Science, knowledge, is the "intellectualization" of the world. Science believes that everything can be known, that one "can know," ultimately, everything. There are no "mysteries" - only things as yet "unknown."
This is the "disenchantment" of the world.
Leo Tolstoi confronts the questions head on: "does science, does technology, have any meaning?"
"All his [Tolstoi's] brooding increasingly revolved around the problem of whether or not death is a meaningful phenomenon," Weber said.
Tolstoi's answer is that for civilized man, death has no meaning; the individual life has no meaning, because "progress" continues regardless of the death of the human individual. And progress is all that matters, in modern civilization. The individual human life is only one step in "progress" - even great human lives like a Jesus, or a Martin Luther King.
Because death is meaningless, life is meaningless.
Has progress got any meaning? beyond the technical?
What is the "value" of science?
"Redemption from the rationalism and intellectualism of science is the fundamental presupposition of living in union with the divine," Weber said.
Youth crave meaning, an encounter with the divine, sacred. Youth crave not only religious experience, but experience. They are nauseated by ideas. And science offers them only observations, intellectualisms, objectification
Technology offers youth only spectacular voyeurism, rather than EXPERIENCE.
Sometimes they turn to dangerous romantic irrationalism, in rejection of pointy-headed intellectualism. But this mindless rebellion can often bring about the very opposite of what they hope to achieve, a direct experience with reality. They may get lost in the fun house.
"After Neitzsche's devastating criticism of those 'last men' who 'invented happiness,' I may leave aside altogether the naive optimism in which science, that is, the technique of mastering life which rests upon science -- has been celebrated as the way to happiness," Weber said.
Those people who have blind faith in technology, who believe technology will usher in a new age of wonderful happiness, need to have their heads examined. They are deeply and dangerously deluded.
Tolstoi said, "Science is meaningless because it give us no answer to our questions, the only question important to us: 'What shall we do and how shall we live?''
