On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 10:57 AM, Edmund Storms <stor...@ix.netcom.com>wrote:
> ...Perhaps, this behavior is beneficial because it slows progress enough > for people to adjust. Present progress, thanks to the computer that does > not suffer from this limitation, is starting to exceed the ability of many > people to adjust. This failure to adjust does not give optimism about the > future. > The conservative posture has obvious merits given the real complexity of any society, let alone the ecology within which society is embedded. However, if we are to be consistent, we must recognize that some changes, such as the introduction of civilization, were profound shocks to which humans and indeed the biosphere<http://longnow.org/seminars/02012/apr/20/social-conquest-earth/>are still adjusting. Nor is it obvious that these changes will ultimately prove beneficial. There is rationality in being skeptical of even this kind of widely-accepted change. At the other extreme we have the Enlightenment's acceptance of individual rights to freedom of thought and -- in the form of Protestantism's freedom of individual association in the formation of diverse sects -- conscience in _society_. This extreme acceptance of individually chosen change was given substance by the New World in its Jeffersonian exemplar of classical liberalism (which has nothing to do with today's "liberal" touchstone of "equality of outcome"): The Declaration of Independence. My long history of taking seriously the potentials of computer networking and space settlement <http://www.oocities.com/jim_bowery/vnatap.html> led me to directly confront the control structures in the media and Washington, D.C. -- actually shepherding grass-roots legislation into law that banned NASA from competing with private launch companies<http://www.oocities.com/jim_bowery/testimny.htm> so that when the F&P phenomenon hit I naturally teamed up with a founder of the US hot fusion program to legislatively terminate the hot fusion program and replace it with prize awards for achievement of technical milestones<http://www.oocities.com/jim_bowery/BussardsLetter.html>. This, in turn, forced me to analyze failures in private sector capital markets that had resulted in technical stagnation and provide policy recommendations for their remediation<http://ota.polyonymo.us/others-papers/NetAssetTax_Bowery.txt>. After all, I was attacking public funding of technology so I could not very well ignore the macro-economic policies that were leaving private sector investment gaps that were used by proponent of public sector technology programs to justify their social theories. The end result of this educational process -- a process that has brought me full circle to the conservative posture that is skeptical of civilization itself -- has been that I now recognize only one over-riding priority, and that is to sort proponents of social theories into governments that test them <http://sortocracy.org/>. Only in this way can profound conservatives coexist with profound liberals and -- in so doing -- not only allow the Enlightenment to penetrate the social sciences (which would, as a byproduct, find the social theories that both lead to the most rapid advances in technology) and preserve the pre-civilization ecologies that we must preserve lest we become victims of our own hubris.
