Word: lucretius
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...industry cherishes Piety 1. The traveler drifts through the world trying to fend off the truth of Piety 2, which declares itself in spasms of denied disappointment. At worst, a nostalgic heartache goes to work, the travel snob's regret, grandchild of an Evelyn Waugh-Somerset Maugham steamship elitism. Lucretius wrote: "Whenever a thing changes and alters its nature, at that moment comes the death of what it was before." A new metaphysic of distances and destinations has taken over the world...
...even proclaimed "the end of history." The West and democratic pluralism seemed to have triumphed: satellites and computers and ; communications and global business dissolved the old monoliths in much of the world. Humankind could take satisfaction in all that progress and even think for a moment, without cynicism, of Lucretius' lovely line: "So, little by little, time brings out each several thing into view, and reason raises it up into the shores of light." But much of the world has grown simultaneously darker...
...20th century, Lucretius' shores of light vanished like the coasts of Atlantis, carried under by terrible convulsions. The ascendant civilizations (the Europeans, Americans, Japanese) accomplished horrors that amounted to a usurpation of the power of God over creation. The world in this century went about a work of de-creation -- destroying its own generations in World War I; attempting to extinguish the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust, to destroy the Armenian people, the Ukrainian kulaks and, much later, the Cambodians -- all the reverberating genocides...