File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2004/bhaskar.0403, message 36


From: "Mike Jones" <Mike.Jones-AT-woofumdust.com>
Subject: RE: BHA: RE: Concrete utopia
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 13:19:52 -0700



if your talking about 'a world without domination and hierarchy',......

The task of a scientist is to inform 'Why people are the way they are'.
It is of little interest what an 'ideal' /'model' man or society should
be. 
[Mike] 
[Mike] I would like to argue against this view. As a practitioner of
applied science, my goal is to use knowledge of natural mechanism to
make things that do something. I rely on the fact that the mechanisms
are fixed for a duration longer than the life/value of the product, and
that the knowledge of them is adequate for building closed systems that
exploit them. In this example, science serves the purpose of discovery,
and whatever the motivation for discovery, the knowledge is used to
control.

The problem in the social sciences seems to me different. First, I am
not ready to assume that all mechanisms have the same kind of fixity as
natural ones. My intuition says that the root reason for this
variability is our reflexivity. Mechanisms may vary temporally and
spatially. Furthermore, mechanisms as a group/relation acting actually,
may modify themselves.

What I think this leads to is humans as a species can modify themselves
and their products. This can mean changing our genetics, or changing
social structure, culture, etc. If the constitution of the human psyche
is in part the internalization of social structure and culture, then
there is a path from praxis to cultural/structural changes, that then
change people, even if this operates over generations.

Therefore, we can ask questions about what kind of culture/structure is
most congruent with humans and some more basic level, and try to make
change in some particular concrete dimension. This more basic level
might at some psychological level, or even biological.

Is this the task of a scientist? Perhaps not, perhaps we might say it is
the task of a social engineer properly defined. But is it worth doing:
Yes! Call it what you like, but if there is the possibility of making
life better, there is no principle I can think of for not pursuing it.

WHAT are those mechanisms which prevent complete equality? Are they
inaccessible to humans?
[Mike] Probably a lack of imagination of how the world might potentially
be.

As for can we have a world without master-slave relations? I think so.
However, it would be quite an achievement. People would have to create
such a world through their activity. It won't fall from the sky. The
first step is to ask what humans would have to be like to support such a
world. Then to ask whether current human biology could support it. If
not, we have to make change at the biological level. If so, then we have
to work on psychological and social mechanism to change them.

Mike

Shiv


Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam

--- StripMime Warning --  MIME attachments removed --- 
This message may have contained attachments which were removed.

Sorry, we do not allow attachments on this list.

--- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- 
multipart/alternative
  text/plain (text body -- kept)
  text/html
---


     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---



     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005