Elephants and turtles: Difference between revisions
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===The Big Idea is dead, and we have killed it=== | ===The Big Idea is dead, and we have killed it=== | ||
To make a whopping great narrative, try this: the Enlightenment slowly suffocated God | To make a whopping great narrative, try this: the gently advancing enquiries of the Enlightenment slowly suffocated God. Copernicus started it, in the 15th century, displacing the Earth from the centre of the universe; it fell to [[Charles Darwin]] to deliver the ''coup de grace'' four centuries later, and {{author|Friedrich Nietzsche}} to announce it to the world. | ||
But when we killed God, we gave quite a lot ''else'' away, too. Quite useful stuff: a settled means of telling right from wrong, for one thing. And, well, ''truth''. | |||
Without God the enlightened western intellectual tradition needed to rebase all these organising principles from scratch: to ditch ''one'' Big Idea, it needed to replace it with ''another''. A ''new'' Big Idea was there, waiting to take over, at the moment the old one fell back lifeless on Charles Darwin’s specimen table. The New Big Idea was, of course, the enlightenment scientific tradition itself. Rationalism. Now, here is an interesting thing: what if the very idea that there must ''be'' a Big Idea, at all, is a function of the ''Old'' Big Idea — the one that just joined the choir invisible? Was Rationalism, in a profound way, utterly bound to the intellectual mores from whose surly bonds it slipped? | |||
For now, hold that thought, for the Big Ideas that rushed in to replace God ''all'' did all cleave, strongly to the notion that ''there must be a Big Idea''. Science could yield ''physical'' truth about the world, but not ''moral'' truth. Making an is from an ought is tricky. The attempts to do so — to imagine a utopian future derived from the rational precepts of enlightenment, and free of the mysticism of turtles, elephants, geometrically illogical trinities and so forth, dependent only upon the scientific method, we call [[modernism]]. | |||
Science provided the foundation for physical truth, but needed rationalist programmes to coordinate the moral components. New Big Ideas were needed, and before long they presented themselves. In the early twentieth century there were two, both were as utopian, as they were disastrous. Between them, we can see the birth, and immediate crisis of, [[Modernism|modernity]]. | |||
===The Turtle as a metaphor for our times=== | |||
In any case, failure of the “world turtle” [[metaphor]] is in its own inadvertent way, a potent symbol for the malaise of our time. A ''meta''-metaphor. Knowledge, friends: we are getting rather close to the turtle. | In any case, failure of the “world turtle” [[metaphor]] is in its own inadvertent way, a potent symbol for the malaise of our time. A ''meta''-metaphor. Knowledge, friends: we are getting rather close to the turtle. | ||
{{draft}} | {{draft}} |