>Understanding Human Ignorance< >>>>> Chapter Six >>>>> Humankind's Predicament 2019

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 19^th century laid the foundation for a 20^th 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 20^th 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 21^st century.

 

As the violent years from 1901 through 2000 ensued and then yielded to a 21^st 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 20^th century. 

 

Concurrent with the violent conditions of life and other demonstrations of general ignorance were astounding achievements in the course of the 20^th century and early 21^st 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 19^th century, the entire 20^th century, and the first two decades of the 21^st 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.