- January 17th, 2024, 8:20 am
#453693
One of the older Reinhold Niebuhr's pet ideas (he had maybe two) was irony: the sometimes inconvenient results of man's kinds' best-laid plans. Some years back I ran across a short story where a professor was building up to a lecture's climax about "history's greatest mass killer, a German." Who the students all wondered, who? Hitler, Mengele, Reini Heydrich? Nope, the prof concluded, the honor (such as it was) belonged to Ignaz Semmelweiss, the physician who introduced hand-washing and thereby reduced post-operative infections, infant mortality, etc. to numbers nearing zilch. Which, the prof averred, paved the way for rampant overpopulation.
Overkill? You bet your life (the one mortgaged to Semmelweiss' innovation). And surely one cannot blame Iggy for the whole population problem. Still, yeah. One does feel the irony. Improving (indeed granting) the lives of every Tom, Dick, and Harry does not necessarily leave their descendants with a livable world in the long run. Spare the tree and lose the forest or sumpin', nein?
"Mankind has no destiny. Only some men do: to recover lost divinity."---Miguel Serrano