if you look at the years between 1600 and 1789,
you find that there was a transition from the old way of thinking,
the medieval pattern of thought to the modern way of thinking…
the path was lead by science and science was all about seeing for oneself
and not depending on any sort of traditional or authority basis…
like depending on Aristotle for your understanding of the world or
depending on the authority of reveal revelation of the bible…
the world that the new way of thinking found was different but
still understandable in terms of our experiences… the world was one
of many worlds and circled the sun with other planets… this new thinking
was not about the difficulty of the premise, but about the training
and customs that was one was taught since childhood…we had
to break free of the traditional way of thinking about things, but the
idea’s themselves of circling the sun was not hard…it is just hard to
switch one’s thinking from what was one was taught…
we have the new science which is different then the old science…
today we have quantum mechanics and the superstring theory and
attempts to have a Grand unified theory of everything…
these thoughts are not part of everyday experiences…I just
can’t find a common experiences which allows me to easily understand
superstring theory or quantum mechanics…
and that is part of the problem today…the framework of modern science
is not easily understood and not really part of our everyday experiences…
thus we have a hard time trying to make sense of modern science…
turn it into a philosophical framework like the philosophers of the
17 and 18 century did…we don’t have a Descartes or a Hobbes or a Locke
to turn the current scientific theories into understandable philosophy of life…
from our childhood training and customs taught us from birth, we
have been taught to believe in science but and this is important
we don’t understand current science, so we are left without
some support from modern science… it is hard to believe in something
you don’t understand like modern science… and one of the basis of
modern society is the belief in science…so we have a problem…
how can we believe in science when we don’t actually understand it…
and as modern children, we have lost our respect for religion
so we don’t have that basis for our understanding of the world…
we don’t have science to believe and we don’t have religion to believe in,
so, what exactly are we to believe in?
this is the basis of the modern problem…
we are in a crisis and we don’t even know it…
because our traditional standards of belief are gone…
science and religion are both in disgrace and we have
nothing to replace them with…
this has been the crisis of the last 117 years, since the turn of the 20 century…
we have the world wars and the holocaust and the cold war and terrorism,
all events stemming from our lack of something solid to believe in,
like science or religion…a new way is needed. a new way of seeing
things, of understanding things… Nietzsche saw this back in 1880’s…
the coming age, he said, was an age of Nihilism and what is Nihilism?
the general rejection of customary beliefs…the rejection of
science and the rejection of religion… but what to do?
what can replace science and what can replace religion?
that is our task… the modern man task is to find a new way…
to find a new understanding of the modern world in which
we use experiences to create a new model of belief, a new model
of how we understand the world… using science AND religion together,
to create a new, not necessarily better, but new…understanding
of who we are and what is possible for us human beings…
the question is before us… who is brave enough, bold enough to
stand alone and be a creator of values… values that will
give purpose and understanding to the modern world…
who among us… is that leader?
who indeed…
Kropotkin