> What I'm saying is that we cannot extinguish our curiosity and > inventiveness, and that we have to somehow wriggle our way through what > seems to be a bleak and unhappy period of history (though it's probably no > bleaker or more unhappy than most periods of man's history). > > Keith
Keith, I like the tack you are taking on this but I would like to make one "quibble" with you on it. Let us take cement and the Inca stonework as an example. Curiosity and inventiveness is one thing but one can be Sisiphus about it all. Many cultures seem to be in that place in the world. Constantly re-inventing what they are doing without any real progress in the ultimate scheme of things. In the West it is Spirituality while in the East it is technology. The West is clumsy and unsophisticated when it comes to the psycho-physical realities using the body to heal itself that is taught in the East and in certain ancient areas here that have not be totally decimated. It is no accident that the Doctor of the Dalai Lama teaches at Harvard Medical School. I have had women students that have gone to him for severe feminine issues of pain and suffering which he has cured very simply while at one point the Allopathic Doctors were going to put one student in Chemo-therapy. The scholar Jerome Rothenberg did a study of spiritual texts from around the world and he came up with the statement that many peoples were superior "Technicians of the Sacred" where the West was not. On the other hand if you judge those cultures by mechanical technology they are very poor. The IMF recently put out a paper comparing some of these issues that was addressed on this list with regard to Cuba and came to the conclusion that Cuba did not stimulate the kind of technical wizardry that the West did but it took care of its people's educational and health needs better than America. The President of the IMF or was it the World Bank?, stated that Capitalism may indeed be imcompatible with 100% employment, a society wide healthcare plan and universal schooling. This, I might add, is the same argument made by William Dawes in relation to the Cherokee Nation in 1883 when in the Dawes Report he recommended breaking up the Cherokee Nation into private allotments and doing away with the Universal Health Care, Education, Women's sufferage, because only greed could create innovation and raise the standard of living. The point to all of this (and I would get back to the cement and the Incas) is that destruction of general welfare did not bring innovation. In the case of cement which is found in Roman architecture, it had to be re-invented because the entire society forgot how to make it. In the case of the magnificent Inca stone work, we don't have any idea how they did that. So, in short, I would say that the losses when compared to the gains in defining the human souls inventive power versus a humane society that conserves and balances its non-monetary capital, values the potential of each individual as a resource and plans and polices a genuine educational discipline within a liberal humanist tradition will out out perform the starved human spirit every time. Now Keith, I don't believe that you were advocating starving the human spirit, but whenever we use the human spirit as an answer to inhumane, inefficient, poorly planned social structures we always get inequality and a tremendous loss of societal potential along with a general retardation of human progress. Otherwise I have become an admirer of your recent writing. Especially the discussion about the Middle East and to some degree GWBaby as well. Best regards, Ray Evans Harrell
