Mar 30, 2013
Like our ancestors, we are overwhelmed by fears oozing from the vast void between the grandiosity of the challenge and the paucity and flimsiness of our tools and resources - though this time we don't truly believe that sooner rather than later the void can be bridged. We experience what people must have felt when they were overwhelmed by Mikhail Backtin's 'cosmic fear': the sight of giant mountains and boundless seas evidently immune to human efforts to scale them and blind and dwaf to human cries for mercy. This time, though, it is not the mountains and the seas, but human-made artefacts and their impenetrable by-products and side-effects that exude the most sinister of our fears.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Fear, page 93/94