Thus did the great bulk of humankind
arrive at late modern and contemporary times male-dominated, dictatorially
ruled, economically exploited, and ill-educated.
Humankind in the 19th
century laid the foundation for a 20th century that was an Enlightenment
philosophe’s (think Voltaire) nightmare:
World War I was appallingly stupid
in causation and strategy. Capitalist
myopia produced the Great Depression.
The blunders and exigencies of both of these events engendered World War
II, violent enough on field, air, and ocean of battle had not the killing of
six million Jews also been part of the spectacle. Ill-advised diplomacy and Big Power chauvinism
yielded the Cold War, as if hot war had not been enough. And then Cold War brought more hot war, with
Big Power and proxy interventions in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Ethiopia, Argentina,
and many other locations. The police state masquerading as democracy in the United
States and its South African impersonator induced civil strife. Colonialism and colonialism’s end brought
awkward attempts to create nationalism in the absence of nationalist sentiment,
complete with wretched governance and abominable brutality that rivaled the
violence that had been perpetrated by exiting imperialists. By the end of the violent 20th
century, long festering sectarian wounds burst asunder, the north-south
division of Ireland upon independence (as the Irish Free State within British
Dominion, 1922; as non-commonwealth Republic
of Ireland, 1948), the Arab-Israeili wars (1948, 1956, 1968, 1973), and the
Iranian Revolution (1979) foreshadowing increasingly virulent
Protestant-Catholic conflict in Ireland (1969-1997), the Iraq-Iran war
(1981-1988), the ascendance of the Taliban in Afghanistan during and after the
failed Russian intervention (1980-1986), and the violent explosions launched by
Al-Qaida and then the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, also known as the
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [ISIL]) within the first two decades of
the 21st century.
As the violent years
from 1901 through 2000 ensued and then yielded to a 21st century
successor that signified also a new millennium, the New York City Twin Tower
and Pentagon bombings plus downed United Airlines Flight 93 brought tightened
security that terminated any remnant innocence that had survived the
hostilities of the 20th century.
Concurrent with the
violent conditions of life and other demonstrations of general ignorance were
astounding achievements in the course of the 20th century and early
21st century produced by that minority of humanity possessing full
prose proficiency or other abilities that far exceeded humankind as a whole, symbolized
and materially manifested in the advent of the mass-produced automobile,
heavier than air flight, atomic and nuclear weaponry and energy-generation, the
mainframe computer, space flight and lunar landing, personal computers, digital
cameras, cell phones, and smart phones incorporating many of these technologies
into one amazingly compact device.
The salient
feature of life throughout the late 19th century, the entire 20th
century, and the first two decades of the 21st century is that a
fraction of humanity has elevated comprehension of scientific processes and
technological applications while the mass of humanity rushes to use devices
created in these applications with little understanding of what they are using,
how the devices were created, with what materials, at what human cost (think koltan
from the [non-] Democratic Republic of the Congo), or why.
More concisely,
the salient feature of life in 2019 is that one portion of humanity has a deep
understanding of science and technology while they and the bulk of the population
have very little understanding of themselves.
Knowledge of science and technology far outstrips understanding of
psychology, religion, purpose, and meaning.
Application of scientific and technological knowledge in the absence understanding
the psycho-spiritual nature of those by and for whom technological devices are
created is portentous:
We are paying
dearly for this knowledge gap and we shall endure future catastrophic consequences
if we do not close the gap with persistent and unprecedented acquisition of
factual information and utilization of that knowledge in philosophical
contemplation, psychological inquiry, analytical reasoning, and the development
of more sophisticated sense of meaning and ethics that draws from but far transcends
the tenets of established religions.
Women and those
tentatively liberated in the social convulsions from the late 1960s forward
must as in all other endeavors lead the way in resolving the gap between
science and religion.
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