Conflict, Part III

I am suggesting that in our global society the epistemological map is being redrawn, and that the lines may be a little more clear than they were twenty years ago. It is an epistemology built upon deep psychological footings, and it is pervasive, that is, it is part of the shared cultural experience. Economic alliances will enforce its claims on the everyday lives of our neighbors. This is a strong philosophical trend, even if it is poorly defined in the citizen's mind. But let's define it:

Truth is what the computers generate (or what we get from institutions most closely associated with powerful computer technology).

I began a couple of days ago under the headline "We've Done this Dance Before". I think there is an historical period which is analogous to our present age, especially with respect to our allegiance to the increasing powers of computer processes. It was an age in which popular confidence was eagerly lent to a new philosophical system; a system promising individual liberation, political and scientific strength, and a prospect for growth unlike anything that came before it. I know of no writer who conveys the feel of this period better than Jacques Barzun, one of the premier scholars of the twentieth century. Mss'r Barzun was born in France in 1907, came to the States in 1920, and developed his brilliant academic career at Columbia. In the year 2000 he published From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present. It is a beautifully written account of western cultural decline. Here is Mss'r Barzun on the early Enlightenment:

Encyclopedia - the "circle of teachings" -may be taken as the emblem of the 18th century. Like the Renaissance, the age was confident that the new knowledge, the fullness of knowledge, was in its grasp and was a means of EMANCIPATION. Confidence came from the visible progress in scientific thought. Science was the application of reason to all questions, no matter what tradition might have handed down. Everything will ultimately be known and "encircled".

Sounds like the cutline from yesterday, no? But back to Mss'r Barzun:

The goal of exploring nature and mind and broadcasting results was to make Man everywhere of one mind, rational and humane. Language, nation, mores, and religion would cease to create differences, deadly as everybody knew. With a single religion and its universal morals and with French as the international medium of the educated it would be a world peopled with - or at least managed by - philosophes.