Perhaps there are fewer great thinkers in the modern era because there are fewer revolutionary thoughts left to think. You can only refocus all that there is to think a few times per social-technological revolution, and perhaps, society must become drastically different before we need different perspectives than we already have. No one is coming up with the thinks Kant or Nagarjuna came up with because they already came up with them. I'm not saying there won't be new thoughts, but that they will require more thought, time, and effort than those before them. Lets look at say Physics or Metallurgy as a parallel. In the past it was enough to learn that there was gravity or how to make copper. We already have these skills today; we can marvel at the civilizations that made copper and think "that was really something," but they will be remembered for it, even if we, given the same situation, could have done the same thing. Perhaps different schools of thought are like copper and bronze and steel; once you have them, they don't go away, and while there theoretically are more and more alloys that you could make (that is, more fine-tuning and mingling of theory) once you have the major ones, there simply are fewer breakthroughs left to make.

Idunno. Lets wait a thousand years.

posted by Adrian   [7:28 PM]

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