Tuesday 10 January 2012

King Midas's Burial

Respect for the physical sciences by no means exhausts the secular humanist's wonder at the richness of life. Nonetheless, the curiosity and discipline associated with the natural (and I would add the better social) sciences surely compete with ethical conduct as the most remarkable attributes of our species.

And alas, the Humanities themselves attest to a deplorable tendency to self-corruption as in their deplorable infatuation recently with fatuous polysyllabic dead ends.

Corrupted reason is one of the greatest weaknesses of mankind. The ideal Humanities Curriculum of the only possible future (given the wasteful ways we've been heading) would honor the marvelous paleontology of Penn's Patrick McGovern in discovering what our less than rational forebears drank at King Midas' burial as much as a great poem. Both attest to the wondrous capacities of the human species to honor the truth.

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