The Financial Crisis and the Scientific Mindset
6th April 2010
Looking back, one of the striking revelations of the past two years of recession is that the pattern of real-estate development and capital investment in America has been driven for two decades and more by a very peculiar system of finance — one that depends on an intricate infrastructure of speculative debt; one that is enabled by modern technology and wedded to abstraction and formula; and one that, it turns out, can only be maintained, in a pinch, by intervention from the state.
The modern mind broke down on account of its infatuation with abstraction. That mind is singularly susceptible to falsely imagining that ideas are more real than men. The power of the lapidary theory over the modern mind has been often remarked. The whole of the twentieth century was marked by calamitous wars driven by the imperial impulse of what Edmund Burke called “armed doctrines.” Armies, impelled by their doctrines, rolled over half the earth, leaving behind blood and smolders.