Offered Without Comment 44

Another from Jared Yates Sexton’s book The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis (2023):

This framing of Western civilization as the pinnacle of human achievement placed the dominion of European man at the center of the universe, and science as a means of harnessing the will of God. Nothing could be allowed to delay the march of progress, whether it was the fate of enslaved and oppressed peoples or the destruction of the natural world. Facts and empirical evidence made little difference. Whereas revelatory knowledge had once been the cornerstone of religion, science in the name of “progress” now became a faith all its own and the rewards of its pursuit nothing short of paradise. [p. 73]