The previous instalment of this blog (No. 78) looked at the implications of today’s muddled world which has tried to “get by” with an attitude which actively avoids a great deal of “theory” and has virtually abandoned philosophy.

It also showed how Descartes established the activity of modern philosophy… as a daring imaginative exploration of the possibilities of future knowledge.

But today there is very little such “imaginative knowledge exploration” (IKE) taking place. The Silent Majority is sitting numb… waiting for something to turn up. We have been reduced to this unedifying impotence by decade after decade of Future Shock…

The worst effect of this overwhelming Future Shock is that the conditions for encouraging young thinkers to take up the Cartesian Challenge have been conspicuously absent since the tacit abandonment of traditional culture and moral seriousness in the 1960s.

The elites of maths and physics let down the curious generations of the past by fudging their (the elites’) so-called “solutions” to the two impossible problems of 1887 and 1901. These fudges were treated as “Party Lines”, thus assuming that rational progress was effectively impossible.  As a result we have been brainwashed for more than a century by such dismal, nihilistic arrogance. No effort has been made by the two elites to revisit and re-energise the Cartesian pathfinding quest.

A good example is the complete failure to internalise the bombshell Jurgen Habermas launched in the 1970s when he pronounced that the human race was spending more on education than it had ever spent before. (There were large additional numbers of universities and professors.)  But the “fruit” of this ill-conceptualised, managerialist, mentally dead “education”, was that the amount of take-up of mental energisation by the youthful generations had never been so poor.

Habermas died on 14^th March and The Times gave him an appropriate two-page super Obituary two days later.  He was a giant thinker who was largely ignored in the Anglophone world.  He was dismissed by the supercilious mid-20^thcentury Oxford philosophers as a mere “sociologist”. Very little was said in the Obituary which would bring out the scandal involved in the sheer ineptitude and inadequacy of the hopelessly dysfunctional “education” which Habermas had dramatically called-out in The Observer fifty years ago.  No Letters were subsequently printed to underline Habermas’ vital message.

The people who are supposed to be bringing leadership into the Anglophone world are sleep-walking whilst the previously civilised world gradually deconstructs. (Trump is a direct consequence of the hopelessly inadequate “education” which Habermas was denouncing fifty years ago.)

Another serious scandal is the total lack of any response from the maths and physics elites about Anti-Maths. This is another example of brazen sleep-walking. Anti-Maths is the kind of the overall mental change which only comes to the fore once in 500 years. It challenges and explains the distorting effect of maths treated as the one-and-only 100% abstract logos.  If maths is a epistemological monopoly, the regimentation it brings in its wake is dangerously amplified. But Anti-Math shows —in the most obvious way—  how maths need not enjoy an abstract monopoly.  

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CHRISTOPHER ORMELL around 1^st April 2026 – chrisormell@aol.com