The abolition of truth

Aquilino Polaino-Lorente

In his book Antropología e investigación en las ciencias humanas (Anthropology and research in human sciences, 2010), Aquilino Polaino-Lorente writes:

The evangelical phrase "truth will set you free" is being replaced by the opposite: "freedom will set you true." (Chapter 6). After scientific relativism, political absolutism almost always appears... only irrational attitudes remain, dominating the person, the world and politics... The truth is a mere hostage of the material world, without admitting any discussion outside of it. The absence of truth has maddened science. (Chapter 10).

Science has as its objective the search for truth. Its purpose is to discover what happens in the world, outside and inside of us. And once discovered, that truth also should set us free, because it makes technology possible, which increases our freedom (or should increase it).

One hundred years since The Decline of the West

Oswald Spengler

This year it will mark one century since the publication in 1918 of the first volume of the book The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler. The second volume was published five years later, in 1923. This book was the first to raise the idea that our famed Western civilization is in decline. What can we say about it, a hundred years later?

The great historian of the twentieth century, Arnold J. Toynbee, agreed with Spengler on his fundamental idea, although not in the details. For Toynbee, Western civilization collapsed in the twentieth century, when the two world wars proved its inability to face new challenges. Of course, for Toynbee, the collapse of a civilization does not mean its disappearance, it does not even prelude it. We still have ahead - according to him - a few centuries of what Toynbee calls the Universal Empire, linked, however, to a certain cultural stagnation.

The first thing we have to notice is: if Spengler actually managed to detect the decadence of our civilization, it means that the decline had begun much earlier. Evolutionary movements, both biological and cultural, are imperceptible at the beginning. When they become visible, they are quite advanced in their development.

The myth of the Enlightenment

As I mentioned in the previous article, in my unpublished work Quantification of history and the future of the West I applied an objective quantitative method (not dependent on my preferences) to give points to the main creators in various fields of human activity in the Greco-Roman and Western civilizations: science, philosophy, literature, plastic arts and music. The next figure represents the global cultural evolution of our civilization over the centuries. It can be seen that:

Global cultural evolution of Western civilization