Why did a reaction against Western science take hold in the second half of the twentieth century?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: Unease and pessimism were rampant, especially in Europe and parts of Asia, where the material destruction and moral horror of the Second World War were worst. The most widely accepted response to the war emerged from German philosophers: the Frankfurt School. Their project was to find alternatives to Marxism and capitalism. They defined what they called alienation as the central problem of modern society. Economic rivalries and short-sighted materialism divided individuals, wrecked common pursuits, and induced feelings of dissatisfaction and rootlessness. Existentialism represented the retreat of intellectuals into the security of self-contemplation, in revulsion from an ugly world. In France in 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) relaunched existentialism as a creed for the post-war era. Every individual action is an exemplary act, a statement about humankind, about the sort of species you want to belong to. Sartre's version of existentialism fed the assumptions about life of educated young Westerners in the 1950s and 1960s. Critics denounced Sartre as a philosopher of decadence were not far wrong in practice because existentialism was used to justify every form of self-indulgence. Sexual promiscuity, revolutionary violence, indifference to manners, defiance of the law, drug abuse could all be part of becoming oneself. The social changes of the 1960s, would have been unthinkable without existentialism—beat culture and permissiveness, ways of life millions adopted or imitated. Existentialism was briefly the philosophical consensus of the West. But it never caught on in the rest of the world; and even in the West, people saw more urgent problems than shaping one's personal future. By the 1970s, a reaction was in the making: conservative in politics, mistrustful of materialism, inclined to religion, anxious to recover tradition and rebuild social solidarity—especially through the family. This was a global reaction. It was strong in the Americas. In Asia and Africa revulsion at Western-dominated thinking further strengthened the trend.