Maybe as a species we really have reached the same evolutionary dead end as Australopithecus robustus – intelligent enough as a species to create problems we're not bright enough, or adaptable enough, to solve. I don’t know. But if extinction, or a return to the dark ages, is indeed our fate – or our grandchildren’s fate, anyway – I think it will be a Hobson’s choice as to which cultural tendency will bear the largest share of the blame: the arrogant empiricism that has made human society into an instrument of technological progress instead of the other way around, the ignorant prejudices of the masses, who are happy to consume the material benefits of the Enlightenment but unwilling to assume intellectual responsibility for them, or the cynical nihilism of corporate and political elites who are willing to play upon the latter in order to perpetuate the former, which is, after all is said and done, their ultimate claim to power.Read the whole thing -- it's depressing, but interesting.
In my dark nights when I can't sleep, I often worry that this thing we call liberal democracy has basically come to an end, that the inmates have run the asylum for too long (and not just since the Shrub came into office) and that we're all basically screwed. But we can't live our lives that way, and have to hope that somehow, in some way, that reasonable people can begin to make right those things in the world that irrationality and superstition have made wrong.
Not much else to say, honestly. If I were a praying man, I'd pray.
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