The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will:  In Response to F.L.A.T. and other
Modern Nonsense

Holton goes on to say "One issue was how technology, so useful to the state,
could be fitted into the Romantic idea. In recent times, many antimodern
movements, including [religious] fundamentalists have embraced technology.
The physicists Phillip Lenard, a chief cultural hero of Nazi propaganda,
spoke for at least a minority when he said that the tendency of scientific
results to prepare the ground for practical advances has led to a dangerous
notion, that of man's 'mastery' of nature: Such an attitude, he held, only
revealed the influence of 'spiritually impoverished grand technicians' and
their 'all-consuming alien spirit.' This idea, too, has its roots in the
centuries-old history of the rise of Romantic thought. Alan Beyerchen
provides us with a summary of his observation that 'the romantic rejection
of mechanistic materialism, rationalism, theory and abstraction,
objectivity, and specialization had long been linked with beliefs in an
ORGANIC UNIVERSE, with stress on MYSTERY [and] subjectivity....' " [8]


CLOSING REMARKS
The ominous import and caveats contained in Holton's opus  Einstein, History
and Other Passions, interspersed with some of my remarks, cannot be ignored.
We are engaged in a battle against deleterious and pernicious
academic-sieve-cosmic twaddle and propaganda – with enormous LONG-TERM and
BIG-PICTURE effects – that will be quickly seen NOT, as the optimists would
have it, as passé, but *de rigueur*, as the Postmodernist Socialite
Dilettantes would have it – again ushering in a New Dark Ages of
Superstition, Mysticism, Exoteric Authoritarian Religion, Nationalism,
Fascism, and the like.

The best of good fortune to all those of The Enlightenment Tradition in your
variegated battles against the Vain Imaginings of today's  Sultans of
Sophistry, obscurants, and obscurantism – for you, and we, are going to need
it.


Clay Stinson