Any living society is based on a shared way of life, a "public orthodoxy": once it abandons that and is "open to whatever," it is disintegrating, and will soon cease to exist.
Nope: we now simply enforce a new "public orthodoxy": see Brendan Eich's dismissal from Netscape. He was apparently a fine CEO. But he did not hold the "correct" opinion about SSM, so he lost his job.
It is not that "open societies" are not as good as "closed" societies: they do not, in fact, exist. They are an impossibility, given human nature.
Strange claim. Absent calamity of the military or natural disaster variety, does ANY society "cease to exist?" My perception is that societies change and evolve into other societies, which is not the same thing at all.
I suppose we can say ancient Egyptian culture did not cease to exist. Just like we can say "that tree did not cease to exist: it just turned into dirt."
But my "strange claim" is a very common way of speaking -- see Spengler and Toynbee -- and I think it works just fine, so long as one is not determined to read tendentiously.
Ancient Egypt would seem to be evidence for my claim rather than yours.
It was certainly modified -- Hellenization being the first big example -- by increasing travel and trade.
But even after major military calamity #1, its conquest by Alexander, the Ptolemies referred to themselves as, and comported themselves as, successors to the Pharaohs.
And after it was annexed by Rome in 30 BC -- major military calamity #2 -- the Romans for a long period of time mostly ratified the Ptolemaic system until Constantine began the process of forcible Christianization.
And then of course there was major military calamity #3, the Muslim conquest. The Egyptian language only persisted for a thousand years or so after that!
And Cleopatra is not really "dead": her corpse hung around for a while, and her name is still spoken frequently, and people put on plays about her, and every atom that was in her is still with us...
Oh, and by the way, there were not forced conversions under Constantine.
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
The name is a misnomer. And a harmful one, because it interferes with understanding the process that is really occuring. What is really occurring is a search of a constrained program space. Let's say you want to be able to identify images of hot dogs . You begin with a plausible program for doing so, that is able to also search the space of nearby programs that might get better results on the problem. You then (in "supervised learning") provide scores that indicate how well one of these possible programs has done on solving the problem. After doing this for some time you settle upon a program that solves the problem "well enough." This is a great technique that can produce truly impressive results on a wide class of problems, such as identifying images of hot dogs. But notice that, except for the phrase in scare quotes, there is no "learning" in the description. Calling this "learning" is importing ideological baggage that just obscures what
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
I think we've been an open society for a long time. Either this process takes a while or an "open society" is not self-destructive.
ReplyDeleteNope: we now simply enforce a new "public orthodoxy": see Brendan Eich's dismissal from Netscape. He was apparently a fine CEO. But he did not hold the "correct" opinion about SSM, so he lost his job.
DeleteIt is not that "open societies" are not as good as "closed" societies: they do not, in fact, exist. They are an impossibility, given human nature.
Then what do you mean by "once it abandons that and is 'open to whatever,' it is disintegrating, and will soon cease to exist."?
Delete"They are an impossibility, given human nature."
DeleteLogical impossibility is more like it. No need to invoke human nature.
Strange claim. Absent calamity of the military or natural disaster variety, does ANY society "cease to exist?" My perception is that societies change and evolve into other societies, which is not the same thing at all.
ReplyDeleteI suppose we can say ancient Egyptian culture did not cease to exist. Just like we can say "that tree did not cease to exist: it just turned into dirt."
DeleteBut my "strange claim" is a very common way of speaking -- see Spengler and Toynbee -- and I think it works just fine, so long as one is not determined to read tendentiously.
Ancient Egypt would seem to be evidence for my claim rather than yours.
DeleteIt was certainly modified -- Hellenization being the first big example -- by increasing travel and trade.
But even after major military calamity #1, its conquest by Alexander, the Ptolemies referred to themselves as, and comported themselves as, successors to the Pharaohs.
And after it was annexed by Rome in 30 BC -- major military calamity #2 -- the Romans for a long period of time mostly ratified the Ptolemaic system until Constantine began the process of forcible Christianization.
And then of course there was major military calamity #3, the Muslim conquest. The Egyptian language only persisted for a thousand years or so after that!
And Cleopatra is not really "dead": her corpse hung around for a while, and her name is still spoken frequently, and people put on plays about her, and every atom that was in her is still with us...
DeleteOh, and by the way, there were not forced conversions under Constantine.