Sometimes you can have high expectations for things that just don't pan out.... In the first 150 pages of Ishmael I was quite impressed with how neatly Dan Quinn brought out some of the deeply one-sided views nearly everyone in the developed world shares, but then he ended the book with not much more than that we made a mess of the world because changing things is 'not our job' (the earth doesn't belong to man but man to the earth). I think that's an inadequate explanation of how the 'knowledge of good & evil' explains our undoing as a species, and maybe Quinn should have left his good questions on the subject as just that. My point of view has long been that our way of 'changing things for the better' (rephrasing the premise of the 'fall' that fixing things is our problem) goes wrong mostly because we overdo it, i.e. have a flawed sense of limits. Looking around for widely shared deeply one-sided views of the 'requisite variety' I find the common belief that people have choice and all other things are controlled from outside. That's equivalent to a denial that anything in the world has an 'inside' except humans. The fact is that virtually anything that grows demonstrably has a real independent interior behavior and design. We don't easily see them because the interiors of things are inside them and naturally hidden. I think denying the animating interiors of everything in the world but ourselves would quite directly blind us to the thresholds we cross as multiplying good things goes bad. Verifying and finding diverse powerful examples seems easy.
Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 680 Ft. Washington Ave NY NY 10040 tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] explorations: www.synapse9.com <http://www.synapse9.com/>
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