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or were, the dogmas of dialectical materialism. Communist regimes claimed these to be scientific<br />
in nature (Krieger, 1996). This claim was demolished by <strong>Max</strong> <strong>Born</strong> in his reply, unfortunately<br />
unpublished, to a letter from the communist physicist Leon Rosenfeld (<strong>Born</strong>, 1955).<br />
Liberation of the human mind from religious dogma began with my mother’s ancestor Martin<br />
Luther [50] and some like-minded contemporaries. It was a prerequisite of the improvement<br />
in the human condition during the last five hundred years (<strong>Born</strong>, GVR, 2002). Like Denis Healey<br />
I am sure that the scientific revolution has created an irresistible demand for political freedom<br />
(Healey, 1989). <strong>Berlin</strong> can thank the electronic media which the Wall could not keep out<br />
[51] for causing its downfall and for re-unification.<br />
The speed of scientific and technological advances makes it desperately clear that we are not<br />
discarding the doctrinal shackles of history fast enough! In order to survive we have to storm<br />
and sack – very quickly indeed – so many inherited mental prisons that, looking at and listening<br />
to what is going on in the world, it seems an impossible task (<strong>Born</strong>, 2004). One also has to<br />
contend with vested interests which ignore or falsify evidence, for example by the misleading<br />
economists whom Bjorn Lomborg recently assembled in Copenhagen (Vidal, 2004). The curse<br />
of gradualness – how imperceptibly your car’s fuel indicator creeps towards empty – is still hindering<br />
worldwide awareness of global warming which already causes glacier meltdown and<br />
hurricane build-up; climate change is happening too fast for the embattled and inadequate proposals<br />
for slowing it down (Crutzen and Steffen, 2003; King, 2004; Lawton, 2004) [52, 53].<br />
From this perspective, all the violent conflicts which dominate the World’s attention – always<br />
somewhere, at present in Iraq and Dafour, however terrible for the people involved – are mere<br />
distractions.<br />
It is a sad thought that the flowering of rationality with its fruits in the conquests of disease,<br />
discomfort and distance might still fail to win the battle against unshakeable dogmas. And it is<br />
Fig. 51<br />
Gustav <strong>Born</strong>’s family on the<br />
<strong>Berlin</strong> Wall in 1982. From the<br />
left: Sebastian, Sue with little<br />
Lily, Carey and <strong>Max</strong> Jr.<br />
<strong>Max</strong> <strong>Born</strong> • Gustav <strong>Born</strong> 27