From: Brett Paatsch (bpaatsch@bigpond.net.au)
Date: Mon Aug 04 2003 - 01:43:49 MDT
Emlyn O'regan writes:
> How about a poll...
>
> Who on the list personally knows someone affected by
> terrorism. Personal acquaintances as maximum distance,
> no friends of friends please.
I think I saw people on this list affected by terrorism. I think
I saw rational intelligent people retreat in the face of hard
choices to polemic positions that I would have thought and
hoped that they would not do.
I saw it become nearly impossible to have a discourse on
foreign policy, international law or the lack of it and the
state of its emergence as poeple for the most part
*seemed* to retreat to emotional prejudices.
> More subjective: would you rate yourself now (hopefully
> based on some kind of quasi-empirical guestimate, at least)
> as more or less safe than you were 10 years ago? 20 years
> ago? What are the major threats to your continued existence
> lifestyle? How about 10 years into the future?
This is a good stock taking question.
Ten and twenty years ago I was 26 and 16 respectively.
I then knew considerably less than I know now but had
more time than I have now to learn and to try and find ways
to as Voltaire said cultivate our garden, using humanism or
variants of it as an applied philosophy.
I think my level of personal optimism peaked around
1999/2000 when Dolly was cloned, the human genome
was racing along, Thomson and Gearheart had isolated
human embryonic stem cells. I was aware that books
like Damien Brodericks Last Mortal generation were
seeping into the social and cultural groundwater and
I was discovering to my delight the power of the internet
and the range of kindred spirits or thinkers of likemind
exploring such issues as cryonics, uploading, biotechnology,
ethics etc. It seemed then that the world had grown up
and the time and opportunity for serious change had never
been better.
Then Bush won the presidency and put embryonic stem
cell research (which we need for basic understanding of life)
in concrete and did his best to sink it. Bush then went on to
attack that weak emerging thing that was international law,
not because in my view he is an evil man, but because in my
view he is an idiot elected by a complacent electorate that
took its eye off the ball and forgot that great damage could
be done to a great country by putting so much power in the
hands of such a nitwit.
In short Bush was never capable of competently flying the
plane that is the United States of America. I think he has
through incompetence rather than malice sold the US best
interests down the river. He has planted the seeds of
terrorism at the same time as he professed to be trying to
crack down on it.
I have also learned how little we actually know. The human
genome project is important and empowering stuff. But we
are only just beginning to get that it is not genomics but
epigenomics that matters and epigenomics is to a substantial
degree hamstrung by policies that make it incredibly difficult
to conduct the sort of basic research that is needed to
understand human embryology.
On the patents front, biotech has raced into a quagmire from
which it will no doubt emerge but not before considerable
time and effort is wasted getting policies straight that in my
naivety I would have hoped could have been straighten out
much more quickly.
I have learned somewhat saddly that things take far longer
than I imagined that they would need to and that the reason
that this is so is that we are far less wise in the areas that
matter than we often give ourselves credit for.
I have also learnt that we know far less about the human
nervous system that I thought that we did and that as a
consequence progress on the cybernetics front, on AI
and on uploading and the plausibility of cryonics is likely
to take longer than I would have hoped.
Perhaps for me one of the biggest disappointments was
that politicians like Bush and Blair and Howard could
bullshit so categorically to their own electorates and the
own electorates for the most part would swallow
without chewing. There was plenty of opportunity before
hand for smarter constituents to hold their elected leaders
to account and yet they failed to do so. I feel like I have
witnessed first hand vast numbers of intelligent people
buy a line of BS that is little more sophisticated that that
peddled in such Hollywood movies as "Wag the dog"
and then even when as was the case with Australian Prime
Minister Howard people came to the view that they had
been either intentionally mislead (around 37%) or un-
intentionally mislead (around a third -by Howard doing
to little thinking and too much believing) these same
constituents thought so little of the crock that was
perpetrated in a so called representative democracy that
they said they'd probably go ahead and vote for him
again anyway.
I am not a religious person, but on the matter of the
Iraq war, it is my feeling that the quality of debate and
the lack of critical thinking that prevailed even in circles
where I though critical thinking was estemed, was of
such a low standard that I began to wonder if this generation
was too stupid to deserve to be the last mortal generation.
In 10 years. We will I hope have substantially increased
our understanding of human developmental processses,
of epigenetics, and we will be able (if we are very lucky
or far more politically astute) to produce far better maps
of the human neural system which in turn will prompt better
research and development in cybernetics make cryonics
and uploading considertably lesser leaps of faith than
they are now. In 10 years Bush will be gone but will the
damage he did the UN and the cause of international
law have been undone? I don't know. I doubt it.
In 10 years the issues of intellectual property will have
largely been sorted out. The public policy aspects are
not that complicated. It should be able to reconfigure
systems such that in order to have flow through benefits
of technologies to end users it is not necessary to negotiate
with a myriad of stake holder all of whom can bog down
the process and set themselves up as toll gate holders on
the road to progress.
In 10 years we will be seeing whether through ham fisted
idiotic approaches to foreign policy the Bush government
may have freed the US from having to play nice with such
regimes as the Saudis.
And in 10 years an entire new batch of medicines will have
made their way through clinical trials and be available on
the market.
Important questions such as what is the nature and moral
weighting of a person will still be being discussed but they
will be being discussed by nearly everyone. That much, that
that conversation *will* take place stands as an achievement
of note. And the Kass's and the Fukayamas will find
themselves arguing increasingly bizaree esoteric points with a
new generation of thinkers who will have come to maturity
in a world where the inevitability of death or at least the
possibility of radically extended life will not have been radical
but will have been common place. And this new generalition
will, I suspect eat the specious deathist arguments of such
crusty old farts as Kass for breakfast.
Self interest and clear thinking will, baring some major
policy fuck ups of Bushesque proportions (and he only
gets one more go at the presidency at worst) bring this
new generation of thinkers hard onto the fallacies and
specious arguments of Kass etc.
Ironically, the last few years, especially the experience of
watching societies reaction to their elected leaders statements
around the Iraq war has left me with a sense that is heavily
reminiscent of the bible story of the Israelites in the desert.
They were too jaded to get to see the promised land
themselves. But their children born in the desert and having
never known the constraints of slavery were able to push
forward and conquer the promised land. I suspect it may
be so with us. I hope it is not so. I still hope that we may
lift our game.
I hope this generation, my generation, can lift its game,
because currently we are getting the cruddly leadership
(Bush, Blair, Howard) that we deserve.
And I think we are in serious danger of 'believing'
ourselves uncritically to death.
Brett Paatsch
[Sometime I try and write thoughtfully and sometime
I rant in a manner akin to whinging to friends - this
post is in the nature of the second ]
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