People naturally seek knowledge and want to know what the future holds for them. For this reason, upright walkers have always looked at the stars in the sky with their heads held high in search of signs, and so they began to practise astrology, which has persisted in modern public life as a broad interest in horoscopes and should come as a surprise in a knowledge society that sees itself as enlightened. This also applies to the fact that people today prefer to stare down at their iPhones with their heads bent rather than looking up at the stars.
People have not come of age, they have become hands-off, as one might say. But you see: Firstly, things turn out differently than you think, and you can illustrate this rule with historical examples: At the end of the 19th century, leading physicists thought their science was mature and complete, but then came Max Planck and Albert Einstein and with them the quantum revolution, without which there would be neither chips nor iPhones. At the end of the 20th century, biologists thought they could solve the cancer problem by mapping the human genome. Now they are drowning in masses of data without being able to assign cancer-relevant meanings to them.
While the Enlightenment still believed in the predictability of the world - in their "Dialectic of Enlightenment", the two authors Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno explicitly write, "The program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world", by which they meant the predictability of its processes according to natural law - the Romanticism that followed the Enlightenment recognized this idea as a mistake. To this day, many sociologists still refuse to accept this and prefer to build a deterministic pop dance with science on the basis of statistics. All those who, like the sociologist Max Weber, have been talking about a "demystification of the world" since the early 20th century and justify this with its "predictability" through "science as a profession" should really be ashamed of themselves. Because this determinism does not exist. The sciences do not demystify the world, they enchant it and deepen its mystery. Paradoxically, although engineers are developing ever better devices with their help. But lamps shine even when no one knows how the atoms give the light the energy it needs.
