Epilogue

IF THIS BLOG HAS SHOWN ANYTHING AT ALL, it is that new times demand new answers. The old maxims and axioms just will no longer do. We need to concern ourselves not with the mediaeval clichés that we have inherited from our grandparents, but with the new insights that we propose to bequeath to our children and grandchildren – or rather the insight that they would be far better off developing their own. The one-eyed folk wisdom that we have derived from the past needs to be abandoned if our posterity is to be assured.There is, as we have seen, not one of the time-honoured propositions that we have been discussing in this book of which the opposite is not also in some sense true. That is what this blog has been about. Seeing is emphatically not believing. The wolves are not out to get you. You can stop progress. The ancients didn’t have all the answers. Disasters are not punishments from God. And there is no way in which you can say that the universe is doing anything at all.This is not to say, however, that the opposite is necessarily any truer than the original. It is not merely a case of fleeing to the other extreme. As Confucius had it, ‘The truth lies between’. Or, as Hegel preferred to put it, from the interplay of thesis and antithesis arises a new synthesis. In the present case, that synthesis is likely to involve the realisation that, for example, neither seeing nor believing necessarily reveals the truth to us; that it is not a question of whether progress can or cannot be stopped, but of whether ‘progress’ is really progress at all; and that what is important is not whether the ancients had the answers or not, but whether we do.Those answers may or may not reveal that (to quote yet another maxim) there’s nothing new under the sun. But hopefully they will reveal concepts that people instinctively always knew but never dared express. In which case we might have to turn yet another old maxim completely on its head and, instead of saying It’s no use preaching to the converted , say It’s no use preaching except to the converted.Which, experience suggests, has more than a flavour of truth about it. If not, after all, why are you still reading this blog?All the options are open. None of them either is or should be closed by received wisdom to fresh investigation. And so our world-view needs to be one that is not constrained by that of our grandparents, let alone by that of the Middle Ages, nor indeed by any preconceived ideas at all – as the arcane mysteries of electronics, cybernetics, quantum mechanics, low temperature physics and the Internet are already demonstrating to a remarkable degree.In short, the new common sense is likely to be a very uncommon sense indeed, and for that very reason it will need to be consciously sought. Every maxim will need to be questioned, every piece of preconceived wisdom put under the microscope. Take nothing on trust. Dare to doubt. Welcome heresy. Do not accept the idea, common ever since the Middle Ages, that to doubt is dangerous.And always spare a corner of your mind for the thought that it is not the sceptics, but the convinced – the ideologues, the religious fundamentalists, the political extremists – who pose the greatest dangers to our world.

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