Subj : The Game
To   : John Wilson
From : Frank Masingill
Date : Mon Oct 23 2000 10:41 am

 FM> I'm asking if we can KNOW, finally and irrevocably the answer
 FM> to such questions about history.

 JW> Ah. Thanks for the reply. It is solace for me to remind myself
 JW> that history never says the final word 'bout *anything* :-)

 JW> I veer close to accepting Henry Ford's "History is bunk"...but
 JW> never so much that I cease my enjoyment of reading it....

        I stronly suspect that the "history" to which Henry Ford was
exposed WAS bunk!!  Remember that the late nineteenth century was
under the strong spell of "positivism" in which Hegel, Marx and
Comte had been the leading figures in declaring the end of history
and the apocalypse of modern man as taking charge now of his own
destiny.  A "dead" God was certainly no help in inventing electric
power, phonographs, radios, automobiles, airplanes and atomic power.
Supermen do this sort of thing, n'est ce pas?  

        It was not popular in those days to call attention to the
openness of man's being 5,000 years B.C.E to an entire universe of
divinity from which to choose adequate representations of beginnings
and beyonds.  On this side of holocausts, successes and failures in
human living, we're seeing an openness becoming more attractive and
inhabitance of the world less of a prison from which to escape
either into some imagined paradise or some utopia transported from
the beyond into THIS world.  Producing an automobile that could be
purchased by the millions was, after all, no mean feat.  Maybe man
WAS Super!!!

Frank

--- PPoint 2.07
 * Origin: Maybe in 5000 years (1:396/45.12)

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