There’s a telling scene in the documentary Food, Inc where industrially raised cows are getting E.coli due to the cramped and unsanitary conditions they live in, and because they're being fed a diet unnatural to their systems. In order to combat this, food writer Michael Pollan suggests that if the cows were only put out to pasture for five days (to be fed on grass, their real diet), the problem of E.coli would be self-correcting. It would go away. What does the industry do instead? It builds an enormous space-age looking factory where men in fully enclosed suits put all the meat into stainless steel kettles where it's treated with ammonia to remove the contamination. Forget about the condition of the cows or the final quality of the meat- the solution chosen is the one that will continue production unchecked so that outputs can continue to be maximized.

Are you a relativist?

If you ever hear yourself saying phrases like “Who’s to say” (meaning who is to say which opinion is better), or “That’s just your opinion” (meaning all opinions are equal), chances are you’ve absorbed the relativism so central to the postmodern zeitgeist (1). About five years ago, the Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn wrote a book called Truth: A Guide, in which he challenged the relativist position with some gusto. For Blackburn relativism is a serious and charged topic. Blackburn accuses postmodern relativism of being “something which corrupts and corrodes the universities and the public culture, that sweeps away moral standards, lays waste to young people’s minds, and rots our precious civilization from within” (2).

Socrates is such an important figure in the root history of modernity that he is almost easy to overlook; his example seems by now almost cliché, too obvious. But we can’t lose sight of how original and phosphorescent he was in the history of human evolution. He dared those around him to question their lives, to take nothing for granted, to accept no authority but that of their own mind. “The unexamined life is not worth living”. It is hard to truly capture how radical this statement was in 5^th century Greece. It was alien, otherworldly. What the hell was this guy talking about? It didn’t make sense. The gods were the source of authority, or leaders, or tyranny and brute force, but- myself? Radical. Socrates was put to death for this rabble rousing, which is understandable enough. Power doesn’t like being challenged today, and it didn’t like it much then either. Socrates called into question everything, no foundation of the ancient Greek world was left standing. But it was more than that. The human being was starting to light up from within. It was the light of reason and the birth of autonomous man.

Modernity. What is it? It’s a complex question, but it’s something we need to figure out if we’re ever going to evolve beyond its limitations. Cause we’re caught up in it, it floats all around us, so close as to be almost unrecognizable. It’s more than just a time period, or a particular geographical happening. It’s something grander and more strange than that, irreducible to singular coordinates. It’s the story of human growth, with its continual changes in form and meaning. And it’s a story of acceleration.