Re: Did You Know?

[Eric Scoles]

delancey wrote: as fo people are becoming more civilized? I don't think so. Some are, some are becoming less civilized. Tun on the news, local, national, or world news. The news is nothing but anecdotes. It focuses on the dramatic. That's fine as a social service, but not as a source of representative sampling. It depends on what you're after. It can tell you what we fear. Fear is pretty dangerous when you have the power to wipe out large populations with relatively little effort. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski's standard admonishment to his students always applies: Don't tell me what they say they do, tell me what they do. But what they say they do, and how that differs from reality, tells us important things about their mental state while they're doing what they do. Helps us to understand why they do, what they do. Interpersonal violence has smoothly declined for centuries (see Pinker's nice discussion of this at TED: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html). Slavery, sexism, homocidal homophobia, racism, state torture, sanctioned genocide, the belief that all non-human organisms lack moral value -- a million foul beliefs and practices that were normal as little as a century or even 50 years ago are now socially unacceptable. Our government is now forced to wage war in secret (e.g., Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador) or with huge disinformation campaigns that limit the time the wars can be waged. Examples like these can be compounded indefinitely. Though, perhaps, these trends are largely but not solely in the developed world, such as Europe. Actually, I suspect they get more dramatic when you look at the details outside of Europe. Europe's been heading that way for a long time. There is one exception, I think, though: Much of Africa remains unstable (hard to argue that it's not less stable than before colonialism). Aside from folks like Ben Ebenhack, nobody but the Indians and the Chinese seem to give a crap about Africa in a lasting or substantial way. That's true in SF, too -- who can you think of in SF who writes on African topics? Gotta get ahead of the curve: Indian and Chinese software development firms have been aggressively looking for a fourth world to re-outsource to for at least eight years that I know of (source: a former outsourcing chief at Sutherland) and keep revisiting the idea of going to Kenya and Nigeria for talent; and I give it a maximum of five years before the Nigerian film industry has a breakout hit in the US. Chinese investors are rolling in there with fat pockets and few scruples about how the money gets spent. (As a side note, this is the thing I find most perplexing about conservativism. Conservatives appear to share a belief that things used to be better. That's astonishing to me. It's just false. As nuts as denying evolutionary theory.) This isn't puzzling to me at all. The conservatives you speak of regard many of the changes you cite as evidence of a decline in civilization: Cats & dogs, living together in PC har-mo-nee. Hell, I agree with you about most & maybe all of those as 'goods', but many of the hottest-selling lines in SF right now have some pretty strong racist, sexist and pro-violence (if not explicitly pro-torture) aspects to them. Modern military SF is essentially fascist in character, and there's a strong conservative aftertaste to 'new space opera'. So anyway, as we "advance"*, we see backlash, we see instability, and this has an effect on society. If you want a "'twas ever thus" on this, you could find one by looking to the social changes going on around many major technological revolutions. Yes, we cam through them all, and now here we are. But: is where we are now someplace our ancestors would have wanted to get to? To Dave's point: I agree that Toffler was looking at the social aspects, but I still think he was technologically focused and that's why he over-predicted the chaos and the change: We haven't changed as much or suffered as much (psychologically) as he predicted, because he under-estimated the power of inertia. So far. On this count, inertia is a double-edge sword: It protects our sanity as it jeopardizes our future. == *I was trained in anthropology, not philosophy, so I have some issues with this concept of "advancement." To me, it's just choices we make about what we want. To us, it's 'advancement', but to me, it's "mere" evolution (and I define 'evolution' very, very broadly). "Advancement" smacks of teleology. == We should consider these facts when evaluating the singularity. Will it be a spinning out of control, or will social factors continue to improve? This singularity -- is it blue? I'm sorry, but 'the singularity' in non-ironic usage simultaneously puzzles me and makes me laugh. It's got such magic-think aspects to it, and yet it's all so bloody numeric. And folks like Vinge approach it with such a sense of inevitability that they think 'ways it could not-happen' is a clever time-waster of a parlor game. Sterling and others have pointed out repeatedly that: it's in the nature of singularities that you don't know what they'll result in; that most of the singularitarians are then going ahead and predicting anyway -- which is fine, that's what futurists and SF folk do, but I smell a strong, deeply sexual tang of technolust about it all that makes you wonder about their objectivity; and that we have, in fact, been here before. (See my point above.) cd --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. 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