the road to Hell...

[sergebroom]

The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions, and there is this law of unintended consequences, but not all good intentions wind up as pavement for that road nor are all unintended consequences bad. Look at the world around you and compare it to what it was 1000 years ago.

Comments

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

"It is because we have got rid of so much pain that what remains horrifies us so much" (John Stuart Mill, quoted from memory).

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Maybe we look around and ask if why there is still so much left to do after all the blood that's been shed. And when people debate whether or not we should torture prisonners, we ask why this subject is even coming up. So much for the lasting effects of the above-mentionned blood that cemented the stone walls of progress...

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Still, some of the worst things have been eliminated. You do have a right to vote, and to criticise the government that tortures prisoners. Just because there is a long way to go does not mean that the miles already past are irrelevant.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Oh, I completely agree. That was pretty much the point I was trying to make in my original post. What I meant in this last entry is that there are some people who'd like to turn things back. (At least they think they do.) Luckily there are mechanisms to make it difficult for them to get their way. Someone pointed out in Making Light that laws can't change human nature. To which I'd quote the line of a classic SF movie that's much more sophisticated than people give it credit. Ever seen Forbidden Planet? There's a scene where Captain Adams confronts Morbius and makes him realize what had destroyed the Krell - the mindless savage still lurking in the wiring of their highly evolved brain:

"That's why we have laws and religion."

Isn't that last bit a bit subversive, coming from a Fifties movie?

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I have seen Forbidden Planet and remember the 'Monsters from the Id'. I'm afraid that our current crop of conservatives confuse the existence of civilisation (our attempt to contain said monsters, at least in the view of Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud) with the need to impose the greatest number of restrictions possible on the 'lower orders'.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Maybe they don't confuse things. Maybe it is their view that what we consider civilization isn't it, and that it demands a top-down society, preferably darwinist - although the old man would probably shake his head at people who, while not believing his theory of evolution, use his name to justify their own nasty natures.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I agree with you on Darwin.

I do think that conservatives are confused -- between what it means to be human and what it means to be disciplined. They tend to think that the latter is the same as the former.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

"...what it means to be human..."

It's always a matter of defining a term. What does it mean to be human? Your definition and mine are probably the same, or close enough to be the same. What people like the now late Pinochet think that 'humanity' means might be quite different.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I'd say you were right!