Friday, March 28

The modern world, which prides itself on being a repudiation of the irrationalities of a culture that could give rise to an Inquisition, was in fact forged in the fires of those irrationalities, and we can still feel their heat.
This sentence from James Carroll's Constantine's Sword is extraordinarily insightful and can be generalized to many problems of modern life: Racism, the fight against scientific rationality, cultural hegemony, religious conflict, the list goes on... In fact, with a slight re-wording I think it becomes even more relevant:
The modern world, which prides itself on being a repudiation of the 'irrationalities of culture', was in fact forged in the fires of those irrationalities.
How long before rational thought runs the world?