The philosopher, statesman and author "Francis Bacon" (1561-1626) dedicated himself to a wholesale revaluation and re-structuring of traditional learning in the English world. His revaluation was to take the place of the established tradition (a miscellany of Scholasticism, humanism, and natural magic), he proposed an entirely new system based on empirical and inductive principles and the active development of new arts and inventions, a system whose ultimate goal would be the production of practical knowledge for "the use and benefit of men" and the relief of the human condition.
And Bacon's efforts helped form the beginning of 'empiricism' as it has been handed down through the Anglo world to the 'common man' in America.
It somehow seems strange to me that practical science, whose applications are "universal," had to be invented as a school of thought in history!
But I think that the requirement for the 'invention' and spread of modern science, was that the human "mind" did indeed have to be devalued or limited and those limitations constitute the epistemology of the modern age. For good or for ill, the modern, scientific age was constructed out of a strict denial of the more mystical elements in life. I say that because the mind does see real magical things, it perceives the inexplicable and the mystical and sees them from an early age.
I mean the type of magic that religion is always involved with. I don't mean only metaphysical origins or god but smaller everyday things that modern physics doesn't touch upon.
When Max Weber famously wrote about the "disenchantment of the world" he was saying that superstitions (and deep philosophical thinking?) were being replaced by empirical invention throughout the western world. And that this was a tragic event in the history of the world.
However, in our post-modern multicultural west, local tribes and local 'belief-systems' are obsessively and religiously protected by political correctness and thought crimes laws. So the situation has changed and now today science is always blamed for killing mother-earth and her concommitant superstitous tribalisms.
What I mean is that today it is the irrational, the mystical, the deep imagination, the fact-as-fiction, and the religious which now surpasses the empirical, the physical and the logical.
Ours is not a culture that believes in science anymore (money does not equate to empricism), but rather one that esteems the magical.
Oswald Spengler in "The Delcine of the West" wrote about modern Western politicians, saying that they were not rational actors but rather the "agents of financial interests." He goes on talking of the power of those politicians and the future:
Yet their power is not eternal. Blood, ethnic pride, cultural chauvinism, territorial instincts and natural aggressiveness, will soon assert themselves against the world of money, science, and technological prowess. An age of violent conflict is opening, and it is obvious an era of perpetual warfare has begun.
New Caesars with armies of fanatical devotees struggle for mastery. Meanwhile the mass of mankind looks on with growing bewilderment, apathy, or resignation, prepared to accept the fate that determined soldiers, terrorist movements, fearful police and militarised states impose.
But long before this comes about, political ideologies and parties will have lost their meaning. Life in a globalised world falls to a level of uniformity where local and national differences virtually cease to exist. The only places that matter will be a handful of gigantic "world cities"-New York, Berlin, Tokyo or Beijing. These will be what Hellenistic Alexandria and Imperial Rome were to the ancient world-vast assemblages of people all living on top of one another, a mob following anyone who keeps them amused.
The lives of the masses will be an empty rehearsal of dull tasks and brutal diversions-arenas and gladiators, gross spectacles of sensuality and sadism watched by drunken roaring crowds. Music will be similarly depraved. Intellectual activity becomes mechanized, practical, cold, and merely clever. The educated lose their feeling for language, and the same basic speech-a coarse argot filled with obscenity-is spoken by intellectuals and workers alike.
* * *
Then when every trace of cultural form and style has disappeared, a new primitivism begins to pervade all human activity. Even the feeling for scientific truth-which may for some time outlast the dissolution of culture-grows vague and uncertain. Superstitions thrive; men believe anything; their appetite for the mysterious and supernatural expands and flourishes. It becomes hard to tell fiction from fact or fact from fiction.
In vulgar credulity the common people try to escape the universal boredom of work in a mechanized and bureaucratised world. Then out of the desolation of city life arises a "second religiosity", a fusion of popular cults and dim memories of forgotten piety. In this way the uncomprehending masses seek to assuage their misery.
The future looms dark and cold and strange. It will require yet more and more magic to keep us warm and safe.
Resources:
Online Article:"Return of the Tribes" by Ralph Peters:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=12616&R=ED9A394EF
Francis Bacon:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/b/bacon.htm#H2
Book: Spengler's Delcine of the West:
http://www.amazon.com
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