The Great Forgetting and the Great Denial

Date

Location

Lab 4, E48

Description

Airing out some ideas about the arc of human history, and our culture's bizarre attitude towards the Scientific Revolution.
Speaker: Yasha Neiman.

I like Yuval Noah Harari's division of human history into three stages, separated by the Agricultural and Scientific revolutions. I also like Daniel Quinn's phrase Great Forgetting to denote the fact that the Agricultural Revolution was so long ago, and so sweeping, that our so-called ancient mythologies contain almost no memory of human existence before it.
I'd like to propose a similar phrase for our attitude towards the Scientific Revolution. It appears useful to view modern culture as engaged in a Great Denial - a desperate effort to pretend that the Scientific Revolution didn't overturn our most cherished values, and that history continues business-as-usual.

Please help me test out these ideas, and tell me where I'm being stupid!

Trigger warning: there will be no way to avoid the conflict between science and most religions.
Anti-warning: I promise not to point out which religions are false, and which one is true.

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