The Natural Linguist

My attention for the last few months has been very much occupied by Vladimir Putin's war on the Ukraine. Like many, I have come to feel a deep admiration for the bravery, resource, intelligence and dogged persistence of the Ukrainian people and military in the defense of their country. It has also been extremely gratifying to see European nations put aside their internal differences and full-heartedly support the Ukraine in their hour of need. I have also been struck by the contrast between what we have traditionally thought of Russia's military power and what we are actually seeing unfold in front of our eyes today -- over a million casualties in a war that was intended to last at most a few weeks, but has dragged out over more than four years with no end in sight. We are seeing the hardware of war being destroyed in colossal numbers by drone warfare -- tanks and artillery vehicles in their thousands, entire air defense systems wiped out, even the flagship of the Russian navy,...

I am currently reading "The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View" by Richard Tarnas. This book dives into the history of Western thought, from ancient Greece to modern times. I'm reading in the last part of the book, which is about the Enlightenment era. The author divides the thinking in this period into a dichotomy that's familiar to us now, with Science on the one side and Romanticism on the other, though we may phrase it differently -- Logic vs. Emotion, Science vs. Religion, Evidence vs. Feelings, etc. It should come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog (if anyone does, which I doubt) that I generally operate in the Science side, and consider it "the adult" in the room. But this quote really struck me: From the Romantic's perspective, the conventional scientific view of reality was essentially a jealous "monotheism" in new clothes, wanting no other gods before it. The literalism of th...