Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

Parsons’s picture is not the Marxist one, but it is similar in that it
starts with an optimistic view of human nature and posits a set of
steps that all lead in the direction of progress.
As mentioned earlier, social pessimists also see culture as
progressing. According to Ayn Rand and other thinkers of the middle
of the 20 th century, the marketplace is as brutal to ideas as nature
is to organisms. As a result, the free market and democratically
elected government always produce the best results.
Humans are rational and self-interested and will always look
for an advantage. This competition causes adaptation and new
developments. The innovations that work radically transform the
landscape, and society moves forward.
The key, the pessimists argue, is for people—especially the
government—to stay out of the way of the progress and avoid the
provides the incentive to innovate and make life better for everyone.
There will always be inequity and suffering, but when we take the
long view, the suffering will be much less as a result of letting the
process run its course.
th century, the modernist mind—whether
it was optimistic or pessimistic—bought into the proposition that
social reality is progressive. The structures under which we live
are responsible for laying the groundwork for individual human
better adapted to solving the problems that plague us.
But then, those problems changed. The 1930s saw a worldwide
economic collapse. In its wake came the Second World War, in
which we saw human beings at their genocidal worst. Further, we
learned that those very same humans were capable of developing
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