> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of Dan Minette
[snip]
> Are you seriously suggesting that if educated Englishmen were asked their
> serious opinion of whether the English would be the most powerful country
> for the next 5000 years or if some other country might be more powerful by
> then, that they wouldn't admit that it was possible.
That's not really the question. If they could only imagine that a
*similarly organized* system could become more powerful, they would be still
taking Fukuyama's point of view. I don't think he argues that individual
powers won't rise and fall, only that our *type* of system will continue to
dominate. Go astray from our system and you become vulnerable... which
raises an interesting question as to which nations are doing the best job of
implementing "our" system -- which is interesting whether you buy Fukuyama's
premise or not.
[snip]
> First of all, what Gautam reported was not saying things would not change.
> Its that change, from now on, would be evolutionary, not a war between two
> ideologies. An example of where that has happened is science. Before
> Newton, there were a lot of ways to do natural philosophy. The various
> philosophies were "warring" systems.
>
> Science is not like that. Although we talk about paradigm shifts and
> scientific revolutions, it is not a war between different basic systems.
> Quantum Mechanics doesn't consider Classical Mechanics as absolute
> nonsense. Rather, it has a hallowed place as a limit value special case
> within QM. I'd argue that whatever new systems we have will be evolutions
> from liberal democracies, not a warring system like Communism.
Pretty sticky, I think, to make distinctions between evolution and
revolution. England still has monarchs, so was its transition from an
absolute monarchy to its current system evolutionary or revolutionary?
Evolution often looks revolutionary in the long run.
My two cents again... I look at sources of order as a fundamental
characteristic. The widespread adoption of the notion of order arising from
self-regulation through competition and feedback was revolutionary relative
to the medieval idea that order is delivered from above, hierarchically.
That revolution took place in many spheres -- religion (the Reformation),
machinery (the Industrial Revolution), science (Darwin), business
(capitalism) and government (democracy). However, we didn't abandon
hierarchical authoritarianism even as we adopted competitive feedback. We
learned that they co-exist, creating social systems that are less
susceptible to corruption, machinery that was more efficient and scientific
theories that simply made more sense. More important, this re-balancing of
power created greater liberty than could have been imagined under
hierarchical authoritarian rule.
Looking at history this way leads me to wonder if we will, over the coming
decades and centuries, increasingly adopt yet another fundamental source of
order. Of course, that opens an enormous debate about whether such things
exist and if so, whether they could have the degree of impact of competitive
feedback. As anyone who's been reading my stuff on this list knows, I
strongly suspect that the studies of self-organization, game theory, etc.,
are revealing such a source of order, which is at work in collaborative
human endeavors, but largely "untamed," and little basis in theory, but much
in terms of ethics, spirituality and such. If there is truly a third
significant source of order that would bring greater efficiency and liberty
and less corruption, perhaps it won't have as big an impact as competitive
feedback, since it would be only a 50 percent gain in fundamental knowledge,
so to speak, rather than the seeming 100 percent gain of balancing
authoritarianism with competitive feedback. And perhaps that means that the
gain in liberty will not be as great.
Nick
