Category: Civilization, History, and Anthropology

(FB 1543073761 Timestamp) PROMETHEAN FIRE: ARYANS, SEMITES & SCIENCE by @[100016659043273:2048:Daniel Gurpide] (must read – as always – by @[100016659043273:2048:Daniel Gurpide] ) The world today is dominated by technology as never before. It is impossible to travel anywhere without seeing some manifestations of the technological wizardry that has shaped life on the planet today—particularly those innovations developed at the time of the Industrial Revolution. One crucial—and typically ignored—feature of this astonishing technological revolution is that the great technological innovations which have set the pace for the entire world are exclusively the product of a tiny minority of Europeans. One of the particular traits of Indo-European languages, already noticed in the nineteenth century by such philologists as Wilhelm von Humboldt and Ernest Renan, was their implicit capacity for abstract thought—a precondition of any sort of scientific theory and praxis. Renan was also the first to establish a connection between religion and ethno-geographical origin. He contrasted a ‘psyche of the desert’ found among Semites—‘the desert is monotheistic’—with a ‘psyche of the forest,’ characteristic of Indo-Europeans whose polytheism appears to be modelled on a changing nature and a diversity of seasons. He observed that the intolerance of Semitic people is an inevitable consequence of their monotheism. Indo-European peoples, before their conversion to Semitic ideas, never regarded their religion as absolute truth. This is why there is found among these peoples ‘a freedom of thought, a spirit of critical inquiry, and individual research.’ Techne (technological development)—the appropriation and control of a surrounding environment via technology—may be considered a trait defining the ‘specifically human.’ It is inevitable companion to the progress of human knowledge; however, it also describes something that has been devised and developed in a peculiar way only in the Indo-European context: from the Battle-Axe culture war chariot to the laser and the moon rockets designed by Wernher von Braun. In particular, modern technology is closely linked to the West—to a culture underpinned by a ‘compromise’ between Europe and Judeo-Christianity. Following the Christianisation of Europe, paganism survived underground in several forms. It survived in folk beliefs and traditions; in ‘heretical’ trends inside or on the margins of official religion that have extended even into the present; and in a collective unconscious that finds release chiefly in music, and in science and technology. In this sense, science and technology may be interpreted as arising from the impact of long-standing monotheistic repression of the European collective subconscious, and from the contradictory process of secularisation and emancipation to which this repression gave rise, and which began with the Renaissance. What doesn‘t kill you, makes you stronger…Let us remember the names of the American rockets and space programs of von Braun’s times: Thor, Atlas, Titan, Jupiter, Delta, Mercury, Apollo. None was called “Jesus,” “Forgiveness and Love,” or “Holy Bible.” In Man and Technics, Spengler wrote: ‘To build a world oneself, to be oneself God—that is the Faustian inventor’s dream, and from it has sprung all our designing and re-designing of machines.’ The Jewish-Christian tradition—and the ‘grand narratives’ it produced—is explicit in the rejection of the Faustian temptation. Nietzsche remarks in The Antichrist that ‘such a religion as Christianity, which does not touch reality at a single point and which goes to pieces the moment reality asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably the deadly enemy of the wisdom of this world, which is to say, of science.’ Man must repress his ‘pride’: he may not eat the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge, lest he create instruments competing with the perennial nature created by God. It is sacrilegious behaviour, as the myths of the Golem and the tale of Frankenstein remind us. As in the past—when opposing dissection—the Church now condemns contraception, genetic engineering, and biotechnological research in general. It is not difficult to see why egalitarianism is anti-Promethean. Every new advance in technology is an advance in respect of the ability of some to control others. If one considers, as in the Bible, Rousseau, or Marx, that it is an ethical duty to condemn the exercise of control or power—the domination of man by man—then it is easy to perceive that such epochal mutation as our societies are experiencing will produce new vertical division between man and man, and between society and society, just such as the Neolithic Revolution provoked: namely, (1) differentiation between the body of consociates and the aristocracies that came to exercise political power, creating cultural forms and directing community life; and (2) the fact of certain societies coming to dominate others. Any dream of independence and self-determination—individual or collective—any sort of political, economic, or cultural sovereignty—may be realised only through the technical means necessary for such ambition. Science is a domain which the European mind has monopolised, and technology a tool that can make man into a god. These must be especially valued by Europeans if they are to mount a primordial, Faustian response to life which can recapture and transcend the Indo-European outlook for post-Neolithic man.