I thought you'd never ask! Short answer: you can't get there from here.
Longer answer: we don't deserve any better than we've got, because it doesn't take a high IQ to have a functioning moral compass. And I'm not talking about that traditional substitute for a moral compass; that crutch frequently used instead of a decent set of well-developed ethics -- religion. Following a set of dictums which requires "Turn Off Your Brain And Believe Me When I Tell You That This Is The One And Only True Way" is no substitute for the real thing. It works fine for terrorists, and other flavors of bigot, and in come cases for people too timid or cowardly, or just too plain confused to think for themselves, but religion is not the answer to solving the problems we've created. Your mileage on religion no doubt varies from mine, but remember: you asked... The larger perspective requires viewing where we stand within the overall scheme, where the overall scheme, as far as we currently believe, is about 14.7 billion years old and as a continuum is inexplicably (to our own feeble intellect) expanding at an ever-increasing rate. Humans have been around as a definable genome for what, 100,000 years? Or have the latest archeological findings pushed that back? I haven't been keeping current on that. But we've only been recording history for about 5,000 years or so: our position on the intelligence evolution scale is still at the "I'm still not sure if this one wasn't a big mistake" mark. So here's mine: we'll either evolve a set of ethics and a level of intelligence, and a maturity to finally do the right thing with a certain degree of consistency, or we won't. I'm not holding my breath though; I would't take even money on us getting there. I do wish there were some way that we could check back in a few tens of millions of years so see which way it went, though. --Doug On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 2:09 PM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote: > On Feb 14, 2010, at 2:02 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote: > > Nice goals, Owen. > > A bit short on details about how to implement, and as far as I could tell, > did not address methods for stemming/thwarting the economic drivers that > make war so attractive to those large military industrial societal > components. Nor was their any guidance on how to direct that inward-looking > dim majority which comprises the majority of our race towards the version of > a higher level of Nirvana which you describe. > > But nice goals. > > --Doug > > > Well, I showed you mine, you should show yours, right? > > -- Owen > >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
