From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Sun Feb 02 2003 - 06:33:30 MST
On Sunday, February 02, 2003 1:22 AM nanowave nanowave@shaw.ca wrote:
> The "losing seven of the best of the best" angle
> just doesn't seem to resonate with me that much.
> Although I very much sympathize with the
> bereaved families, I can't say I feel a greater
> degree of sadness simply because of _who_
> has died, or their various pedigrees. Call me
> strange (hopefully not insensitive), but I suspect
> that had my morning started with the news that
> a van carrying seven fetching prostitutes had
> just been crushed under a commuter train, I
> might have felt a similar pang of sadness
> for the essential loss of human life.
I kind of feel the same way. You bring up a good point here.
On the purely intellectual side, one can't get depressed over every last
death -- whatever the cause -- because simply too many people die each
minute and almost all of them die anonymously -- meaning they're
strangers to you and I and even to almost the rest of humanity, "six
degrees of separation" not withstanding. (I also tend to think the "six
degrees of separation" thing is a metaphor that's been taken too far.
It's more like an average. To someone living, say, in the Amazon jungle
who has little contact with the outside world, she or he is probably
fifty (pulling a number out of a hat) degrees of separation or more from
everyone else.) Getting totally wrapped up in each death or even in
just the major tragedies of each day -- a train crash here, a building
fire there, a terrorist attack somewhere else -- would completely swamp
my mind with grief and I wouldn't be able to function.
On the purely emotional side, any death is sad. Hearing of the deaths
from the cold in Bangladesh recently made me very sad too. From the
view of losing scientific-technological-intellectual-artistic "the best
of the best," these Bangladeshi losses probably will not have an an
averse impact on future progress. (Still, we don't and probably won't
ever completely understand just how such progress proceeds. Who knows
what villager there might have raised the next Edison or Chandrasekhar
or van Gogh?)
The point in life, too, is to be live and be happy -- not to be just a
cog in the wheel of a social machine, judged solely on one's fit in the
overall scheme of things. The important thing, from a purely
existential perspective, is not that one produces more than the next
person or one contributes to the overall progress of civilization or
technology (or to the coming of this or that Singularity), but just that
one is alive and has a private life with its myriad of private choices
and experiences. In fact, I would turn things around and judge a
society, even a civilization by the degree to which it allows and
encourages people to live their lives as they see fit in pursuit of
their happiness. (Of course, with the qualification that people who are
purely destructive -- i.e., violent types --are kept in check.)
Some paleoconservative thinkers, such as the _Chronicles_ crowd
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/ ), would argue that our attachments
are really all local. We feel more those we know and, in the extreme,
our compassion and empathy is stronger for close friends and close
family than for the larger circles of humanity -- that we are embedded
in attachments that are much more compelling the more local they are and
less so the further away (socially/culturally) they are. They would
argue, this is how it should be. One should feel more strongly bound to
one's family than for one's neighborhood, and more strongly to one's
neighborhood than to one's country, more strongly to one's country to
one's continent or to the sum of humanity. They would argue, too, that
overturning this actually creates more problems than it solves.
Hayek has some similar themes in his _The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of
Socialism_. One of his points about socialism's failure is that it
attempts to substitute a sort of close familiar based social logic and
feeling for the whole of society. The latter, for him, works better if
the anonymous, spontaneously rule-based order of the market is giving
wider lattitude. (See also "Accounting for Changes in the Family:
Toward a Market Process Approach" by Stephen Horwitz and Peter Lewin
that can be linked to from http://it.stlawu.edu/shor/Papers/wpmain.htm )
Cheers!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
See "Splitting Hares" at:
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/SplittingHares.html
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