct. Nietzche announces God is dead. Foucault and Derrida say something or other and WHAMMO we are all post-structuralists. As acts of vandalism, these authors works are impressive, especially considering the merits of what they rejected. In previous ages, the tension between the real and the metaphysical produced some great thinking and writing, even living. Casanova began in the church and certainly we can class him as having a personality type similar to that of the megalomaniac saints. Now that there is nothing left to deconstruct, it seems that our post(fill in blank)ist paradigm has little to offer. Certain texts, like Angels in America, have reintroduced the supernatural and they benefit immensely for it. Life is more intersting when earth is framed by heaven and hell.

posted by Matthew Schmitz   [8:00 PM]

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