History Is On Our Side

Dear Emeritus: Because of your inexplicable fondness - engouement - for all things Chinese and Marxist you won't need an introduction to Joseph Needham. With his book, History Is on Our Side (1947), he not only repeats the same claim Marx makes in the preface to the second edition of Das Kapital, that Marxism is a scientific ideology, a theory of economics no less exact than Newton's celestial mechanics, but that he feels certain that the long subjection of the Chinese people to feudal lords and a feudal type of economy was the reason why science had not been born in China. By the time he finished the volume he had reached a totally different conclusion: The Chinese failed in science because they had failed in theology! Having rejected, sometime in the early second millennium B.C.E., their belief in a personal, rational and transcendental Creator, a Lawgiver, the Chinese lost confidence in the ability of the human mind to fathom the laws of nature. All of which does not really answer the question, relevant even more so since president Obama inhabits The White House, "On whose side is history?" As a middling theologian, who tries to survive on the side lines, I believe history will always stand firmly for the world view which provided the indispensable spark for the birth of science, and with which science must side if it is to remain true to its creativity. There is a tremendous future to orthodox Christian belief. Only when steeped in that world view will our moral strength be enough to let history be on everyone's side. The first, necessary step we must take is to evacuate president Pepé le Pew from OUR House and return him to the rock from under whencever he crawled.