| HN Mirror

It's the cargo cult of Western Civilization, when Plato, Aristotle, Greece, and Rome are taught. Universities and teachers invoke the grandeur and largesse of ancient empires and philosophers, in the hope that the future will be more like the semblance of an idealized past. Whereas Greece and Rome had the shield and spear, now these have been replaced by technologically-advanced militaries, the same which created the cargo cults Feynman mentioned.

For one thing, Plato and Aristotle both assert that there's some sort of absolute truth or order to the world, but many other human traditions reject this idea and offer a variety of counterpoints. My favorite is that the questions of material/immaterial, monism/dualism are irrelevant, and that the universe is presided over by tricksters of various sorts with almost nothing to do with the co-occurring human world. There's Coyote, Loki, Anansi, Hermes, many mythical characters from across traditions who would have both Plato and Aristotle know they're merely daft professors, and there's no such thing as atoms nor caves.

These ideas and their idealized past always center on the idea of a natural human order. This arises from, in Plato, the idea that each mind is imprisoned in a series of closed cabinets, and can achieve perfect knowledge of neither truth nor justice; in Aristotle, from a first-moving cause within a universe in which all things are bound by a certain causality. Rome utilized an initiate religion which was used to structure business hours, and you can trivially extrapolate to Darwin and Victorian society, or wherever you like. And, generally speaking, things aren't great for people without the "advanced literacy." Philosophers from around the same era would lampoon all of these notions: Heraclitus insisted there was no cause and effect, Diogenes insisted there could be neither ideals nor wisdom. Even today you can find physicists who are skeptical of causality outside of controlled experiments.

When you look at alternatives to the Great Civilizations of the West and Near East, many of them vanished without written record (I wrote from my laptop, as a technology professional) or created massive citadels and then abandoned them the way one leaves behind sand castles (common throughout the Americas). The apocalypse prophecy of the Hopi tradition, Koyaanisqatsi, states that the world ends when people begin to mine for minerals. Note that after the fall of the Roman Empire, steel was lost to civilization (outside of China? Can't remember) for a long time. But of course, you can think of perhaps ten traditions, without using Google, where the end times have always been upon us.

To place faith in one particular myth, philosophy, or history as always defining of an individual person or their world, or somehow superior to another, is to err. Individual world-theories are often the o-rings of our society, to be puzzled out by inspectors like Feynman long after they fail catastrophically, but in other places their graceful interaction can indeed change the world forever and for the better.

Not sure what all these words will mean to you but I hope they helped you understand where my mind has wandered lately.