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Article: Providence, predestination and progress: or, did the Enlightenment fail?
- Article from:
- Albion
- Article date:
- January 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 North American Conference on British Studies. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Early in 2002, the earth experienced a near-miss: an asteroid passed within a whisker (in astronomical terms) of the planet. (1) Had it struck, it would have done so with a force six hundred times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. No observer saw it coming, and it was tracked only after it had passed; yet this event produced little surprise. We already knew that the secure foundations of modernism had moved beneath our feet: the idea of continental drift; then pollution; then global climate change; then epidemic disease, AIDS; now the realization that life on this planet is regularly challenged, and at longer periods catastrophically transformed, by the impact of ...