I have a complicated relationship with science and tech on one side and religion and intuition on the other. I find none of the ease with which people seem to be able to belong to one camp or the other feeling uncomfortable, as I do, at the abject surrender of humanity and individuality which both sides demand as the price of entry into their communities. Intuition had its time which can be said to be past now and we saw during that time its monstrous transformation into a system of monolithic and absolute dictum, ruling the general populace with a hand at once heavy and cruel. We saw it transform into a hideous excuse for controlling the lives of other people in this time and we saw the deadening of the romance which lies at the heart of religion, its ossification into a soulless, pointless, and mediocre set of rules and regulations. When the time came this idiotic and hollowed out framework crumbled under the spirit of the age, it surrendered its limited acuity against the skeptical attitude of the various sciences. And now we have come full circle. Science, and its bastard child which goes by the name of tech, isn't as idiotic as the logic of organized religions but its followers certainly compete very well in the area of intellectual incompetence. For they have again thrown in their lot with an agency they do not understand very well.

At this point it is clear to me that the relentless march of science will serve only to increase the misery of most in this world. In material terms it will drive most people out of a means to earn a reasonable living, eliminating in the process the dignity which humans find in doing a hard day's labor and creating something out of the rough materials of life. This is already seen to be increasingly true in many many areas. On the spiritual front it will hollow out the humans of their humanity, reducing them to atomistic and simplistic entities useful only to the extent where an explanation of the impersonal world is sought. Like leaves, snails, and dust. Not only will it reduce the worth of humans in the context of universal explanations, it will also reduce their worth in their own eyes. In the absence of true humanity, unchecked science will, and has already begun to, reduce humans, their cognition, and their total attention to mere market activities. To notice the modern urban human is to notice a remarkable likeness to a soulless robot, exactly as dead and exactly as mundane.

I ultimately disagree with Berlin's hypothesis that there is no such thing as the inevitability of history. I think there is and the world as we find now could not have been otherwise, or at least would have reached the same stage at an earlier or later time . All that one can do is try to control the short range flows but the long range effects seem to have a force of their own. I think in this sense there is an inevitability in the passing of the baton from religion to science, in the passing of idiocy as well. I'm curious to see the next moves.