Hi Bob:
Great answer and a good read. I have two comments to make. New
information, whether through inductive reason, dreams, or pure creativity
can obsolete known truths - a point your references have made. Going back
to some of the previous discussions re the "soul" that have been posted.
This body of knowledge whether from the insights of shamanism, pychotropic
drug use experiences, general religous experiences, or the study of ancient
religions such as Hindism, Buddism or North American Native cultures - has
fallen off the horizon of modern thinking. This does not mean that the
truths, experiences, techniques are invalid, it just indicates that they
don't fit the current paradigm of the moment. And this could change in a
moment - no matter what the rationalist, scientific, academic authorities
posit today. The future is truly unknowable
Second, and I will repost your quote to juxataposition it with my
observation. Much of what we assume we know, is based on imcomplete
information. You posted:
> (ibid., p. 74)
>
> "... we might consider the sentiments in early and mid-nineteenth
> century America that eventually led to the abolition of slavery in the
> United States. Many people of course participated in leading popular
> thought and action, but we can cite a novel, Harriet Beecher Stowe's
> Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the impact of a political leader, Abraham
> Lincoln, as being among the major influences. The arguments for
> abolition arose from many facets of human experience and with varied
> kinds of religious and philosophical support. And in spite of
> counter-arguments and social inertia, a conviction that involved a
> change in assumptions about human lives did eventually carry the day.
> New social-industrial factors may well have been, as some have argued, a
> factor in the challenge. The humanist, in any event, can be responsive
> to the total situation of his times."
Thomas:
The above quote explains what most of us believe to be true about the
abolishment of slavery. Nowhere in this account is the antecendents of the
abolishment of slavery given it's economic background as a strategy between
the two dominant powers of the early 1800"s, France under Napolean and
England. The following quote gives the requisite information.
Patriots and Profiteers by R.T. Naylor Page 12
For over 150 years, the two powers hd contended for control of the world
sugar market. France won. By the turn of the nineteenth century, sugar
from its West Indian colonies cost 25 percent of that from the older British
plantations. The Napoleonic Wars gave the British a chance to strike back.
First they attempted to capture St. Dominique (now Haiti), the source or
destination of 75 percent of France's colonial trade. Unsuccessful, they
turned to indirect means. In 1807 Britain declared the abolition of the
slave trade. When the British captured the African slave trade posts and
commited the navy to stopping "illegal" traffic, they succceeded in cutting
off the supply to the French islands, which required several thousand new
slaves per year. It was perhaps the world's first economic blockade
rationalized by "human rights" rhetoric. And it worked.
Thomas:
As we muddle along with our rationalist explanations of many things, often
using selective statistics, historical interpretations, learned insights of
human behavior from the current academic theories as the rationale for our
current decisions, we refuse to acknowledge how incomplete our background
of insight really is. It is as if - we are playing cards in which the next
card to be dealt is truly unknown and unpredictable and yet, we assume from
the cards in our hands and the ones which have been played that we "know" or
can explain what the next card will be.
Of course, going around in this circle of destroying rational thought seems
to leave us with no way to make decisions about the future - I mean - after
all, if we can't trust the lessons of the past to provide predictability
then we are truly in a mess. The antidote may come from less reliance on
what we know - which we often don't really know - to decisions based on
principles and values of what we hold to be our highest aspirations. This
creates a discontinuity with all the past truths and allows us to creatively
strike out with new answers to current problems.
Respectfully,
Thomas Lunde
----------
>From: Bob McDaniel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: FutureWork <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: An Aside: On Rational Thinking
>Date: Wed, Jun 30, 1999, 3:54 AM
>
> Eva Durant wrote:
>
>> Uncompromising means, not changing opinions even when
>> presented rational reasons to do so. In the absence of such
>> what can I do? What if my opinion is actually a good
>> approximation to reality, <snip>
>
> Let's take a harder look at rational thought:
>
> "Rational thinking ... cannot predict the future. All it can do is to
> map out the probability space as it appears at the present, and which
> will be different tomorrow when one of the infinity of possible states
> will have materialized. Technological and social inventions broaden this
> probability space all the time; it is now incomparably larger than it
> was before the Industrial Revolution, for good or for evil.
>
> "The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was
> man's ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The
> mental processes of invention are still mysterious. They are rational,
> but not logical, that is to say not deductive. The first step of the
> technological or social inventor is to visualize, by an act of
> imagination, a thing or a state of things which does not yet exist, and
> which to him appears in some way desirable. He can then start rationally
> arguing backwards from the invention, and forward from the means at his
> disposal, until a way is found from one to the other."
>
> ( D. Gabor, Inventing the Future, Penguin Books, 1963, p. 161)
>
> "... criticisms of rational (decision-making) model:
>
> 1.Success in goal attainment means commitment to the goal, and
> commitment is an emotional -- thus nonrational -- state ...
> 2.All groups have several goals ... so that over-specialization may
> threaten survival ...
> 3.... it is very difficult to gain agreement on just what goals or
> goal are being sought ..."
>
> (W. Breed, The Self-Guiding Society, The Free Press, 1971, pp. 95-96)
>
> "Several critics of the rational model suggest a second approach to
> decision-making -- incrementalism.
>
> "Two major weaknesses ... First ... reflects the interests of the most
> powerful groupings in society ... second .. ignores overdue
> innovations."
>
> (ibid., pp. 99-101)
>
> "The model (of decision-making) we recommend is called mixed scanning.
>
> "An example of mixed scanning: weather satellites hold two cameras. One
> takes broad-angle pictures covering large segments of the sky ... The
> other lens photographs much smaller segments but in much greater detail
> ... dual scanning device ... scans for signs of trouble. The second
> camera explores these danger points in detail ...
>
> "When criticism shows that a policy is ineffective, stop incrementing
> and turn to more encompassing scanning."
>
> (ibid., pp. 103-111)
>
> "Intellectual competence will be judged in terms of the ability of the
> student to synthesize the explosion of information. Most significant
> thinking will be reflective ... Men will succeed or not in the measure
> of their ability to order information into unity and to evaluate and
> judge (Aristotle's order of judgment again, his very principle for
> distinguishing wisdom
> from mere science)."
>
> (F. D. Wilhelmsen and J. Bret, The War in Man, University of Georgia
> Press, 1970), p. 35)
>
> "Kant's complaint against Cartesianism was based on his insistence that
> pure rationalist analysis can never add to our knowledge. Analytic
> thinking can simply penetrate and arrange the already given, the already
> possessed ... True progress in knowledge -- not specifically in the
> sense of knowledge possessed by me as an individual, but in the sense of
> adding to the entire store of knowledge possessed by mankind -- is
> synthetic."
>
> (ibid., pp. 42-43)
>
> "Belloc hit it when he wrote: 'It is in the character of unwisdom to
> analyze and to proceed upon the results of analysis: in the character of
> wisdom to integrate the whole point.' But we are leaving the Age of
> Analysis patterned after mechanical models and rigid deduction, all of
> which involve very hard 'work', whether it be the analysis of a literary
> text into its component parts or of a chemical compound into its
> elements. We are entering an Age of Synthesis that will demand a maximum
> of talent concentrated in men who simply occupy positions in society and
> who will be paid to synthesize, 'to integrate the whole point'."
>
> (ibid., p. 97)
>
> "There is in the philosophy of science a doctrine known as reductionism.
> Its proponents argue that eventually all of the processes of nature will
> be shown to be physical processes; or, in an alternative statement, that
> all of the natural sciences will eventually be found subsumed under the
> principles of physics."
>
> (R. Schlegel, Inquiry into Science: Its Domain and Limits, Doubleday,
> 1972, p. 68)
>
> "There is the point to be made that because of the indeterminism that
> physics has found in nature on the microscopic level, there will be no
> explanation in science for why one individual quantum event occurs
> rather than another that may be equally probable. This limitation could
> be accepted as merely the consequence of an element of chance in nature.
> But in a more general way, it is associated with the breakdown of close
> space-time description for individual quantum events. With these, we
> come to an end of science as a rational ordering, just because the
> individual event cannot be known through any kind of predictive
> calculation but only through measurement. Indeed, as we have seen, the
> clear implication of the Superposition Principle of quantum mechanics is
> that the individual event is created, in one state out of a number of
> possible states, in the interaction observation process ... on the
> quantum level we must simply accept the being of individual events as
> they occur."
>
> (ibid., p. 73)
>
> "... the deductive system rests on principles or axioms which are
> themselves simply to be accepted, and hence without explanation in the
> sense of being consequences of some other assertions of the system."
>
> (ibid., p. 74)
>
> "... we might consider the sentiments in early and mid-nineteenth
> century America that eventually led to the abolition of slavery in the
> United States. Many people of course participated in leading popular
> thought and action, but we can cite a novel, Harriet Beecher Stowe's
> Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the impact of a political leader, Abraham
> Lincoln, as being among the major influences. The arguments for
> abolition arose from many facets of human experience and with varied
> kinds of religious and philosophical support. And in spite of
> counter-arguments and social inertia, a conviction that involved a
> change in assumptions about human lives did eventually carry the day.
> New social-industrial factors may well have been, as some have argued, a
> factor in the challenge. The humanist, in any event, can be responsive
> to the total situation of his times."
>
> (ibid., pp. 86-87)
>
> "...I should emphasize that I do not mean that formal reasoning should
> be abolished. On the contrary. I hold it to be the most penetrating of
> all modes of thinking. But for that very reason, it is also so
> dangerous. Indeed, I think it is for its dogmatism and not for its
> abstraction that most of the social sciences are open to what Whitehead
> once labeled the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, by which he meant
> that there are some aspects of reality which are ignored when we force
> our thinking into the preselected categories of conventional reasoning."
>
> (G. Olsson, Birds in Egg, Michigan Geographical Publication No. 15,
> Dept. of Geography, University of Michigan, 1975, pp. 15-16)
>
> "It is by allying himself with objectivity that modern man has increased
> his sense of society and decreased the sense of himself. By employing
> analytic techniques which assume all ambiguity away, he produces
> distorted theory and inhibiting practice. In this manner, the analyst
> forces the fuzzy aspects of human action into the categorial exactness
> of his thought. In due course, this practice leads the centralized
> bureaucrat into acts of thingification."
>
> (ibid., p. 159)
>
> "If evil can grow out of our efforts to do good, it also seems to be the
> case that good can grow out of our efforts to do evil. The Roman
> military engineers built the roads that the Christian missionaries
> traveled to convert an empire. The British executed by firing squad the
> Irish rebels of 1916, and thus helped to free Ireland. The Nazis
> executed the six million, and thus helped to bring the State of Israel
> into existence. But much of this seems unconscious, for those who do
> evil certainly do not plan to have good result from it, and those who
> think they are working for progress do not wish to create apocalypse.
> The inventor of the aerosol spray did not wish to destroy the ozone
> layer of the planet, but whether it is dynamite, atomic energy,
> psychosurgery, or genetic engineering, it does seem to be the case that
> our very unconsciousness of these enantiodromias increases the
> likelihood of evil emerging from our acts. It is no longer safe to
> assume that good intentions are enough. One can wreak havoc with
> benevolence as well as with malevolence; therefore we have to stop and
> call into question the ideas of progress and philanthropy upon which
> modern liberalism is based."
>
> (W. I. Thompson, Evil and World Order, Harper and Row, 1976, p. 80)
>
> --
> http://publish.uwo.ca/~mcdaniel/
>
