Fetishes

[degringolade]

 

Art Nouveau / Franklin Carmichael/ La Cloche Panorama

Been pondering of late.  Of course, I have always pondered, but this is more of a fourth quarter kinda ponder.  I think that it is normal for this age.  

Now, a lot of you might immediately label my thoughts as heretical were I to share them.   I will go so far as to admit that they violate the law of obligatory positivism that pervades what passes as thought in these times.

I think that the biggest source of angst that I am wrestling with of late is the idea that the dreams of my youth were false and appear to be getting “Falser”.

Ugo wrote a piece over at his place last week that really got me a-pondering.  Now, as most of you know, Ugo is one of my gurus, but as one old man to another, Ugo, I think that you are going down the wrong path on this one.

The article seems to me to be self-effacing and a call to the old days of a unitary science.  I can’t remember any such thing appearing in my days of being a scientist.  Money decided what was science and what wasn’t.  Molecular Biology was worshipped, there was money there.  Ecology was denigrated, things like the environment interfered with funding.  The unitary church that Ugo pines for was long ago bought and paid for  by industry.

Ugo is my guru, and I read him religiously.  But I am thinking that in this particular case, he is doing what us old men do, fetishizing a non-existent past.

After all, and  I speak here from hard experience, it is not fun to realize that you were just a part of the problem.