Aristotelian Realism vs. Humanity’s Futile Flinching. From Locomotives to Nuclear Power, the Future Refuses to Kneel.

Frans Vandenbosch 方腾波 24.02.2025

Intellectual inertia

Humanity’s intellectual inertia—the stubborn urge to cling to comfort over truth—has always faltered before the unrelenting logic of reality. From 19th-century peasants fearing locomotives to Empress Dowager Cixi’s disdain for automobiles, resistance to progress reveals a timeless folly: the delusion that human anxiety can override mathematical law. Aristotelian realism, which binds mathematics to the physical world, dismisses such fears as fundamentally incoherent. Steam engines, nuclear reactors, and AI algorithms do not negotiate with superstition; they obey equations etched into the universe itself. To defy them is not just futile—it is to wage war on reality. As the past’s kneelers fade into footnotes, the future advances, indifferent to our trembling. Progress, like physics, tolerates no veto.

Defying Progress: A Timeless Tale of Fear and Futility

The 19th century’s locomotive revolution ignited irrational panic. When railways debuted in England and Belgium, hysteria gripped populations. Farmers swore their cows would stop lactating if exposed to steam engines. Even King Leopold I of Belgium, present at the inaugural Belgian railway celebration, refused to board the dangerous new machine. Yet within years, trains became indispensable; proof that progress outruns fear. The sceptics faded into obscurity; their warnings drowned by the whistle of modernity.

China’s Empress Dowager Cixi embodied similar obstinacy. In 1901, she received for her 66th birthday a ground-breaking Mercedes-Benz—China’s first automobile—as a gift. Though intrigued, she rejected it with imperial pettiness. One account claims she demanded her chauffeur kneel while driving, rendering the vehicle unusable. Another insists she treated the car as a trophy, never daring to ride it. Her disdain mirrored broader resistance to innovations; she’d earlier blocked railways to “protect” sacred lands. Today, her untouched car gathers dust at Beijing’s Summer Palace—a relic of regressive thinking. The world surged forward, indifferent to her antiquated qualms.

Modernity faces the same irrational foes. So-called “green” ideologues rage against nuclear energy—the only scalable, carbon-neutral power source—while championing unreliable solar panels and wind turbines. Their dogma ignores science, economics, and urgency. Yet just as trains and automobiles prevailed, nuclear will eclipse these timid alternatives. The climate crisis demands pragmatism, not poetry. History will remember these activists as footnotes to progress—obstinate, not visionary.

Now, artificial intelligence provokes fresh hysteria. Critics—often technologically illiterate—spew doomsday prophecies. Their ancestors feared locomotives; their heirs will mock their AI panic. Innovation has always outlasted ignorance. The lesson is clear: those who cling to the past become the past. The future belongs to the bold—not the kneelers, the naysayers, or the nostalgics.

Let the timid protest. The rest of us will build.

Aristotelian Realism and the Unyielding March of Progress

The Aristotelian realist philosophy of mathematics posits that mathematical truths are inherent in the physical world, discovered rather than invented. Unlike Platonism, which situates mathematical entities in an abstract realm, Aristotelian realism grounds numbers, shapes, and relationships in observable reality. This framework insists that mathematics reflects the structure of the universe—a structure accessible to human reason through empirical engagement. It is a philosophy of continuity between the mind and the material world, where progress in understanding mirrors progress in manipulating nature.

This worldview resonates powerfully with humanity’s repeated triumphs over irrational resistance to innovation. Consider the 19th-century railway panic: sceptics dismissed locomotives as unnatural, yet the mathematics of steam power and engineering—principles rooted in physical reality—proved irrefutable. The trains prevailed because they operated in harmony with the quantifiable laws of motion and thermodynamics, not in defiance of them. Similarly, Empress Dowager Cixi’s rejection of the automobile revealed a failure to engage with the mathematical logic of mechanics—a logic that would soon dominate global transportation.

Modern parallels abound. Opposition to nuclear energy often disregards the mathematical certainty of its efficiency and scalability, favouring instead the inconsistent outputs of renewables. Aristotelian realism would frame this as a rejection of reality: nuclear fission obeys equations as immutable as those governing steam engines. Likewise, fearmongering around AI ignores the algorithmic coherence underpinning machine learning—a coherence that, like railway physics, can be harnessed through rigorous study.

In each case, progress aligns with mathematical truth. Fear arises from a disconnect between human intuition and the quantifiable order of nature. Aristotelian realism teaches that to resist this order is to deny reality itself. Just as cows did not stop lactating and locomotives did not rend the fabric of existence, so too will nuclear energy and AI integrate into human life, their critics reduced to historical curiosities. The future belongs not to those who kneel before tradition, but to those who build upon the unyielding truths of mathematics—the language of reality itself.

The Arithmetic of Triumph

History’s chorus of ‘no’—from steam engine Cassandras to AI doomsayers—echoes the same intellectual hubris: the belief that human fear can rewrite the universe’s unyielding syntax. Aristotelian realism condemns this arrogance. Mathematics is not a ledger of opinions but the scaffolding of reality; trains, reactors, and neural networks are its merciless ambassadors. To resist them is to deny the atoms composing one’s own flesh. Yet every failed protest, every rusting relic of defiance, whispers the same lesson: the world bends only to those who grasp its equations. Let the timid flinch. The rest will inherit a future written in numbers, not nostalgia—a truth as ancient as physics, as inexorable as time.

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