I want to say a few words about this, returning again to some themes that I see as crucial to how things have gone for everyone, not just Westerners, but everyone, yet especially for Westerners.
All societies, it seems, have had social divisions, and distinctions of class, work, and privilege.
In the West, We have had the separation, at least for now, of church, and state.
It was a very long, and a very bitter, still quite bitter, development, and some no doubt still feel, regrettable, development, in human history.
Just how bitter, and how long, hundreds of years, this struggle, this aspect, of other contemporaneous political and military and social struggles, in the West, is hard to even make it go into just a sentence.
We also had an enlightenment, through that period, a broadening and deepening of knowledge, with also an anti religious establishment aspect.
We have had an industrial revolution, and very quickly in historical time, others even more momentous.
We have had relentless technological changes in the past few hundred years.
What have these things meant, for intellectual frameworks?
The intellectual framework changes, similarly to difficulties of 'current history', have been such that they cannot even be properly comprehended, much less described, at the time, going forward.
Some implications have been that people have been more willing to see 'doctrinal', and disciplinary, call it sectarian to set up an 'analogy' (hopefully not too much of a Whig analogy) with protestant segmentations, although other religious segmentations could be used as examples; intellectual sectarian segmentation, as a normal part of growth and differentiation of knowledge, and depth of knowledge, in a multitude of specific fields.
People tend not to see this development, itself, compartmentalization, sectarianism of knowledge, per se, as an issue needing scrutiny.
I want to return to implications of this theme later.
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