#post-enlightenment

Not all truth is known through scientific inquiry and method.

Even "awakened" beings can be assholes :)

Everything is energy in motion!

In the heart of Manhattan, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, hangs one of El Greco's remarkable creations, The Vision of St. John. Completed around 1614, it is one of his paintings that looks like it could have been painted in Paris in the early twentieth century. Its feel is not only modern but also somehow imperceptibly contemporary. Evoking the opening of the Fifth Seal in Revelation 6:9-11, the martyrs who bore faithful witness are given white robes while John (it seems) looks heavenward toward the epiphany of the Lamb. The colours of the painting are themselves a startling revelation of another reality. But the painting as we view it today is a fragment. The canvas that hangs in the Met doesn't tell the whole story. In the course of a "restoration" around 1880, the unfinished canvas was trimmed by at least 175 cm. In the name of "improvement," the scene is truncated by almost half. And so, in what seems a fitting parable of modernity, the exultant arms of John the Revelator reach upward to—nothing: to the top of the frame, to the edge of the canvas. The martyrs seem to receive gifts from nowhere, and John seems to praise the nonexistent. All of them seem to look for something no longer there. What if our modernist, secularist projects of "improvement" have unwisely severed us from what makes for a flourishing society? While some might rail against myths of what lies beyond the frame, many others might be asking: What's up there? Our calling in a secular age might be less a matter of securing our status and more a matter of bearing witness to what's missing, especially to those who are feeling the claustrophobia of that frame. We might be surprised at the response.

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé. It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief. But post-Enlightenment and post-idea, while related, are not exactly the same.