Thiel is one of the most prominent entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley and, relevantly for this, he is also one of the most interesting public intellectuals alive today. Thiel’s thought is really hard to summarize, but basically insofar as we’re concerned here he’s a futurist who warns that technological progress has dramatically slowed down over the past thirty years, with dire consequences, and that if technological progress doesn’t start accelerating soon again, there will be even more dire consequences. [...] As Thiel noted, Christianity was the first religion not to harken back to some lost Golden Age; the Heavenly Jerusalem will not be merely the Garden of Eden; in fact, it will be better. Christianity infected the world with the idea that the future could be radically better than the past...that humans could make a difference and bring about a better future. I think one of the few things that all of the panelists that day agreed on is that it’s no coincidence that the scientific and technological age grew out of Christian civilization. [...] One of the things Thiel notes is that it’s hard to imagine a politician today proposing the equivalent of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Project or Nixon’s plan to defeat cancer; proposing a specific, ambitious vision of the future and a specific plan for accomplishing it. And it got me to think: the High Middle Ages equivalent of the Apollo Project were…the cathedrals. In many ways, the medieval cathedrals embody what is best about the human spirit. They were the first man-made structures to go higher than the Pyramids, and this fact alone says a lot about the difference between the Ancient, Pagan world and the Christian world. A pyramid is a fat structure with a heavy base, while a cathedral soars towards the sky. A society that builds pyramids is a society based on slave labor: building a pyramid is pretty much about using as much raw muscle strength as possible to take many rocks from point A and pile them up on point B. Meanwhile, a society that builds a cathedral is replete with scientists, mathematicians, engineers, craftsmen, artists… A pyramid is a monument dedicated to death–it is a tomb. A cathedral is a monument dedicated to the triumph over death.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 19:50:02 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015