« The Spanish Civil War - Dos Pasos and Hemmingway... | Main | Twins have a lower than expected IQ... »
December 01, 2005
Greg Benford and Mike Rose...
Greg Benford (one of the three killer-B's) has a new blog along with Michael Rose. Here is an exerpt from their essay on the future
- Life at the start of the 21st Century is messy. People want the freedom to consume what they like, to sell their services at the highest price they can get, to say what they like in private, and to brandish their opinions on the internet. Regardless of the fascinations and fashions of religious fanatics, academics, journalists, or commercial writers, the lives of ordinary people have pursued similar goals throughout history. Most people want a happy family life, material comfort, and the opportunity to do what they like...
Aristotle is [the] progenitor of the opposition to collectivism... [but] the clearest, and historically most important, expression of this tradition came out of the Scottish Enlightenment: David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, among others. This tradition emphasizes indirect effects, the futility of government attempts to control markets and international trade, the value of enterprise, and the limits to the benign effects of concerted action.
This tradition had its most visible success with James Madison's Constitution for the new American republic, the vastly successful state that replaced the loose confederation of colonies who started the American rebellion against the English Crown. Madison was perhaps the greatest practical student of the Scottish Enlightenment, and certainly the person who most effectively set about implementing its precepts...
We wish to recruit new adherents. Our agenda is simply the view that solutions to political and cultural difficulties can be found in the deliberate cultivation of the empirical, individualistic, skeptical Western tradition.
Put another way: We wish to drive a stake through the heart of the dominant cultural traditions of piety, correctness, ideology, and faith. Then we would like to dance on their graves.
Hear hear!
Posted by rakhier at December 1, 2005 09:44 AM