In the face of the ongoing refugee crisis

Slowly but surely gathering pieces of a puzzle together stretching from the early rise of scientific culture and the different threads of an energetic materialism that would inform such later thinkers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Bataille, Deleuze, Land and others. More and more the Renaissance revival of learning and translation of ancient Greek and Roman texts would form the basis of what we would come to know as Modernity. This is all fairly well scoped out through many histories, science studies, biographies, philosophical studies of the various eras. Yet, it does seem that certain individuals became catalysts within this emergence of science. Giordano Bruno beyond Copernicus and the other usual suspects seems a part of this inner thread of influence.

Stephen Greenblatt in his study of the emergence of Lucretius into scientific culture would attest to Bruno’s importance, saying:

One answer in the sixteenth century was a diminutive Dominican monk…

…as things now stand, with everybody believing he is obliged to know what is taking place here every day and neglecting his own work in order to be continually participating in it, the whole arrangement has become a great and ludicrous piece of insanity. The price being paid for `universal security’ is much too high: and the maddest thing is that what is being effected is the very opposite of universal security… To make society safe against thieves and fireproof and endlessly amenable to every kind of trade and traffic, and to transform the state into a kind of providence in both the good and the bad sense – these are lower, mediocre and in no way indispensable goals which ought not to be pursued by means of the highest instruments which in any way exist – instruments which ought to be saved up for the highest and rarest objectives!…

Human beings, regrettable though it may be, are inherently vicious and have to be restrained from their viciousness.’ –  Lee Kuan Yew

In a recent post Nick Land refers to an old essay by William Gibson Disneyland with the Death Penalty (1993) about the absolute rational society of Singapore, a technocratic City State transformed under the direction of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first premier. As one commentator tells us it was Yew’s unique destiny to construct a rational society, whose guiding vision was of a state that would not simply survive, but prevail by excelling. Superior intelligence, discipline, and ingenuity would substitute for resources. He summoned his compatriots to a duty that they had never previously perceived: first to clean up their city, then to dedicate it to overcome the initial hostility of their neighbors and their own ethnic divisions by superior performance.1

One could say that Singapore is the…