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 ---
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005