New raw data is rarely important to scientists : far more important is what is the most currently socially profitable spin to put on this new raw data.
In their individual activities in their own small personal areas of interest,the collectivity of scientists were adding greatly to the Modern Era's overwhelming sense of sensory overload from a plentitude of new facts and sensations.
Life on Earth and Earth itself was much older than thought - from thousands of years to billions.
Ditto the Universe - billions of years old, trillions upon trillions of other suns like ours, other planets like ours.
An outwardly expanding and growing Universe - perhaps expanding and growing forever.
Ever more species being discovered, every more elements, compounds - ever more and more.
With no end in sight.
If scientists kept up with this, they'd soon be as popular as lions at a lambing.
And this was the first generation of wannabe professional scientists - a generation hoping to be well paid and well pensioned for a lifetime of scientific work.
No more amateurs scientists free to say and do as they pleased.
Professional scientists sang to the public for their supper - what they the public wanted , the scientists gave them.
So plentitude of new facts , beings and objects on one hand.
But on the other - the meat cleaver of plenticide.
It took many forms (Social Darwinism being only the best known) but the bottom line was most of this plenticide was living mistakes, living fossils - early tentative working outs on the way to a few pure perfect forms.
Plato would rescue us from Aristotle .....
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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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