>Nice writing, Brad!
Thanks. *Blush*
> > ... high water mark of belief in Progress. By and large the past two
>centuries
>>have seen the reaction, and confidence in human Progress -- technological,
>>political, humanistic, and moral -- fell out of intellectual favor.
>
>I suspect an awful lot of that happened as a consequence of WW1, doncha
>reckon?
Yup...
>
>>At its most basic level Wright's point is that interactions are
>positive-sum:
>>there are gains from cooperation. Thus human cultural evolution has an
>arrow
>>and a direction: toward greater complexity, toward higher civilization.
>
>Mebbe we were interactive long before notions like mutual benefit occurred
>to us. I reckon the 'utility' we derive from cooperation isn't a choice we
>make; rather it *is us*.
I think it's more complicated than that. We're inclined toward
cooperation. We are reluctant to engage in unprovoked "first strikes"
to grab more than what we regard as our fair share.
But we are also very good at persuading ourselves that our fair share
is the lion's share. And we are also extremely eager to engage in
revenge--even extraordinarily self-destructive revenge--when we feel
that others have double-crossed us...
>
>
>Well, that presupposes we know we didn't lose anything after Mycene,
>Imperial Rome etc. And we don't, do we?
IIRC, we lost Portland cement between the fall of the Roman Empire
and the nineteenth century. The Romans also exterminated their
favorite spice: silphium. And with the fall of the Roman Empire
Europe lost Roman-style fish sauce--liquamen (although we think that
Thai and Vietnamese fish sauce is a close substitute: take fish guts,
bottle them, and let the intestinal enzymes go to work...).
