|
I'm going to write a thing that I'm not sure I totally believe, but I'm going to try it on for size. Pls feel free to push back on any part, or give feedback on whether anything resonates with you: I don't think you give enough credit to the potential importance of eloquent memes and the building of new religions of sorts, in pursuit of making the more complex truths about our world and humanity (which hopefully can inform desired common futures) more palletable to a sizeable majority. (My underlying assumption is that we are emotional machines that sometimes engage in rational thought, and not vice versa.) Pure rationalism won't get us to the future we deserve. We need to treat our packages of beliefs almost as we do the most widely-used open source projects -- shiny surfaces, perhaps built collaboratively, that package up a more meticulously considered core, rooted in something that tends toward a more just world -- a surface thing that is perhaps a little more superficial and concealing of it's unique working, but can be interrogated and dissected by those who care to dive in. The rest can just consume it and have a shallow affinity for the beautiful packaging, and that's ok. The point is that we together build the core carefully, we can all interrogate it to understand why it does what it does, and why it points us in certain directions without asking us to go all the way down the rabbit hole, and that those who care to question its tenets can dig deeper into them. So in this analogy, might Morton just we working on the pretty UI, that's trying to package up the underlying architecture in a way (if not with 100% fidelity) that can at least be more socially transformative ? It's this line of thinking that makes me feel your criticism to be, while not untrue, then at least somewhat counterproductive to the sorts of action/memes that I believe will be most effective in the world. |
Someone who values the best version of the currently knowable truth would have one perspective.
Someone who values human life over freedom has another.
Others value believing in something palatable for a majority of others (clothes, social status, etc.)
Most of what we look at is our projection. Parents believe in things like the future. Others are content for their moment, without wishing for that.
It's impossible to escape our initial and very personal biases to describe these things.
IMO the best we can do is to reveal consistencies we can act upon. For me that is enough.