Nick Arnett: > I suspect that you're onto it, although I tend to believe there's a deeper unpredictability present. > For the last 10 years or so, I've grown increasingly convinced that we are living in a time of > astonishingly enormous transition. A simple version is that we are learning to move from feedback-based > Boolean (there are two competing choices and only one is right) to fuzzy logic (what is right emerges > from many interactions) as a source of authority, which echoes what I think happened in western > culture five centuries ago, when we moved from dogmatism (there is one choice and you're in or you're > out) to our present feedback-based systems of democracy, capitalism, evolution and so forth. Gotta > get this into a book one of these days...
I don't know. Somehow, I suspect human nature is basically the same today as it was ten thousand years ago, and it will remain that way for thousands of years to come if the species survives. Our basic psychological drives and instincts, our desire to increase pleasure and avoid pain, and the physical structure of our bodies that underlies all that emotional and intellectual stuff are pretty much identical to our savannah-dwelling hunter gatherer ancestors from way back in prehistory. The modern concept of "progress" that was made possible by language and writing is something that rides on top of our basic nature, self-programming and evolving "software" that runs in the same old human hardware as always. As long as we're built the same, I think the species will continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. In that sense, history is a trap, so to speak, and the only way out is some kind of species-wide physical change. In regard to Moyers's essay on the Bush Administration and their environmental policies, their behavior isn't too hard to understand, even it is really depressing. The current crop of politicians don't really want to see the world end (imo), because they're built with the same instinct for self-preservation as you and I. But they're like the early primates in the jungle, well fed and precisely evolved to fit in their current environment, incapable of believing that everything around them will change and be replaced by grasslands. In ten or twenty years we'll be on the other side of the curve looking at unstoppable climate change, and everyone will rally around the flag then, because humans are really good at facing immediate threats. The current Administration may be viewed in the same light as Nero, fiddling away on their collective instruments while Rome burned. But until the problems are obvious and inescapable, most people won't be capable of believing in them, and will usually treat those who do with the skepticism reserved for fools. Afterwards though, everyone's hindsight will be 20/20, just like always. Kevin Street -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.4 - Release Date: 2/1/2005 _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
