When talking about the perils of climate change or resource depletion, soil degradation or fisheries collapse, water pollution or nuclear waste–how annoying it is to have one listener respond dismissively, “They’ll figure something out. They always have.” It’s a nonsense rejoinder and yet, it often gains the assent of many–as if this assertion were a self-evident truth that only an enemy of progress would question. And, that’s where we’ll start examining the central contradiction in the modern outlook–with a statement that is offered as if it were a scientific fact, when, in truth, it is nothing more than a piece of dogma enunciated by the religion we call modernism. At first glance, the statement seems backward-looking because it asserts that we humans have always averted catastrophe through our ingenuity. But, of course, this is complete hogwash. History is replete with civilizations that have risen and then fallen, crumbling for […]