On 4/13/06, Dan Minette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Well, I don't think it really has to go that far. A system that claims no > more than the best representation we've seen so far is all that is > fundamentally claimed.
Dan! My *premise* was that I hear a lot of liberal capitalist fundamentalism. You don't get to change my premise by saying that something else is claimed. You only get to argue against my premise. I really do hear it and I'm not comparing liberal capitalist democracy to known alternatives. The idea that it is the best we've done so far is orthogonal to what I'm saying. I have no problem with the idea that it is the best we've come up with so far. That may well be true. Being the best doesn't mean something is good or complete. Sometimes the best is fairly awful. Let me make a comparison to religion. Let's say there are a whole bunch of Christians who believe that they have the best theology around. Some of them think that having accomplished that, it must remain unchanged forever. Those are the fundamentalists. Others agree that it is the best theology around, but they don't believe it can remain frozen as it is. Those are not fundamentalists. That's what I mean by fundamentalism. > > But, as those who work with church charities know, combating hunger, or > massive destruction, like that seen in New Orleans, cannot simply be the > responsibility of charity. I'm confused. What does this have to do with what we're talking about? I didn't propose "charity" as a replacement for liberal capitalist democracy. > I believe that networks, in the many meanings of that word, are already > > demonstrating the incompleteness of economic fundamentalism as it exists > > in the western world today. > > If it is fundamentalism, then it has to be in opposition to a concrete > system, not the view that is still hazy. If you think that the present > understanding of politics and economics is inherently flawed, and that > there > are concrete empirical examples of this, then I'd be interested in seeing > them. I haven't suggested that the *understanding* of modern liberal capitalism is flawed. I said that modern liberal capitalist democracy isn't the best we can do. There's a future out there. Some people think that the political economy won't change in any significant way, or if it does, it'll be for the worse; that there is no possibility of a system that is better than the one we have and so all we can do is keep refining it. I disagree, strongly. What I've seen many times before are general outlines that people see of > future paradigm shifts. The first one was the one we grew up with....when > "the times, they are a changing." While change did happen, the present > doesn't match the '60s vision I remember reading and hearing. > > You seem to be talking about such a change that the very ideas of politics > science, sociology, and economics as organizations of understanding of > human > systems will fall by the wayside. No. The system can change without the way we think about such systems changing. Socialism can be understood with the same sorts of logic and analysis as communism, capitalism, etc. I'm saying there's something that lies beyond capitalism, which is beginning to be visible in networked systems, which behave qualitatively differently. To make an analogy, string theory didn't fundamentally change the way that theoretical physics is approached -- it is still mathematical modeling based on particles, masses, charges, etc. But it changed *what* they think. Quantum mechanics and special relativity suddenly found a way to get along, as part of a new, bigger picture. > > But, I don't see this in the same paradigm shift fashion that you seem to. > I think I told you, I read Kuhn way before he was cool, and misquoted > everywhere. In my field, there have been two real paradigm shifts in > 2500+ > years. Since Kuhn's book, I've seen a number of claims to paradigm > shifts, > that were overblown, to put it mildly. Paradigm shifts take a long time. Do you imagine that there's been enough time for networking (and I mean far more than just the Internet) to be involved in such changes? I seriously doubt it. What I'm talking about is the sort of thing that takes decades or centuries. I don't think we've seen the real impact of networking (and again, I mean much more than data networks). So, I'm really curious. How does networking form the basis for a new > paradigm that is so clearly correct, that those who look at things in the > more traditional way are fundamentalists? "So clearly correct?!" Could you argue from your premise any more??? Our "clearly correct" system has dramatically widened the gap between rich and poor. It has left millions without health care in a country that has most of the world's wealth. It makes war on another country based on horribly flawed intelligence. We had a presidential election with anomalies that drastically defied probability. I could list all sorts of things that could become better, but if you already believe this is the best we can do, then what's the point? As for what things might look like in the future, I haven't tried to articulate my intuitions much. However, as I see emergent properties of networks surprising us in so many ways, I have little doubt that the seeds of great change are being sown. I think that liberal capitalism will look to our descendants as backward as feudalism appears to us. Just as there were aspects of capitalism in feudalism and we have preserved some feudal ideas in the liberal capitalist democracy, I'm sure that our descendants will enjoy some aspects of capitalism... but it will be a different system at some point, with freedoms that we can no more imagine than our feudal ancestors could. Perhaps the way that we serve corporations and other capitalist power centers will look to them much as we regard serfs in service to their feudal masters. Nick Capitalist Futurist -- Nick Arnett [EMAIL PROTECTED] Messages: 408-904-7198 _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
