As an increasingly confused and nihilistic educated young sign up to all sorts of self destructive nonsense in an attempt to find meaning, is it time to face that the Enlightenment has only partly delivered?
I always thought the rationality of the Enlightenment was enough - that we had moved on from religion and superstition into a Spock-like world of logic and rational thought. It has taken me quite a while to realise that humanity needs God because it needs something to hang onto in the middle of the whirling storm of life. My Greek son-in-law is a practising Orthodox Christian and he maintains that it's ridiculous to see people taking pills and going to therapists when there are large empty churches just waiting to take them in and offer them solace. However, until the Christian churches realise they have to stop being "modern" and following each and every hedonistic trend then the people won't return. The church needs to stand up and proclaim its own faith before the people can follow - how many vicars still actually believe in the bible? I knew a vicar who had a nervous breakdown and apparently God was of no help (so did he actually have any real faith at all?). I agree that we in the West will not survive against Islam and Marxism Redux if we cannot find the Christian God or a belief in our own worth. Bleak times.
After the recent death of Rev Edward Norman, I remembered how much I had valued his Meditations in the Daily Telegraph and found that he had published a selection called “Out of the Depths” which I was able to order online. I have been limiting myself to reading one a day, and after reading your article, I started to read the third meditation in the collection, written in October 1992.
It is entitled “Wrong Priorities” and begins:
“The soul of the deceased Marxist empire has not passed from the world: it has migrated to the West, where it now inhabits the bodies of the liberal democracies. Economic determinism and historical materialism are alive and well and flourishing here. They are expressed in the political priorities of both governments and governed; they are implicit in the intellectual culture disseminated in the schools. People judge political leadership according to its capacity to deliver economic policy, and their sense of the moral worth of political society is rendered within a tariff of welfare benefits.”
He concludes:
“The Saviour spoke about the seed that withered because it fell on stony ground, and about the seed which was choked because it fell among thorns. In the parable of the sower, the seed is the word of God and we are the ground. Ground needs to be prepared. In our Western societies today, as in our own lives, we make demands about the seed yet neglect the preparation of the ground. So much for the use we make of the freedoms which are the great achievement of liberal and democratic society.”
Writing in 1992, he says: “the Communist empire collapsed in less than two years ago”, but his words could have been written yesterday. Where, oh where, are the church leaders, of whatever label, who ought to be speaking out and writing like this? Have they lost all conviction, or are they just frit?
I’m sorry I have been able to give only a short extract from this meditation: get a copy of the book if you can!
Thank you, as ever, for your thoughtful reflections, CJ. My own reflection on the Enlightenment is that it was always an error to view it as the foundation of modern science and progress. A better way to think of it is that the West's existing trajectory continued THROUGH that period, since it is easy to show that the roots of modern science and technical achievement came considerably before the Enlightenment, and especially in the Reformation and invention of printing.
What we have to remember is that the very idea of the Enlightenment was, like the Renaissance, a product of the movement itself. They saw themselves, not very humbly, as bringing the light of reason into the world and it just so happens that this hubristic narrative stuck, notwithstanding the fact that the movement - in its impulse to create the proverbial blank slate - left considerable disruption and bloodshed in its wake.
Judged objectively, I'd argue that the essence of the Enlightenment was not actually to encourage reason, which had always had plenty of support in the West, but rather to DIScourage engagement with the church and traditional authority in general. Then as now, there was no actual proof of God's non-existence, but certain people simply preferred to take the supernatural out of the equation. Or at least to relegate it into the realm of private ethics. So that they could then begin to remake the world in their own image. Like the Bolsheviks and Nazis later on, they simply took advantage of historical circumstance to impose their way of thinking on the West.
Because of our idolatry of Reason, we have tended to consider the catastrophes of the twentieth century as being somehow a repudiation of 'Enlightenment values'. In my own estimation, however, those very values were at the very root of the subsequent disaster. I cannot 'prove' it, of course, but like you, CJ, I apprehend that our lack of an objective moral framework left us peculiarly vulnerable to nasty people and ideas. As I see it, neither reason nor the lack of reason is actually the problem. Our problem is that we attempted to live without God.
"The path forward is not regression". "We have progressed". I'd like to politely challenge you on those statements. Whether we have progressed or regressed is dependent on how one measures progress. In simple terms, we can either measure progress through material gain and convenience, or we can measure progress through human fulfilment - the material vs the spiritual.
I would argue that the spiritual is always the more important; that without meaning, everything is meaningless. And I would argue that the convenience served to us through technological progress and dead-eyed materialism has delivered the exact opposite in terms of our humanity - spiritual regression.
Progress isn't replacing the light of a candle with light of a phone, or replacing the warmth of another human with the cold whisperings of AI, it's in the growing understanding that we can never understand. And it's that understanding that would gently guide us towards a necessary fulfilment. That, I believe, is true progress.
The context of 'progressed' here is in the technical benefits the Age of Reason has brought. The purpose is to make the point that I am not arguing for Luddism but for a rebalance and a search for another civilisational imperative.
One of the more misguided things we can do, with all this veneer of sophistication and seeming intelligence, is to forget that we are, in fact, great apes. The greatest, perhaps .. but still apes.
Watch one series of Monkey World and you will see all of human frailty laid bare – love, hate, fear, envy, resentment, desperation, and all the rest - raw and salutary.
There is a hierarchy. Alphas (male and female), Betas (those chosen to fight and breed), Gammas (the babies, the cherished future), the Deltas (juveniles yet to be sorted), then the Epsilons – those who undertake tasks like minding the kids or foraging for scraps, while the others live the high life.
The hierarchy is a pecking order, and everyone knows their place. If they challenge one above them, they better win or they will be punished by the troop. If they challenge the Alpha, they could be beaten to death or exiled if they fail. It’s one of the reasons we inherently fear public speaking, as it has aspects that are tantamount to challenging the Alpha.
Importantly, for this very interesting conversation, each chimp has a purpose. Without one, you are not entitled to food, so you starve, wither and die. That is the nature of a chimp troop, and likely our forebears. We do not evolve as fast as technology or philosophy. We might know it’s wrong to covet, but we covet nonetheless.
DNA deep, we fear a lack of purpose. Juveniles and the elderly are particularly susceptible to this anxiety. Alas, narratives are very good at supplying seeming imperatives that fill that purpose-sized hole in juveniles. What greater purpose than saving the planet?
Religions of every kind exploit our human frailties too, as if it is a sin to lust, envy, overeat, etc .. rather than simply being the expression of our origins – to procreate, achieve, stock up fat for a famine or illness. Of course, excess is never good, but we were previously moderated by conditions or the troop. We did not evolve to be in a state of perpetual feast.
Religious and political leaders, and those shadowy folks behind them, will seek to control and mobilise us for their own reasons and likely driven by their own frailties. Not good.
Religion is not the answer. Faith perhaps, an inner dialogue with a higher being or simply your better self, but not organised religion … in my humble view.
Enlightenment feels illusory. Until we evolve as a species, we will feel the need for purpose and we will act on a mix of our frailties, needs and the promptings of others … and we will keep making the same mistakes and creating the same blind alleys.
I think that the enlightenment’s most important message was that there is a physical standard of truth that can be proven by mathematics and/or physics. In addition to the definition of mentally competent, the principle is that the universe follows common sense or natural laws.
If no religion or ideology is physically superior to any other, then the choice of religion is cultural and personal. Religion and ideology have a role in creating and maintaining the society but neither is suitable for reasoned decision making. 🙏
As I mentioned: the Enlightenment 's flaw is that it is rooted in Newtonian conservatism which was, until the last few decades, taken as a true default. However advances in physics have demonstrated that Newtonian conservatism is a flawed methodology. It's correct some of the time and useful but it is entirely unable to explain the anomalies of discoveries like thermodynamics and Higgs Boson which are only identified as such because we lack the framework, under the assumptions of the Age of Reason to explain them. Ergo we need to adapt our perspective.
Didn’t Einstein correct Newton’s mistake with relativity? Thermodynamics was developed by Maxwell and was one of the main factors in Einstein’s relativity.
The Higgs Boson and thermodynamics are parts of two totally different systems of physics: one covers the range between the speed of light in vacuum and the smallest naturally occurring particle, the other is particle physics which cannot be measured in its normal state.
Henry, thanks for the comment. You’re right that Einstein (and later quantum mechanics) corrected and superseded Newtonian mechanics in important regimes, and that classical thermodynamics long predates Prigogine. Maxwell, Boltzmann and others were already working with entropy and irreversibility in the 19th century.
The specific point I’m drawing from Prigogine is narrower and more philosophical.
Classical science (including much of the Enlightenment worldview that grew out of Newton) treated the fundamental laws as *reversible* and *deterministic*. Time’s arrow was regarded as secondary, a statistical effect arising from our incomplete knowledge of microscopic states (the Boltzmann picture). Dissipation and irreversibility were inconveniences to be minimised or explained away. The ideal remained a closed, predictable, clockwork universe.
Prigogine’s later work (especially Order Out of Chaos with Stengers, and The End of Certainty) argued the opposite: irreversibility is gundamental, not merely epistemic. In systems far from equilibrium, dissipation is not just loss; it can be constructive. Through what he called dissipative structures, order and complexity can spontaneously emerge from chaos when energy flows through the system. The universe is not a finished, reversible machine; it is an open, creative, irreversible process in which novelty continually arises.
That is the shift I’m highlighting. It moves the scientific picture away from the closed, mechanistic, purely deterministic image that underwrote a great deal of Enlightenment rationalism and later materialist utopianism, and toward a view in which emergence, creativity and genuine historical becoming are real features of nature. That temperament is closer to the metaphysical instincts of Augustine or Aquinas than to the high Enlightenment ideal of a fully calculable world.
(The Higgs reference was only a side illustration: the idea of a field that gives particles mass via interaction would not have struck a medieval scholastic as absurd in the way a pure billiard-ball mechanism might. It was not meant to conflate particle physics with thermodynamics.)
In short: Einstein corrected the mechanics; Prigogine (and the broader non-equilibrium tradition) challenges the deeper assumption that the universe is fundamentally reversible and closed. That is the context I was pointing to.
Thanks for the discussion, I’m undereducated in theology but I believe that physical evidence is still more useful than ideology. The difference between deductive reasoning which can be argued on evidence and inductive reasoning which depends on consensus belief is,I think, the difference between common sense and fantasy. The noble lie might soothe the plebes but it leads to hubris in the elites and we know how that ends.
Henry, thanks for the comment. You’re right that Einstein (and later quantum mechanics) corrected and superseded Newtonian mechanics in important regimes, and that classical thermodynamics long predates Prigogine. Maxwell, Boltzmann and others were already working with entropy and irreversibility in the 19th century.
The specific point I’m drawing from Prigogine is narrower and more philosophical.
Classical science (including much of the Enlightenment worldview that grew out of Newton) treated the fundamental laws as reversible and deterministic. Time’s arrow was regarded as secondary, a statistical effect arising from our incomplete knowledge of microscopic states (the Boltzmann picture). Dissipation and irreversibility were inconveniences to be minimised or explained away. The ideal remained a closed, predictable, clockwork universe.
Prigogine’s later work (especially Order Out of Chaos with Stengers, and The End of Certainty) argued the opposite: irreversibility is fundamental, not merely epistemic. In systems far from equilibrium, dissipation is not just loss; it can be constructive. Through what he called dissipative structures, order and complexity can spontaneously emerge from chaos when energy flows through the system. The universe is not a finished, reversible machine; it is an open, creative, irreversible process in which novelty continually arises.
That is the shift I’m highlighting. It moves the scientific picture away from the closed, mechanistic, purely deterministic image that underwrote a great deal of Enlightenment rationalism and later materialist utopianism, and toward a view in which emergence, creativity and genuine historical becoming are real features of nature. That temperament is closer to the metaphysical instincts of Augustine or Aquinas than to the high Enlightenment ideal of a fully calculable world.
(The Higgs reference was only a side illustration: the idea of a field that gives particles mass via interaction would not have struck a medieval scholastic as absurd in the way a pure billiard-ball mechanism might. It was not meant to conflate particle physics with thermodynamics.)
In short: Einstein corrected the mechanics; Prigogine (and the broader non-equilibrium tradition) challenges the deeper assumption that the universe is fundamentally reversible and closed. That is the context I was pointing to.
Hope that clarifies, I may edit the article to elaborate on this point further.
Stopped reading after your description of Marx as 'evil'. All he did was research the economic history, the structures of land and the state and explain, mathematically, how 19th century workers were exploited by capitalists. He and Engels also passed on this information via books and encouraged workers to unite in order to demand better wages and conditions. The evil that has occurred is the deliberate corruption of the Left by the wealthy elites who have funded and continue to fund international institutions and national NGOs to pressurise elected governments to legislate and implement anti-democratic and impoverishing policies - like decarbonisation aka Net Zero using the non-Marxist concept of 'saving the planet.' You are blaming Marx for situations due to big money, propaganda and the fundamental betrayal of his work's aims.
You are entitled to your view but you are catastrophically misinformed about Marx, Engles, the pre Marxist labour movement and its origins, which were based around Christian social justice and not the dialectic materialism of Marx= socialism and communism.
Marx and Engles didn't just comment: they wrote the Communist Manifesto which left over 100 million corpses and continues to oppress and murder in the name of 'equality'.
True what you say: Marx and Engels "didn't just comment." I have always found their Manifesto to be an attempt at a. stirring rhetorical flourish. Perhaps if you broadened your reading to include some of their more informative publications...
It's not widely advertised, but Karl Marx was actually a very disturbed and disturbing person. Engles was about the only person who could endure him. Everyone else, including his parents, found him to be not only extremely lazy and unhygienic but to have a strangely demented personality and sick sense of humour. Indeed, many people at the time, including his own father, noted that he had a peculiar obsession with occult matters and identified on a personal with the Luciferian character of Mephistopheles in Faust. Funny that the Western world should have taken the opinions of such a thoroughly disreputable character to heart! See this video for more details: https://youtu.be/Y5UfRoasgjw?is=HLr63msQPVH1pnjw
Even by the standards of his time he was incredibly racist, failed his family utterly and had a very disturbing sexual relationship with his children's nanny.
Exactly!
I always thought the rationality of the Enlightenment was enough - that we had moved on from religion and superstition into a Spock-like world of logic and rational thought. It has taken me quite a while to realise that humanity needs God because it needs something to hang onto in the middle of the whirling storm of life. My Greek son-in-law is a practising Orthodox Christian and he maintains that it's ridiculous to see people taking pills and going to therapists when there are large empty churches just waiting to take them in and offer them solace. However, until the Christian churches realise they have to stop being "modern" and following each and every hedonistic trend then the people won't return. The church needs to stand up and proclaim its own faith before the people can follow - how many vicars still actually believe in the bible? I knew a vicar who had a nervous breakdown and apparently God was of no help (so did he actually have any real faith at all?). I agree that we in the West will not survive against Islam and Marxism Redux if we cannot find the Christian God or a belief in our own worth. Bleak times.
After the recent death of Rev Edward Norman, I remembered how much I had valued his Meditations in the Daily Telegraph and found that he had published a selection called “Out of the Depths” which I was able to order online. I have been limiting myself to reading one a day, and after reading your article, I started to read the third meditation in the collection, written in October 1992.
It is entitled “Wrong Priorities” and begins:
“The soul of the deceased Marxist empire has not passed from the world: it has migrated to the West, where it now inhabits the bodies of the liberal democracies. Economic determinism and historical materialism are alive and well and flourishing here. They are expressed in the political priorities of both governments and governed; they are implicit in the intellectual culture disseminated in the schools. People judge political leadership according to its capacity to deliver economic policy, and their sense of the moral worth of political society is rendered within a tariff of welfare benefits.”
He concludes:
“The Saviour spoke about the seed that withered because it fell on stony ground, and about the seed which was choked because it fell among thorns. In the parable of the sower, the seed is the word of God and we are the ground. Ground needs to be prepared. In our Western societies today, as in our own lives, we make demands about the seed yet neglect the preparation of the ground. So much for the use we make of the freedoms which are the great achievement of liberal and democratic society.”
Writing in 1992, he says: “the Communist empire collapsed in less than two years ago”, but his words could have been written yesterday. Where, oh where, are the church leaders, of whatever label, who ought to be speaking out and writing like this? Have they lost all conviction, or are they just frit?
I’m sorry I have been able to give only a short extract from this meditation: get a copy of the book if you can!
Thank you, as ever, for your thoughtful reflections, CJ. My own reflection on the Enlightenment is that it was always an error to view it as the foundation of modern science and progress. A better way to think of it is that the West's existing trajectory continued THROUGH that period, since it is easy to show that the roots of modern science and technical achievement came considerably before the Enlightenment, and especially in the Reformation and invention of printing.
What we have to remember is that the very idea of the Enlightenment was, like the Renaissance, a product of the movement itself. They saw themselves, not very humbly, as bringing the light of reason into the world and it just so happens that this hubristic narrative stuck, notwithstanding the fact that the movement - in its impulse to create the proverbial blank slate - left considerable disruption and bloodshed in its wake.
Judged objectively, I'd argue that the essence of the Enlightenment was not actually to encourage reason, which had always had plenty of support in the West, but rather to DIScourage engagement with the church and traditional authority in general. Then as now, there was no actual proof of God's non-existence, but certain people simply preferred to take the supernatural out of the equation. Or at least to relegate it into the realm of private ethics. So that they could then begin to remake the world in their own image. Like the Bolsheviks and Nazis later on, they simply took advantage of historical circumstance to impose their way of thinking on the West.
Because of our idolatry of Reason, we have tended to consider the catastrophes of the twentieth century as being somehow a repudiation of 'Enlightenment values'. In my own estimation, however, those very values were at the very root of the subsequent disaster. I cannot 'prove' it, of course, but like you, CJ, I apprehend that our lack of an objective moral framework left us peculiarly vulnerable to nasty people and ideas. As I see it, neither reason nor the lack of reason is actually the problem. Our problem is that we attempted to live without God.
"The path forward is not regression". "We have progressed". I'd like to politely challenge you on those statements. Whether we have progressed or regressed is dependent on how one measures progress. In simple terms, we can either measure progress through material gain and convenience, or we can measure progress through human fulfilment - the material vs the spiritual.
I would argue that the spiritual is always the more important; that without meaning, everything is meaningless. And I would argue that the convenience served to us through technological progress and dead-eyed materialism has delivered the exact opposite in terms of our humanity - spiritual regression.
Progress isn't replacing the light of a candle with light of a phone, or replacing the warmth of another human with the cold whisperings of AI, it's in the growing understanding that we can never understand. And it's that understanding that would gently guide us towards a necessary fulfilment. That, I believe, is true progress.
The context of 'progressed' here is in the technical benefits the Age of Reason has brought. The purpose is to make the point that I am not arguing for Luddism but for a rebalance and a search for another civilisational imperative.
To me that is Christianity. Front and centre.
Well, the Fen Tigers and the Luddites understood something that most people could not understand today. I'm happy to be a Luddite tbh.
Thanks for the reply anyway. It's a good piece.
One of the more misguided things we can do, with all this veneer of sophistication and seeming intelligence, is to forget that we are, in fact, great apes. The greatest, perhaps .. but still apes.
Watch one series of Monkey World and you will see all of human frailty laid bare – love, hate, fear, envy, resentment, desperation, and all the rest - raw and salutary.
There is a hierarchy. Alphas (male and female), Betas (those chosen to fight and breed), Gammas (the babies, the cherished future), the Deltas (juveniles yet to be sorted), then the Epsilons – those who undertake tasks like minding the kids or foraging for scraps, while the others live the high life.
The hierarchy is a pecking order, and everyone knows their place. If they challenge one above them, they better win or they will be punished by the troop. If they challenge the Alpha, they could be beaten to death or exiled if they fail. It’s one of the reasons we inherently fear public speaking, as it has aspects that are tantamount to challenging the Alpha.
Importantly, for this very interesting conversation, each chimp has a purpose. Without one, you are not entitled to food, so you starve, wither and die. That is the nature of a chimp troop, and likely our forebears. We do not evolve as fast as technology or philosophy. We might know it’s wrong to covet, but we covet nonetheless.
DNA deep, we fear a lack of purpose. Juveniles and the elderly are particularly susceptible to this anxiety. Alas, narratives are very good at supplying seeming imperatives that fill that purpose-sized hole in juveniles. What greater purpose than saving the planet?
Religions of every kind exploit our human frailties too, as if it is a sin to lust, envy, overeat, etc .. rather than simply being the expression of our origins – to procreate, achieve, stock up fat for a famine or illness. Of course, excess is never good, but we were previously moderated by conditions or the troop. We did not evolve to be in a state of perpetual feast.
Religious and political leaders, and those shadowy folks behind them, will seek to control and mobilise us for their own reasons and likely driven by their own frailties. Not good.
Religion is not the answer. Faith perhaps, an inner dialogue with a higher being or simply your better self, but not organised religion … in my humble view.
Enlightenment feels illusory. Until we evolve as a species, we will feel the need for purpose and we will act on a mix of our frailties, needs and the promptings of others … and we will keep making the same mistakes and creating the same blind alleys.
I think that the enlightenment’s most important message was that there is a physical standard of truth that can be proven by mathematics and/or physics. In addition to the definition of mentally competent, the principle is that the universe follows common sense or natural laws.
If no religion or ideology is physically superior to any other, then the choice of religion is cultural and personal. Religion and ideology have a role in creating and maintaining the society but neither is suitable for reasoned decision making. 🙏
As I mentioned: the Enlightenment 's flaw is that it is rooted in Newtonian conservatism which was, until the last few decades, taken as a true default. However advances in physics have demonstrated that Newtonian conservatism is a flawed methodology. It's correct some of the time and useful but it is entirely unable to explain the anomalies of discoveries like thermodynamics and Higgs Boson which are only identified as such because we lack the framework, under the assumptions of the Age of Reason to explain them. Ergo we need to adapt our perspective.
That's percisely the point.
Didn’t Einstein correct Newton’s mistake with relativity? Thermodynamics was developed by Maxwell and was one of the main factors in Einstein’s relativity.
The Higgs Boson and thermodynamics are parts of two totally different systems of physics: one covers the range between the speed of light in vacuum and the smallest naturally occurring particle, the other is particle physics which cannot be measured in its normal state.
Henry, thanks for the comment. You’re right that Einstein (and later quantum mechanics) corrected and superseded Newtonian mechanics in important regimes, and that classical thermodynamics long predates Prigogine. Maxwell, Boltzmann and others were already working with entropy and irreversibility in the 19th century.
The specific point I’m drawing from Prigogine is narrower and more philosophical.
Classical science (including much of the Enlightenment worldview that grew out of Newton) treated the fundamental laws as *reversible* and *deterministic*. Time’s arrow was regarded as secondary, a statistical effect arising from our incomplete knowledge of microscopic states (the Boltzmann picture). Dissipation and irreversibility were inconveniences to be minimised or explained away. The ideal remained a closed, predictable, clockwork universe.
Prigogine’s later work (especially Order Out of Chaos with Stengers, and The End of Certainty) argued the opposite: irreversibility is gundamental, not merely epistemic. In systems far from equilibrium, dissipation is not just loss; it can be constructive. Through what he called dissipative structures, order and complexity can spontaneously emerge from chaos when energy flows through the system. The universe is not a finished, reversible machine; it is an open, creative, irreversible process in which novelty continually arises.
That is the shift I’m highlighting. It moves the scientific picture away from the closed, mechanistic, purely deterministic image that underwrote a great deal of Enlightenment rationalism and later materialist utopianism, and toward a view in which emergence, creativity and genuine historical becoming are real features of nature. That temperament is closer to the metaphysical instincts of Augustine or Aquinas than to the high Enlightenment ideal of a fully calculable world.
(The Higgs reference was only a side illustration: the idea of a field that gives particles mass via interaction would not have struck a medieval scholastic as absurd in the way a pure billiard-ball mechanism might. It was not meant to conflate particle physics with thermodynamics.)
In short: Einstein corrected the mechanics; Prigogine (and the broader non-equilibrium tradition) challenges the deeper assumption that the universe is fundamentally reversible and closed. That is the context I was pointing to.
Hope that clarifies.
Thanks for the discussion, I’m undereducated in theology but I believe that physical evidence is still more useful than ideology. The difference between deductive reasoning which can be argued on evidence and inductive reasoning which depends on consensus belief is,I think, the difference between common sense and fantasy. The noble lie might soothe the plebes but it leads to hubris in the elites and we know how that ends.
Henry, thanks for the comment. You’re right that Einstein (and later quantum mechanics) corrected and superseded Newtonian mechanics in important regimes, and that classical thermodynamics long predates Prigogine. Maxwell, Boltzmann and others were already working with entropy and irreversibility in the 19th century.
The specific point I’m drawing from Prigogine is narrower and more philosophical.
Classical science (including much of the Enlightenment worldview that grew out of Newton) treated the fundamental laws as reversible and deterministic. Time’s arrow was regarded as secondary, a statistical effect arising from our incomplete knowledge of microscopic states (the Boltzmann picture). Dissipation and irreversibility were inconveniences to be minimised or explained away. The ideal remained a closed, predictable, clockwork universe.
Prigogine’s later work (especially Order Out of Chaos with Stengers, and The End of Certainty) argued the opposite: irreversibility is fundamental, not merely epistemic. In systems far from equilibrium, dissipation is not just loss; it can be constructive. Through what he called dissipative structures, order and complexity can spontaneously emerge from chaos when energy flows through the system. The universe is not a finished, reversible machine; it is an open, creative, irreversible process in which novelty continually arises.
That is the shift I’m highlighting. It moves the scientific picture away from the closed, mechanistic, purely deterministic image that underwrote a great deal of Enlightenment rationalism and later materialist utopianism, and toward a view in which emergence, creativity and genuine historical becoming are real features of nature. That temperament is closer to the metaphysical instincts of Augustine or Aquinas than to the high Enlightenment ideal of a fully calculable world.
(The Higgs reference was only a side illustration: the idea of a field that gives particles mass via interaction would not have struck a medieval scholastic as absurd in the way a pure billiard-ball mechanism might. It was not meant to conflate particle physics with thermodynamics.)
In short: Einstein corrected the mechanics; Prigogine (and the broader non-equilibrium tradition) challenges the deeper assumption that the universe is fundamentally reversible and closed. That is the context I was pointing to.
Hope that clarifies, I may edit the article to elaborate on this point further.
Stopped reading after your description of Marx as 'evil'. All he did was research the economic history, the structures of land and the state and explain, mathematically, how 19th century workers were exploited by capitalists. He and Engels also passed on this information via books and encouraged workers to unite in order to demand better wages and conditions. The evil that has occurred is the deliberate corruption of the Left by the wealthy elites who have funded and continue to fund international institutions and national NGOs to pressurise elected governments to legislate and implement anti-democratic and impoverishing policies - like decarbonisation aka Net Zero using the non-Marxist concept of 'saving the planet.' You are blaming Marx for situations due to big money, propaganda and the fundamental betrayal of his work's aims.
You are entitled to your view but you are catastrophically misinformed about Marx, Engles, the pre Marxist labour movement and its origins, which were based around Christian social justice and not the dialectic materialism of Marx= socialism and communism.
Marx and Engles didn't just comment: they wrote the Communist Manifesto which left over 100 million corpses and continues to oppress and murder in the name of 'equality'.
True what you say: Marx and Engels "didn't just comment." I have always found their Manifesto to be an attempt at a. stirring rhetorical flourish. Perhaps if you broadened your reading to include some of their more informative publications...
It's not widely advertised, but Karl Marx was actually a very disturbed and disturbing person. Engles was about the only person who could endure him. Everyone else, including his parents, found him to be not only extremely lazy and unhygienic but to have a strangely demented personality and sick sense of humour. Indeed, many people at the time, including his own father, noted that he had a peculiar obsession with occult matters and identified on a personal with the Luciferian character of Mephistopheles in Faust. Funny that the Western world should have taken the opinions of such a thoroughly disreputable character to heart! See this video for more details: https://youtu.be/Y5UfRoasgjw?is=HLr63msQPVH1pnjw
Even by the standards of his time he was incredibly racist, failed his family utterly and had a very disturbing sexual relationship with his children's nanny.