Today's discussion question

[alice wellintown]

Slavery is a poor example. Too easily mangled by a sophist's rhetoric, too
terribly tangled in the web of history. A sophomore can make a eat pie out
of Greeks without reading them by turning on the slavery switch.


Still, there seems to be a side to this idea, to this argument, even if no
one has got its back. I hesitate to identify it. It is common enough. The
stuff that someone as un-lettered as me might absorb sitting in on an
introduction to philosophy course, or pick up in one of those popular
online courses, like the philosophy of science, or the history of ideas in
the west, or, probably where I got it from, by reading what looks cool in
the discarded books and magazines bin at the public library.

Of course, so western, so limited by its just coming from the west, that
is, and it is doubtful....if anything ever really does come just from the
west, but still...if we are gonna get Spengler out,  we might bite
into crispy, salty, yummy...Bacon.

 Like Newton, Tesla, Adam Smith, Malthus,  the list seems
endless....Marx....Bacon struggled and suffered from the mixture of the
ancient foolishness, religion and irrational ideas, and the modern ideas,
some of them foolish and irrational too. So that to read him we must wade
through mud and murky waters before we get to the fountain that sprang for
us. It shot up, we read, from his use of induction, but it was his
adventurous spirit, and this is, so the story goes, Captured in his
famous aphorism, "knowledge is power", and this, this idea, and the spirit
that set out gain to knowledge, not from the ancient sages or holy books,
but from his pragmatic rejection of the past in favor of the mystery, of
the unknown, of the yet to be discovered world, and so, and now we may need
a more focused course, on American Pragmatism, say, Bacon tastes best with
American philosophy...and, as history would have it, the Americans, those
pragmatists, are linked, by a strange blood sausage, to Bacon, by Emerson.

Emerson looked East, yes, but in a narcissistic self reliant rugged
individualistic turn, he made Bacon a dish for the pragmatists.




On Thursday, August 22, 2013, Bekah wrote:

> My point is that these days we are horrified.  Two hundred years ago our
> US ancestors kept slaves legally - and in the minds of some it was the
> morally right thing to do.  Whether or not the US should legalize slavery
> has never been seriously debated since the 13th Amendment in 1864.
>
> Also,  your point may be one of the types of things Pinker is criticized
> for - he tends to use percentages rather than actual numbers.
>
> Bekah
>
>
>
> On Aug 22, 2013, at 11:35 AM, Lemuel Underwing <luunderwing at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > If I recall correctly there are more slaves today than there were two
> hundred years ago, and I'm not talkin' bout Industrial Slaves either
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 11:25 AM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> > But today we are horrified by slavery anywhere.  Today we abhor many
> things that centuries ago,  or decades for that matter,  were taken as a
> matter of course -  lynchings for example,  but also direct warfare between
> major powers,  capital punishment (in most of the western world, anyway),
>  the abuse of women, children, ethnic minorities, gays,  - even of animals.
> >
> > Steven Pinker's book,  The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has
> Declined [2011],  is flawed in many respects,  but he makes some
> interesting points.
> >
> > That said,   I'm not taking a side here because I think capitalism and
> elements of fascism play into the equation.  Otoh,  the devastation of
> Hiroshima and the atrocities of the Holocaust had an impact.
> >
> > Bekah
> >
> >
> > On Aug 22, 2013, at 8:59 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> >
> > > Yes . Very reasonable points about our collective abilities. But my
> argument is that we often ascribe to ourselves as individuals what we only
> have as part of a system. The gap between the wisdom of moderns and the
> wisdom of the ancients still seems more self congratulatory than
> substantive.  The young girls that make shirts in nasty and dangerous
> factories in Pakistan seem little different than slaves. As far as the
> status of women, this freedom has not been extended to other cultures
> colonized by the Euro and patriarchal powers in the same way as to the
> wives and daughters and mothers of the democracies. The link between "our"
> purportedly enlightened and technically advanced system and crude forms of
> exploitation that rival any in history is shown in the factory conditions
> of people making parts for Apple products.
> > >
> > > I am not saying people used to be wiser. I am arguing for realistic
> humility in claims to advancement, because so much of the history of that
> advancement has been directly at the expense of  militarily and culturally
> vulnerable cultures. In these kinds of advancements there is as much injury
> and loss as advance.
> > >
> > > We inherit through the written word and technology a tremendous
> inheritance of potential wisdom and possibility, but we also inherit some
> really destructive habits and colonialist historic patterns that are built
> around treating the biosphere and its inhabitants as a can of materials to
> be mined, used and discarded.  What I see is more of a runaway train than a
> wise, sustainable  and advanced modern culture. We are generating powerful
> warnings and solutions but so far they are not really slowing the
> destructive juggernaut. I hope I am wrong and that what we are going
> through now will as you also hope enable and compel the changes that are
> needed.  I am just really saying that some humility is in order and is part
> of the needed change.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On Aug 21, 2013, at 12:05 PM, Ian Livingston wrote:
> > >
> > >> I am loathe to take issue with you Joseph, I agree in so many ways,
> but there are a couple of points I want to add to color your choler with.
> First, the "we" thing. As regards your examples of things we can and cannot
> do, "we" can build computers and cell phones and such. I can't make the
> entire product, you can't, and neither can he or she, but they can, and we
> can do things they cannot. I've worked making the batteries for tech
> devices in the past, for example, which is something Bill Gates couldn't
> do. Among the things we can't do are making an axe from chert and wood;
> using the entire carcass of an animal we have killed with a bow and arrow,
> or atlatl, or snare we likewise could not have made; we couldn't build a
> castle of stone that can stand for a year, much less for 500 or a 1000
> years. We no longer have the skills to live in the ways that the people
> among whom the wisdom traditions evolved did; still, as you say, we could
> certainly learn skills from them. Could we learn to keep slaves as they
> did? To demean and disempower women as they did? To leave the weak to
> suffer and die as they did? Well, obviously "we" can, but could you? Could
> I?
> > >>
> > >> Permaculture, peak oil communities, intentional communities, etc.,
> are all good starts t
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