So there it is then : Sir Charles Lyell and Adolf Hitler joined at the intellectual hip.
Both responded uneasily to the plenitude of plenitudes that scientific and economic advances brought to people living in the Victorian Era.
Their personal responses certainly differed, but both their ill-ease and their solution shared much in common.
Their plentiphobia was eased by greatly reducing and ordering the apparent plenitude of objects and actions flying about 'out there' in the new freedom that the Victorian Age - pace Charles Darwin - seemed to have thrown up (God is Dead).
Ironically, Lyell by metaphorically removing Nature and Nature's catastrophes as a potent sort of explanation for human failures only increased the freedom-from that Hitler and his followers found so mentally threatening.
Disbelieve in God means disbelieving in the Devil - and disbelief in natural disasters simply removed yet another scapegoat for human failings.
That pretty well only leaves the Jews, the Romas, the Slavs and the Handicapped to carry the can to the gas chamber ....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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