Randy wuller wrote:
What he can't explain is why anyone would run around the internet
trying to stop people from investigating a phenomenon. It makes no
sense and is probably a symptom of the very negative period (I would
describe it as the age of pessimism) we find ourselves living
through. When the pendulum shifts and we enter an optimistic age,
everything will seem possible and as such being for something will be
much more productive (it always is) than being against something. You
will find a lot less Cude's running around, thank goodness.
Yes. I have long felt that we are living in an age of pessimism. Also,
people have the notion that we are living through rapid technological
progress, but I disagree. Progress was much faster from 1890 to 1950. As
Chris Tinsley said, every major technology was invented by then and we
have been making only incremental improvements ever since. By that date
we had computers, semiconductors, lasers, jet aircraft and just about
everything else.
In one of my papers I quote from the author Walter Lord about ages of
optimism. He wrote:
"The spirit of an era can't be blocked out and measured, but it is there
nonetheless. And in these brief, buoyant years it was a spark that
somehow gave extra promise to life. By the light of this spark, men and
women saw themselves as heroes shaping the world, rather than victims
struggling through it.
Actually, this was nothing unique. People had seen the spark before,
would surely do so again. For it can never die as long as men breathe.
But sometimes it burns low, leaving men uncertain in the shadows; other
times it glows bright, catching the eye with breath-taking visions of
the future."
Quoted here:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcomparison.pdf
Ages of pessimism were described by Giorgio de Santillana in his book
"The Origins of Scientific Thought," (1961) chapter 19, describing the
intellectual atmosphere around 200 BC. It is a marvelous essay. Perhaps
I should upload the whole thing. Here are a few quotes.
Decline and Fall
It is a common experience of our time that enough change takes place in
one generation to more than fill a century for our grandfathers. Things
seem to go the other way in antiquity after about 200 B.C.-a divide
which is marked not only by the death of Archimedes but by the
consolidation of Roman dominion over the Hellenistic empires.
Intellectually, what had been decades become centuries. . . .
A. The Hellenistic states which came after the conquests of Alexander
(and Rome is only the last of them) had not only become a very mixed
civilization, they had become uniformly "big-time," with huge and
fearsome structures of power. State cults of divine rulers,
state-encouraged superstitions, the worship of blind Fortune, had
replaced the old city gods. . . . Science was represented no longer by
free men and respected elders of the community, but by subsidized
intellectuals who were told to go and perform and quote one another in
ample institutions like the library of Alexandria, and also (this was an
order) to provide moral uplift and entertainment for the arts-loving
ruling class. . . .
B. Economic decline has set in. There seems to be a failure of
imagination at the root of it all. A great and
stable and ever more complicated administration needs economic growth to
keep pace with it, and the Roman Empire seems to have been strangely
incapable of economic and political growth; even more so than the
Chinese. . . . Dullness, conformity, and gloom spread like a pall of
smog over the last centuries. Science became manuals and encyclopedias,
literature became stale rhetoric on "classic" models, or tales of the
wondrous.
C. The failure of imagination explains, among other things, why men
became so reactionary-minded, even when they thought they were
entertaining the most lofty and liberal ideals. Something like that was
to occur again in the American South. When Aristotle, the great master
of ethics, said that slavery is a fact of nature, and that we shall need
slaves so long as the shuttle will not run in the loom by itself, he had
registered one of those great mental blocks which foretell the end of a
cycle. And this leads us to what is obviously crucial, the lack of an
applied science.
Pure science is always a hazardous and unfinished affair, stretching out
its structures in perilous balance over the unknown. It does not suit
men's whims or comfort their fears. In order to be accepted by a
tough-minded society, it must produce unquestionable and stunning
results, as happened with Newton's laws. Otherwise, it will be told to
lay off and not disturb people's minds unnecessarily. . . .
- Jed
