Eclectic Views

    
i am not prepared for starting this in a carefully reasoned way,but my
primary approach is grounded on a philosophical position that is more
or less anti-ideologistic. this awkward coinage in meant to be one of
the summary notions for what i consider to be the problematic and now
destructive perspective on human values as being based on --- without
being rigorous --- a tendency to assume or assert that human beings
are
essentially and more or less necessarily selfish and egoistic.

This notion of the basic nature of humanity pervades a cloudy set of
notions that are related in turn on notions of power, authority based
on power, even when the implied hierarchy is based on meritocracy.

This is usually accompanied by a tendency to admire winning, even to
the degree that, emotionally, winning is extremely important --- or
even the most important thing.

Winning, historically considered, has often been associated with the
notion that people who are not winners are losers, and that losers are
not as significant or valuable as winners. This the familiar simple
model usually titled win-lose (as contrasted with win-win, an
appealingly attractive notion). One need recognize that the win-lose
model, notion, or paradigm can be very attractive to those who devalue
losers.

But at the moment, i am trying to sketch and rough out a whole cloud
of notions, tendencies, patterns of thought, emotional and
intellectual
models, political models, economic models, military models, models of
psychological and social domination, ideals about what is the nature
of
the good and the best, ways of selecting the best, etc.

This mess of models, patterns, and tendencies is one we might call the
egoist paradigm, except that such a term might be taken as implying
some notional object that is probably treated as something a little
intellectually more crisp, or strict, or even disciplined than i am
concerned about.

Some of the above description might be considered to be appropriately
discussed as ontology if my intentions are showing through, but i will
try to point out that the whole domain of the pair of super paradigms
i
will try to rush by (in order to get on with the claimed topic) are a
mix that we might not need to clarify and assign to strict columns on
a
chart. 

My main goal and therefore task is to contribute whatever i may to a
further understanding that if we were to take this super paradigm that

might be given some more precise title and call it the egoist
paradigm, we would be narrowing altogether too much the potentially
inclusive scope of the collection of notions. this would tend to lead
considerations, discussion, or anaylsis off into dense thickets of the
constituent aspects of the model or clump of models.

For this reason, i have chosen to refer to this clump of notions as
the ALPHA super paradigm. The exact notion of what people mean when
they refer to this or that paradigm can be very slippery or can result
in squabbles where intellectual wars might be waged of just what the x
or y paradigm might ought to be.

The main reason i mention the vague entity of the alpha paradigm is
that i am trying to enlist help in  defining its polar paradigm of the
same sort. I call this intended and intentional super paradigm the
OMEGA paradigm. 

I call it the omega paradigm primarily because it is the Greek
alphabetical pole of alpha and because i grew up many, many decades
ago
in Episcopal churches that often had alphas and omegas in relief
carved or molded all about in my restless field of vision. 

So since we want this discussion to be about super import political,
social, and ethical issues, i want to differentiate and distinguish
our
discussion a bit from mere a to z matters. I suppose that is more than
a little weak as a humourous aside. My casual apologies.

So Omega super paradigm it is.  Onward.

I must take a break and dash off for a bite more physically nourishing
than bytes.

Later,  Olin
  

    
i will have to follow this up on Sunday
  

    
How about some concrete premises to discuss:

Social Darwinism sucks.

People who claim to be free-market rugged individualists but didn't
emigrate to Russia in 1993 are phonies and dilettantes.
  

    
The verbomania took her and the kids in the epidemic of '08 and Lem
never was the same.  Should we really be saying "sucks" isnt that just
somthing that Bart Simpson says. i mean a vulgar, juvenile kind of
thing and doesn't it refer to fellatio.  Isnt it saying "Give me
fellatio if you want to hold that opinion" Or "that person should give
me fellatio if she wants to play the piano like that"  
  

    
hmmm. tho social Darwinism is a sort of cult and tho it infected US
law in the late 19th century, with such as sterilization laws that are
probably still on the books in various US locations, the more
interesting thing about the cult is its parallel to the grim aspect of
Calvinism:  the notion of the _select_ in social Darwinism is absurdly
similar to the notion of the _elect_ in Calvinism. Both the select and
the elect are an _elite_ selected on the one hand by "nature" (here
used anthropomorphicly) and on the other elected by a supreme god
modeled in its nature on Augustine of Hippo and in turn Plato's idea of
an ultimate perfect good that is the source of the "real" forms,
models for all the imperfect instances in nature, the realm of "coming
to be", which in turn is a world of lesser reality than the perfect
forms/ideas/patterns/models. 
     This problem with the notion of selection is one reason i think
that it is not useful to use the Darwin family term of 'natural
selection' in that the natural world or universe is not the sort of
entity that "selects" anything, in that selection is a process in which
some kind of entity selects things. Entities that survive in evolution
survive by fitting in. They do not survive by being selected by any
force or choosing entity. It is only in this sense of 'fitting in' that
evolution involves fitness or the fittest. This Spencerian term of
'fittest' is another unfortunate aspect of the 19th style of thinking
and feeling about nature. This is Romantic Naturalism of Jack London
and his "call of the wild" and Zola or even Hardy. This is the very
sort of "god" entity that Epicurus dismisses with his succinct
presentation of the problem of evil for notions of god.
   I am not against nor am i an enemy of those for whom the notion of
a benign and loving god is a support in the ongoing struggle to
encourage a widespread and general understanding that a humane
sustainable world requires a clear ethical ideal and an understandable
system of ideas that clarify a general human code of ethics that will
serve as the touchstone for a new understanding of the complex
interaction of the  complex system of political values and ideas and
the complex system of economic values and ideas. That absurdly complex
sentence is what happens when under pressure one attempts to quickly
compress such a large glob of notional issues of great complexity. I
will attach the sort of sketchy notes that precede focusing in on
important variables and issues related to the hugely complex issue of
trying to describe the challenge we face when we try to describe some
of the challenges we face in instituting real parameters for the
details of a government with effective long term checks and balances.
Would that i had assistance such as those bodies that Jefferson and
Adams worked with as they attempted to face up to least harmful
expressions about politics, trade, and a benign approach to maximizing
human individual freedom.
  

    
here the government brainstorming notes are:
[written 2008.05.24 — 
sustainability is the critical condition in contemporary ethics;
without sustainability there can be no constructive political or
economic system that is in any useful way humane;
our human political system must be sustainable, for a non-sustainable
system would trend into war, destruction, mass death, road warrior
ethics, etc.;
similarly, no desirable economic system would emerge;
road warrior ethics is the polar state as opposed to a healthy,
sustainable, fair, humane system of values that is generally
sustainable and self-correcting.
the self correcting aspect, if it is to be continuous — the minimum
characteristic of sustainability — requires some kind of flexible,
self-maintaining system of practical procedures embodied in some kind
of agency entity. 
this means the development of some kind of “government” with built-in
systems of renewal and correction of existing procedures and agencies.
this implies some kind of currying and combing-out of entanglements in
the agency systems, which are necessarily going to require some kinds
of hierarchies of effective knowledge, effectively renewed by internal
and/or external systems.
the subsystems of  agencies are built up in bureaucratic subgroups;
there has to be some perpetually corrected and renewed systems of
evaluating and correcting or replacing effective agents;
such agent entities must be developed with the conscious understanding
that they are pragmatic entities which must make effective use of the
sub-budget portions that are alloted for an assigned purpose and that
general function most be achieved or the line item in the budget must
be shifted to a new agent entity.
such notions are a very minimal and very general image of the kinds of
entities which must be built up, maintained, and replaced within
various more inclusive categories of budget to achieve the various
agencies that must be accomplished to keep the overall larger units of
government in affordable effective condition.
the cleansing and correcting mechanisms are most likely to have to be
extraordinarily dynamic, shifting, and changing in order to constantly
refresh the appropriateness of all expenditures that continue from year
to years, with some kind of refreshing, and retraining, and
reassigning methodologies;
generalizations such as the above must be continually refreshed and
re-described lest phrases applied to an activity be mistaken for the
appropriate action itself, the ultimate disease condition of
bureaucratic elements.
It is within these kinds of respects that a well run business entity
has the same requirements for its health. The business entity has a
potentially effective context of operation, usually referred to an
appropriate market to achieve the shaking up or replacement of units
that do not attain their intend degree of effective agency. The
business usually cannot long afford ineffective activities by paid
staff, or they are likely to price themselves out of their market.
We need to clarify marget-style agencies to spotlight the ineffective
activities within government.
Correctly designed and maintained units of government do not
necessarily have to be more inefficient than businesses, but there must
be good supervision within agencies and of agencies. the latter must
be maintain by supporting citizen activities; these supporting citizen
actitivities must also be continuously refreshed.
it is the responsibility of citizen education processes to prepare and
maintain a sufficient amount of citizen energy to be applied to all
aspects of governing systems.
as we move toward a sustainable culture, more of our citizen energy
and wealth must be applied to this refreshment activity of supervising
the processes of government.
as we move toward the asymptotic maintenance of markets for a smaller
population required for sustainable food-energy-population ratios, a
larger proportion of our population will have to be trained in new
kinds of citizen corps whose duties will be to master and maintain
these governmental management functions.
Citizen units that do not maintain the required maintenance
appropriately will lose some portion of their standard of living until
they can be appropriately retrained and prove successful in new
assignments.
Rigorous pruning must be maintained in all such citizen/government
corrective functions and the procedures to  maintain such an
effectiveness will make up huge circular systems encompassing all
functions of government.
Other wise, the steady state population size will not continue in a
sustainable form and functionality, and new stern, unforgiving
conditions will reemerge.
Education must ascertain that the necessity of correctly maintaining
these   systems will be just as important as the maintenance of dykes
in the Netherlands.
]
  

    
Is the maintenance of Dutch dykes a government function or a more social 
one? I can see maintaining dikes being a reasonable analogy, if that 
helps.
  

    
The maintenance of the Dutch dykes is primarily the responsibility of
local governmental bodies called 'waterschappen' (plural, the singular
is 'waterschap'). Currently there are 27 'waterschappen', all of which
are responsible for water management in a specific area. Most of the
current ones are combinations of earlier, smaller 'waterschappen'. As I
understand these were formed as 'grass-roots' social initiatives
starting in the Middle-Ages. Under Napoleon (1795-1813) water
management started to be perceived as a responsibility of the national
government, and in the 19th century a Ministry was created that was
responsible for water management, among other things. However, the
'waterschappen' continued to exist and retained a certain level of
autonomy.
  

    
Interesting line of reasoning and the Dutch example is new for me. 

You said 
 > Correctly designed and maintained units of government do not
 necessarily have to be more inefficient than businesses, but there must
 be good supervision within agencies and of agencies. the latter must
 be maintain by supporting citizen activities; these supporting citizen
 actitivities must also be continuously refreshed.

I'm familiar with watchdog citizen groups that have performed outside 
of government agencies and that have been important in my region.  A 
group called TURN has been quite important in watching the regulatory 
bodies that manage power supply in Northern California, for example.

In some situations an expert volunteer activist becomes so versed in 
the issues that he or she runs for office -- for example, school 
board -- and then becomes an insider.  In my view a new expert outsider 
is needed at that point, so that seems to be an illustration of 
that point of yours.
  

    
i fully agree with your point that a new expert outsider is needed at
that point.  i also appreciated rjs's,7 details about the dutch system
of dyke maintenance, and i also would like to support ari's,6
implication of appropriate response.  

Gail,8 seems to have well understood the discussion and has added a
very interesting and completely appropriate instantiating case. This is
the spirit of the kinds of goals for community that we must take
forward if humanity is going to be agile and quick enough to reform its
systems and create many new, interacting systems.

Such systems will all tend to be parts of interacting subsystems in a
context in which huge super systems interact, in this case human
civilization interacting with the totality of the world wide ecosystem
which in itself interacts with the general context of the convergence
of all the super-contextual natural systems such as weather and
tectonics and the enclosing soup of energy fields which we think of as
the universe.

In a sense, i am trying to describe a kind of super common sense for
humanity that i think we must clarify and articulate.
  

    
on sustainability and a structured, disciplined, and maintainable set
of human values, i.e., ethics at a usefully inclusive level.

I strayed off prematurely onto a discussion of the maintenance
structures of a broad enough management system for implementing an
inclusive ethical system, that is, effective enough, practical enough,
and maintainable enough to be useful across most organized forms of
human culture.1

Reviewing all this stuff, I notice that I teed off referring to my
“anti” ‘ideologistic’ perspective.
Perhaps it would be useful to accept the probability that dictionary
and word processing word lists are not going to recognize such a word
as valid; that, of course, is merely their being silly and/or limited.

The word ‘ideology’ should be able to take any variant form that
English offers, such as ‘ideologist’, ideologistic, ideologism, etc.
There is no reason for a writer to have to pause and use write-around
phrases, wasting effort to make them fit the flow.

It is hard enough for a mind like mine to stop linking phrases that to
me make a clear set of reasonable understandable relations, though I
know that this is not a very useful style if one if going to keep most
readers. 

For this reason, since I am not likely to have enough time to rewrite
everything I write, I may have to find a way to edit some of my
earliest postings in this environment.

Meanwhile, I should probably use my preferred crutch when trying to
rewrite or make up for some of my most indigestible or opaque writing.

My best luck has been with writing in a format to has the look of
pseudo poetry, using carriage returns to separate phrases and clauses
and such by constant use of the “carriage return” 
(as we used to call it).

This method isolates sub bits of my prose flow
Strongly enough that I notice
Just what stands naturally by itself and 
Emphasizes to me when I have strung things
Out quite enough, thank you.

This encourages me to hit the return and
Pay closer attention to the sentence structure
As distinguished from
The linkage associations that flow so
Naturally when I am trying to think
More than consider how
Graceless or ungainly
My prose might have become.
However, this system looks much Less absurd when I properly 
Adjust the Preferences on my 
Word processor so that my 
Capitalization auto-correction system
Is crippled like this:
so that i switch to the contemporary
style of hardly using any capitals at all.
.now one thing that does is to
disguise the beginnings of sentences
to the degree that one
is likely to have to stop and read 
over mush more than is desirable.

.so i am considering and here 
beginning to use a new convention of
indicating the beginning of a sentence
in a new way, a way that i truly hope
may turn out to be very useful 
and be very easy to convert my 
typing habits to, specifically, i will
try indicating new sentences 
after a period by merely 
hitting the first natural period
like this (end.) and striking a space,
which i do anyway, and then another 
period. .this will make the proper 
period pause and its implied 
linguistic logic quite clear. 
.whether or not the reader
thinks that it looks odd.
.a reader that objects to 
clarifying devices in the communication 
of thought seems to me to be 
acting a bit uncooperative,
if not somewhat petty.
After all:
human civilization finds itself
cresting the cusp 
of a dramatic and 
definitive change and 
definitive challenge 
such as we have never faced 
before, at least in 
recorded civilization.

Here is a simple, but,
i think, very important point:

we are very likely to have 
exceeded the number of 
human beings compatible 
with our human capacity 
to appropriately respond 
by adapting appropriately 
to the challenge that we 
have set up for ourselves.

.we may theoretically have the 
intelligence and the adaptability 
to solve the challenge of our human 
population growth exceeding 
the carrying capacity of 
the ecosystem that is the 
only ecosystem we know much 
about — or at least that we can
successfully adapt to 
in time to save the current system
with its millions of species 
maintaining and managing 
SO FAR to adjust to our ravages 
of our ecosystem’s ADJUSTMENT
capacity.
.in other words, we may be, for 
example, unable to change our
international pan-human social 
system fast enough to arrest 
the destruction of our ecosystem’s
critical level of whatever sorts of
forestation are required to prevent 
a world wide version of the 
disasters that struck the 
society that built the cities 
that built Angkor Wat
or the disasters that struck the 
Mayans when their warring city
states tipped the limit of 
sustainability for their 
great culture.
We know that if the great Asian 
nations that are trying to catch
up with our rapacious way
of life are not only going to 
find it hard to help to limit their 
generations of various pollutions and even 
their increasing levels of meat 
consumption in time to save 
forests such as those of Indonesia 
and of South America, not to 
even consider the ecological 
problems of Africa.

etc………….
  

    
Eco-ethos-symbiotic-organo-mechano-cerebro-kinetic interface,  Let he
who holds the biggest gun decide who will live. Or, the one who can
find peace amid shrill conflict is endowed with the ability to weigh
the truth.
  

    
well, i just lost a good chunk of energy writing my response directly
into the Well’s reply box.
Having typed longer than i can remember now (i just spent a big bunch
of time creating my back-up version of this discussion as it has
actually been sequenced). Now i cannot remember hardly anything about
what was on my mind; maybe it will come back, maybe not.
i sort of remember that i was discussing truth — yes, i was teeing off
on balloonman’s comment on “one”, 
by some method i might imagine, 
but which was only identified as being 
“the one who can find peace amid shrill conflict”, 
an enviable capacity. 
.he wrote that such a one 
“is endowed with the ability to 
weigh the truth.”
i leapt on this introduction of the 
truth, assuming, i hope not too
unreasonably, that he meant 
what i often cite as THE TRUTH.
.i only use the caps here because 
i find that the Well as executed 
in this web html/xml universe 
does not seem to be accepting 
my Safari Mac browser’s mode of
emphasis, just as it does not 
seem to accept my preference for
using a serif-style normal type face 
but rather insist on a typewriter 
style face. .at least it’s not 
Helvetica, or one of those faces 
which do not distinguish “l”s from 
capital “i”s, and on top of that is 
not as readable as Verdana. 
.i prefer Century Schoolbook, 
but i have to admit that i 
am a typeface fanatic, 
moreso the older i get and 
the less flexible my pupils get.
.meanwhile, back at the branch …

i basically have grown over the 
years to become less and less 
able to put up with the notion 
that i am typing as THE TRUTH.
.the problem with this notion, 
and more precisely, this concept, 
is that it is one of those crowning 
cases that we have inherited from 
Parmenides and Plato and friends 
where some of the Greeks came to 
essentially worship the purest 
super-refined abstractions that 
they could they could thinks of. 
.not sure about the older guy but 
i am quite confident that i have 
accrued solid enough info on Plato 
that i will simply evoke his 
wonderfully appealing, to those 
disposed towards intellectual 
delights, notions of, first and foremost, 
his notion of good, or the good — 
or even the idea of the good.
.i was a desultory student of 
classical greek for 7 years 
way back in the 1950s, 
and i never got good at it.
.i went back to it starting 
before the solstice holidays 
in 2007. .my goal was to revive 
and extend my knowledge of 
Plato, but more importantly, 
to reassure myself that my 
knowledge of Plato from both 
the ancient fifties and from the 
intervening decades in such 
media for the most part as 
the literature sections of 
the NY Times and the SF 
Chronicle and the mags 
like Harpers and Atlantic, 
with occasional forays into 
even such as Irving Kristol’s 
little mag _The Public Interest_.
 . invoking Kristol implies, in a way, 
the elite Leo Strauss, the mentor of 
Irving and his formidable wife, 
Gertrude Himmelfarb, (the family 
seems to me to have a serious 
obsession with open sexuality and 
with all hints of sexual license,
particularly if not well hidden)
and the literary Allan Bloom,
but more horrendously, 
some of these are intellectual 
ancestors of those whose 
elitism knows no bounds. 
 .such were the group of 
the folk that were gathered 
for the core controllers of right 
wing policy; 
they joined together to present the 
claim of democratic concerns 
gathered in Bill Kristol’s pseudo-idealistic 
ad and called up all 
who were happy with the 
neocon label to go to war.
Somehow, it seems to me that 
Cheney became the agent to 
call the enthusiasts together 
and make sure that Bush did not 
falter in his role of leader of the war.

 .i always find a tendency for various 
kinds of highly educated elite
folk or celebrated intellectuals to 
move their political emotions to the 
right as they identify more and more 
with their celebration as being a part of 
the intellectual or literary elite.
I used to find some of Irving K’s specific 
analyses, comments, or recommendations 
fairly sane and reasonable, even when 
mixed with other matter. .as one somewhat
obsessed with political, economic, 
social, and psychological ideas, 
i have often plunged and lept 
about like a sort of metal dolphin 
in the seas of ideas, but since 1958 
i have tended to put more and more 
energy into getting various idiosyncratic 
agglomerations of mentation, notions, and ideas 
clearly related to the concrete issues of real 
people and real settings.

 .such settings must be studied as 
they are, not as we may think we know 
that they ought to be. .i am not an 
enemy of complex thought nor of 
intellectual thought, but i hope to 
maintain my sense of real people and 
their needs, real political and economic 
conditions and their problematic 
complexity.

If we cannot use our thinking and our 
capacity for complex thought by 
applying it to the solutions of 
very mundane political and economic 
problems and challenges then we 
may well be wasting some vital 
human resources for the solutions of the 
threats to the people alive today 
and the well being of those being 
born and growing up continuously 
behind us in time. .we are threatened 
and we are challenged.

.but more importantly, we must act 
without much more time to chew on 
our challenges and imagine that those 
challenges are out far enough in the 
future such that we do not have to begin — 
begin to take effective actions that will 
address the most urgent problems.

.unfortunately, one of the most urgent 
needs our current human civilization 
has today is to critically analyze and 
restructure much of our value thinking.

.value thinking involves beginning to 
appreciate more clearly and understand 
more sympathetically the emotional structures 
that contribute most to the misunderstandings 
that most keep us from our  getting 
ourselves and those who are in less 
fortunate situations than ourselves 
together on the truly [in the loose sense] 
important job of ranking human values 
in such a way that the compromises 
imposed upon us by the pragmatics of 
triage do not deflect us from ideals and 
standards that must not be thrown 
out with the wreckage of those parts 
our culture which we by sheer necessity 
have to remodel.

.with this paean and exhortation 
i must pause and rest 
and deal with some of my other 
matters that call for attention 
and action.

.i will have to get back to the 
THE TRUTH problem later … 
  

    
damn! ant i a slow learner! .i just 
now wrote a longer paragraph than 
i intended, launching into a riff 
on my ridiculous typo of keying ‘metal’ 
when i meant to key _‘mental’_:  a word 
with a very strong ‘n’ in it. 
.i get embarrassed enough just reading my 
failures to monitor my tendency to 
generate run-on sentences — and worse 
to occasionally run them on so carelessly 
that i lose track of the appropriate 
positioning of subjects such that 
they rule the appropriate objects. 
.i find it absurd when in letting 
one thought-image-notion generate 
such a flood of thought that provokes 
an easy side-slip until some sub notion 
pivots into another thought such that 
the more dramatic imagery that my 
mind was tracking too sloppily 
such that the later predicate notions 
point back to some subjugated subject 
whose rule was supposed to be 
temporary, the focus properly 
shifting back further in the ranks, 
or perhaps more properly, the 
succeeding waves of notional 
crests —   as now i have managed 
to string out my critique until one 
may as well simple emit a big strong 
dash and finish the whole thing 
off with some clause that can 
claim legitimacy in its own right.

such are the prose problems of 
such a neuronal brain as mine, 
which simply goes its own way 
when i write or talk. .talking is 
safer, in a way, for with vocal 
emphasis pointing out high-lights, 
the meat manages to be processed 
more successfully in the receiver’s 
mind. 
        .and commas become much 
more crucial for sorting stuff out 
in the welters of notions and imagery 
that can pour out unintentionally.

.now that i have made such a verbal 
fuss, i might as well go on and 
comment more appropriately on 
response 3, which leads off my page 
for todays start and review session.

.There i am reminded, though i have 
tried to ignore it, that today’s repeated 
display of “Piercenukemdick’s” riff re 
fellatio seems to me to be confusing 
the grammar and implied substantial 
subject of ‘sucks’. surely the proper 
substantive element in the subject 
role has nothing to do with the 
subject demanding fellatio at all. 
the speaker who says that something 
‘sucks’ is merely trying to lower 
the prestige of whatever is being 
implied to be practicing “oral stimulation”
(as the Oxford American dictionary 
would have us understand it) on 
something, as karish would have us 
understand that abstract entity 
that Spencer generated to heighten 
the drama of stress in the society 
of us human folk should be 
performing. .that is, whether he 
is intending to or not, karish is 
implying some generalized instantiation 
of human society acting out the 
competition [to the death?] of 
animal against animal in the 
eternal struggle to dominate. 
.thus the abstracted Social Darwinism 
is relegated to a shameful role.
.this is a reasonable level of 
despising due the abstract set 
of ideas in question, even if 
quite crudely put. .but having 
grown up in the cotton fields 
in the middle of the Mississippi 
delta in a day when abused 
workman were just as good 
as any rapper today at invoking 
such insults, and having further 
spent three years living in the 
barracks with other enlisted 
men in an army full of draftees 
who eagerly learned the most 
vivid flourishes of the crudest 
language that such an institution 
elicits from us, not to speak of 
my rich exposure to the freest 
exercise of free diction that the 
free speech movement that teed
off the increasing active phases
of that movement as it morphed 
into both the civil rights movement 
and the ant-war movement,
i am almost never impressed with
the language of humankind. 
.further more, i think here in my 
ancient age, that i still agree 
that there is no such thing as 
a dirty word, nor should any 
word, as such, be unspeakable.

.this only becomes worth serious 
consideration when we wrestle with 
the appropriate allowances for 
constitutional free speech and for 
the universal rights of freedom 
for all the world’s folk, even the 
most disenfranchised and weak.

.but for those of us who really believe 
in freedom — freedom of speech, of 
assembly, of association, even the 
freedom to demonstrate peaceably 
and non-destructively — this
all becomes more serious.

.but this is not trivial, nor is it 
easy. .we should all be striving 
to help move the world towards 
respecting human rights much,
much better than it does today.

it may be appropriate to quote 
Wikipedia’s summary of the basic 
facts about the enacted documents 
that summarize a very thorough 
and theoretically binding set of 
documents:

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a declaration
adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (10 December 1948 at
Palais de Chaillot, Paris). The Guinness Book of Records describes the
UDHR as the "Most Translated Document"[1] in the world. It consists of
30 articles which outline the view of the General Assembly on the human
rights guaranteed to all people. The International Bill of Human
Rights consists of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its two
Optional Protocols. In 1966 the General Assembly adopted the two
detailed Covenants which complete the International Bill of Human
Rights; and in 1976, after the Covenants had been ratified by a
sufficient number of individual nations, the Bill took on the force of
international law.

.isn’t that interesting: the Bill 
took the force of international law 
more than thirty years ago.

.what many Americans, Europeans, 
the countries in South America, 
the countries in Africa and Asia — 
all of us know that this sort of 
ideal should be taken seriously, 
but many ideologies interfere and 
trump real human and cultural rights 
with ideological theories that have 
clearly moved, mixed with various 
supposedly 
religious positions, towards a far too 
highly wide-spread tendency to 
make a mildly mistaken faith 
called “free trade” and — especially 
in the sense of so-called laissez-faire,
the specifically stated notion that 
we should let business people do 
whatever they want to do — 
that freedom of trade trumps all.

.this remarkable theory, held by 
many since before the Declaration 
of Independence in America, is the 
most inadequately challenged super 
powerful theory in the world.

.what are the most important 
_HUMAN_ values?
.even the primates generally 
take their societies more seriously 
than many big business and 
financial types do. and many 
much smaller business folk 
also tend to claim that this 
doctrine may be the most 
important belief in their value 
systems.
 
        .many of these people if 
not aroused about some political
or economic issue that they see 
as a threat to their status, will 
under calmer conditions and 
among mellower sorts of folk, 
admit that Allah or Yaweh or 
Jesus or The Buddha would not 
rank money matters over the real 
commitments that real religions 
usually require.

.but the people who claim to 
believe in these religions, 
especially when demagogs  
have stirred up their fears 
effectively, are capable of 
setting these values aside 
when they believe that their 
financial interests are as 
threatened as the demagogs 
try to convince them that 
they are.

.well, since i lost a big chunk 
of typing to the entry box 
monster that lurks in the Well 
once again, i find that i have 
been trying to get back to whatever 
my original intentions might 
have been this noon, now 
that it is well after 5:30 
and my bottom is cramping 
and i am getting hungry, 
i had better set this aside,
as soon as i can give it a 
cursory check out. 

.so later. Aloha.
  

    
So, exactly how long have you been completely isolated from popular culture?
  

    
sorry, karish, but i just got this thing 
to come up in a new window and 
found your response. I am trying to get 
some one at the Well to help me get out of 
a Forgotten state that seems to reemerge for me every time i have to
start with a fresh window. i just stumbled across the detailed url that
i am using above, whereby i discovered your comment!

so i will try for a quick and dirty answer 
so that i can return to trying to find out 
how to kill the old Forgotten state that 
keeps coming up after i log off and come back later.

i have been in touch with the culture 
of NPR. PBS, the NY Times, Washington Post, 
the Raleigh News and Observer, and at least some 
teenagers and college aged persons of both sexes, 
and some of their parents. 
.my grandnephews still represent the 
child development stages that i studied 
in the fifties and sixties from time to time,
that is ~4 to 6 year olds.

I was quite familiar and even involved 
in the culture of high school kids and 
young adults in the sixties, with the 
culture from prekindergarten through 
the ancient in Biloxi in the late sixties 
and the early '70s.

i returned to Berkeley in 1972 to observe 
that final wave of the great cultural 
movement that was poisoned by 
the events of 1968 and the extreme 
reactionary period that followed. 

.i pulled out of Berkeley and moved 
down to the Stanford neighborhood 
where i was very involved with 
persons from 5 to at least 
their late sixties 
in various contexts and subcultures 
from the "main stream" as it became 
less vital and more conservative and 
all sorts of variant sub groups of the 
sort that one can interact with in the 
environs of a University such as Stanford, 
but even more so the culture of silicon valley 
as we stumbled from 8080/z80 chip s100 buss 
machines through the tote-arounds like my 
Ozborne (sp?; prob'ly s not z) to which i glommed on 
a regular size CRT monitor for then and 
a “HUGE” 5 or 10 megabyte hard disk 
[my current older hard disk machines 
have mirrored 60 and 80 gig hds and 
my i20 Mac that i am working on has 
only 250 gig, but is now backed up with 
the new Leopard OS 10 with something 
wonderful called Time Machine which 
backs up to an external disk with 500 GIG.]

.any way, after the 1980s being filled with 
manufacturing management consulting, 
which familiarized me further with, extending 
from way back in the early '60s IBM days, 
and i was able to study the corporate culture 
once again for another time slice.

.i was involved with a lot of graduate 
students at the turn of the nineties, 
but then i returned to the south 
in 1993 to a somewhat more progressive and 
contemporary culture in the so called 
Research Triangle territory, 
a much more with-it culture than 
i found in Biloxi just past the cusp 
of the middle 60’s —
anyway, here in the “really new” 
cultural enclaves where i continue 
to interact with students, tho 
mostly only university students and 
where i have tended to get to know 
mostly upperclassmen and grad students, 
the latter being mostly pursuing various 
medical pursuits from MDs to Public Health 
to dentistry. .i also get to interact with 
the young to fairly young  waitperson 
and bar and restaurant types when 
i sup at the counters of my two favorites 
places.

I was much more involved with the funkier 
side of culture between 1967 and around 1974, 
but i think that i am equally open to it, if 
not making a frontal assault past the 
wonderful family folk that take care 
of my 96 year old mother who can’t talk 
or really walk or feed herself. .she had taken 
care of a very large chunk of my time and
energy over the last ten years, until it 
was clear that she needed 24 hour care,
tho i am right across the hall at night 
if anyone should need me.

.the above may give you a little better 
basis to answer the question you asked 
me.

.tho i do believe in truth in packaging, 
up the point of a significant involuntary 
foray into my privacy.

.perhaps this response will satisfy you.
.i hope it is either useful or interesting 
to some of you out there who might 
stumble across this.

Now i had better pursue the Forgetting 
of this topic at times when i do not want 
to forget it or interfere with its availability.

.i hope this takes
  

    
outlining the challenges

the challenge of population growth.

so what?

more population growth means more forests cut.

implication?

we are already accelerating the 
number of species that are becoming 
extinct.

maintaining a very rich variety of 
species in the ecosystem on which 
we are dependent is critically 
important to the health and 
persistence of that ecosystem.

our current rate of population 
growth and of the growth of human
consumption looks certain to have a 
disastrous impact on the ecologies 
of our forests.

maintaining a very high degree of 
variety among species is important 
in two major venues:

1. maintaining the high degree of
variegation among species 
supports the capacity of complex
systems to resist disastrous 
damage. if one subset of
interdependent species is 
seriously damaged and 
threatened, the loss of the
required richness of variety
will increase the probability that
the whole rain forest, for example,
will NOT be able to adjust and 
will NOT be able to provide the 
necessary opportunity to develop 
new sets of interactive species
that can fill the function of the 
damaged set.

2. food crops must not replace the 
wild varieties of the type, such as a 
wide variety of wild tomatoes, wild 
grasses, wheats, ryes, maize, wild 
potatoes, wild fruit, and so forth.
we are headed toward so damaging 
the ecosystem that provides 
sufficient complexity to maintain 
most of the species in our ecosystem 
that its capacity for self-renewal and 
self-correction is threatened.
 
there will be a tipping point. we are 
accelerating towards whatever that 
tipping point is.

using our current approaches to 
feeding humanity, the growth of the 
population is such as to continue 
increasing the degradation of the 
ecosystem that sustains us.
cutting down forests to allow more 
food production by human 
agriculture will degrade the 
ecosystem.
this degradation of the ecosystem is 
certain to risk generating 
irreversible damage.

we cannot assume that whatever 
other changes we make in our life 
styles other than reducing the 
population will be adequate to stop 
the shrinking of our forests.

shrinking forests mean more loss of species.

humans currently cutting the rain 
forests are causing so much damage 
to that land that replacing the rain 
forest may not be possible in time to 
compensate for the loss of such a 
huge amount of highly variegated 
species habitat.
  

    
AGENDA items

towards describing the agenda 
for human ethics and values

Background Problem:  
the agenda of meaning:
the notion of ‘good’ and ‘better’ 
and the *evaluation* of 
the good and the better

Issue:  the current agenda in our 
culture of everything being “relative” 
_versus_ the competing traditional 
agenda of *The Truth* and the
truth about goodness or the good;

the background issue of both the 
limits on relativeness and the 
opposed notions of 
THE TRUTH and THE GOOD. 

the notion of “real” philosophical, 
logical, and 
common language TRUTH.

the competition for the notion of 
THE REAL as an ultimate 
unchangeable TRUTH which is 
_more real_ than the existence of the
 changing world of nature and the 
natural, a world which Plato 
characterizes as the world of 
“coming to be” as opposed to the 
world of eternal stability and 
reliability, the world of a permanent 
 and stable truth which does not 
come to be but which simply is, 
permanently and unchangeably. 

This Platonic sort of truth is 
absorbed in western theology 
within the godhead. 

.polytheism and many versions of 
pantheism and animism do not 
require this sort of infallible, 
ultimate, omniscient overseer and 
director sort of truth.

In opposition to this sort of 
understanding of reality and truth, i 
firmly believe in the world of 
pragmatic truth of the sort which 
can be found in Charles Sanders 
Peirce and his students John Dewey 
and William James. 

.the earlier of these was a famous 
natural scientist (re the earth’s 
magnetic field) and influential 
logician, whose symbolic logical 
notation was essentially adopted in 
the monumental _Principia 
Mathematica_ (by Alfred North 
Whitehead and Bertrand Russell). 

Dewey is famous for his notions 
about democracy and the kind of 
education on which the maintenance 
of a healthy democracy  depends; 
William James wrote a book entitled 
_Pragmatism_ which shows his version 
of Peirce’s notion of pragmatic truth. 

This short period 
of interest in the pragmatic 
understanding of truth seems to 
have been blown away by WW II 
when the so called neo-orthodoxy of 
Reinhold Niebuhr or the more 
Calivinist Karl Barth came into 
considerable attention. [ Richard 
Niebuhr, as far as i got into him 
seemed to me to have a much more 
interesting approach to Christianity 
than his more famous brother. ]

.but i do not want to get involved in 
logical disputations. .a simple way to 
phrase what i am concerned about 
is that ‘what works’ and ‘what has 
practical uses and implications’ is 
what matters about the “truth” 
about something, so that what 
matters about ideas and the 
description of processes is that their 
usefulness is worked out in a 
practical context by empirical 
testing;  we should never stop this 
empirical evaluation, for contexts 
are in a natural state of change, 
much of which is unpredictable. 

.Contextual changes may require 
adjustments in what we consider to 
be the case. .the disciplined 
pragmatic approach is the most 
reliable and useful way 
to monitor 
the effectiveness and 
the appropriate operation of 
processes.

.thus if we are going to minimize 
error and mistakes that generate 
bad practical consequences, we must 
never stop re-evaluating our 
programs, our procedures, and our 
processes. 

.what matters is their practical 
outcomes, the pragmatic results.
  

    
Background Problem:  
the agenda of *being*

.i hope that i will be able to avoid 
getting bogged down in the agenda 
of *being*.

This is the territory of what is real 
and/or less or more real than some 
other kind of phenomena, or 
noumena, or whatever.

.thinkers and such have not been 
able to make much progress on the 
battles that rage around this sort of 
topic.

i am not particularly concerned 
about who believes what unless, as 
the famed lady said to G B Shaw at 
a party somewhere around a century 
ago –– unless it scares the horses.

.in this case, we are concerned about 
who will and who will not cooperate 
in the struggle to generate a new 
general canon of human behavior 
that has the potential to be useful in 
facing up to and seriously trying to 
solve the problems that we face now, 
here in 2008.

in a very real pragmatic sense, the 
issue of “being” has two primary 
senses that are of enormous 
practical importance and that have 
extremely important effects in our 
lives.
  

    
“being”

for one, we must consider the nature 
of natural reality and context of real 
personal, political, economic, and 
social reality.

this is the sort of reality we are 
referring to when we discuss the 
physical properties of the physical 
world. i do not think that it is 
particularly useful to talk about the 
“material” world, in that such usage 
implies much too broadly that the 
physical world in general is made up 
of matter.

for me, the physical world is made 
up of patterned energy that can be 
observed in a wide array of forms 
and combinations of patterns and 
effects. it is the action of these and 
their interaction with each other 
that matter most. it seems to me 
that matter makes more sense 
before we get sophisticated enough 
to break up its structure and 
disperse the energy condensed into 
its mass. all the stuff we study about 
matter is primarily the effects of the 
concentrations and interactions of 
the energies involved. i think that it 
probably distracts our students from 
the real features of matter when we 
only concern ourselves with those 
features that are consistent with the 
atoms of the old uncuttable, 
unsplit-able kind. the energy of 
matter looks a lot different to us 
since the atom bomb and its 
successors.

What is very important to us about 
the so-called material world its 
physical stuff, how we use it, how we 
get ourselves in bad habits about the 
various interactions of physical stuff.

we occupy land to live on and to live 
by its products. .some of the 
products we generate when we are 
manipulating the physical world are 
necessary for sustaining our lives, 
like food.

some of the stuff is what we use to 
make our buildings and our 
transportation systems.

we exploit the natural world in 
many ways simply to get energy for 
our own use to sustain ourselves.

some of the ways we sustain our 

current livestyle happen to have 
consequences that can threaten the 
sustainability of the natural ecology.
we have come to dominate that 
natural ecology in an often 
thoughtless and destructive way.

as Daniel Quinn and his wonderful 
fictional character Ishmael put it,
we are the animals who are the 
takers. too many of us are 
irresponsible about the 
consequences of this cultural trait to 
the point that we are threatening 
the more reasonable life on earth 
that is characterized by taking only 
what is really necessary and leaving 
the rest for the good of the greater 
ecology.

this is of course a parable, but it is a 
parable that can help us take a look 
at many of our unexamined 
assumptions and our habits which 
we ignore the effects of.

it does not take a lot of time to 
explore Quinn’s websites, 
ishmael.org and ishmael.com

but it is very easy to see the point 
that DQ is making. .if it makes any 
of us uncomfortable, that may be 
more useful than wasteful or 
harmful.

the facts seem to point pretty clearly 
to our coming to see that the 
population of us human takers on 
this globe is probably already too big 
for the safety of the ecosystem that 
supports us.

in addition, the effect that our 
wastes are having on the waters and 
on the temperature on the earth is 
probably already beyond the harm 
threshold that we should have been 
trying to study and measure more 
adequately.

that is why i feel that we should all 
be trying to help each other and 
especially those who seem to be 
about to imitate us on an increase of 
scale that could bring some terrible 
consequences for the sustainability 
of the ecosystem to we depend on for 
our survival.

i am not making any judgements 
about just how much time we do or 
do not have.

i believe that whether or not we 
have put our climate under serious 
threat already that is on or past the 
cusp of serious damage, the life style 
of energy use that we have adopted 
and which huge nations that make 
up great chunks of the human 
population are so admiring of that 
they are going ahead full tilt to catch 
up with and surpass our energy use.

Since the way we obtain the fuels for 
that level of use, especially in the 
universe of turning coal into energy 
and using vehicles with a noxious 
degree of carbon emissions to use for 
convenience, pleasure, and 
necessary transportation — that 
lifestyle is not compatible with such 
a huge usage factor we  are 
racking up:
(we as the rising populations of our 
own culture and the even larger 
ones of other cultures hungry to 
imitate us)

this is already more than is useful 
on the theme of our current human 
population and the potential for an 
accelerating ecological disaster 
scenario.

what this is all leading into is 
perhaps an even more challenging 
problem:

how we are going to bring our 
current collective behavior to 
what amounts to a 
screeching halt?

how are we going to teach and 
persuade ourselves to move firmly
and fast to bring on a general 
upgrade of human culture?

and how are we going to get the even 
huger masses that envy our current 
style to make some sort of drastic 
cultural and industrial revolution 
that will be compatible with a 
practical, human, and livable world?