(which was that of a comparatively stationary universe visited occasionally by convulsions of change) had some rather faddy fashionableness at Oxford, and got so far as to be named "Catastrophism".
"Are you interested in Catastrophism?" asked the wondering Yankee.
But though Kidd knew a great deal about Sir Claude--a great deal more, in fact, than there was to know-- it would never have crossed his wildest dreams to connect so showy an aristocrat with the newly-unearthed founder of Catastrophism, or to guess that Sir Claude Champion and John Boulnois could be intimate friends.
That very evening, marked by Mr Kidd for the exposition of Catastrophism, had been marked by Sir Claude Champion for an open-air rendering of Romeo and Juliet, in which he was to play Romeo to a Juliet it was needless to name.
He went on to say that there are individuals in the UK who are whipping up this
catastrophism for their own own reasons.
Rather than the injunction to imagine differently, the conclusion might now reflect Simon Winlow's enlightened
catastrophism, which abandons the myth of reform, incremental progress, and easy solutions for the clarity of a grim realism better equipped to imagine the dystopian future, or perhaps diagnose the dystopian present (Winlow 2016).
In so doing, he briefly covers the infancy of paleontology, the debate between uniformitarianism and
catastrophism, and the tensions that existed between science and faith during this time, pointing out that religion actually played an important role in the development of earth history and science in general.
It is reminiscent of Patrick Allitt's warnings about environmental
catastrophism in A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmental ism.
In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) quickly published a study that disproved the alleged association: "Public perceptions--especially with the advent of fast and global communications via the Internet--are often inaccurate and the general public is often misled by conspiracy theories and
catastrophism" (De Andrade et al., March 10, 2016, p.
The decline and rise of coronary heart disease: understanding public health
catastrophism. Am J Public Health.
Having said this, he argues that
catastrophism is itself a risk -- that is, the pessimistic tendency to fix on the worst imaginable outcome, and to panic.
None of this
catastrophism was chronicled by our ancestors, Velikovsky asserts, because they suffered from a "collective amnesia" that repressed all memory of these occurrences.