Monday, April 11, 2016

what Age of Exclusion excluded (mostly) was complexity and uncertainty...

Our post-1965 Age of Inclusion is learning to include uncertainty along with all the other minorities in its considerations - and this is a very good thing at a time when the Globe faces its first ever existential crisis brought on by the wilful hubris of sentient beings.

Hubris is what flourishes whenever uncertainty and complexity is deliberately excluded from conscious thought - as it did in the Age of Exclusion from 1875 to 1965.

That Age had only enough intellectual vigour to be able to tick just one of two possible boxes : 'the simple pure certain universal right answer' or 'the complex, uncertain,contingent, impure, wrong answer'.

No room whatsoever for boxes for possible answers like 'we don't know' or 'need more information' or 'it all depends on the particular circumstances'.

The decision to devote scarce war resources, in the dying days of WWII ,to continue to make malt syrup, as Kurt Vonnegut did, to succour pure Ayran mothers-to-be obviously came from the right answer box in German eyes.

Just as the shower deaths, destined for impure Jewish women to 'mothers-to-be' to be useful slave labour, obviously came from the Germans' wrong answer box...

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