Ancient Slavery & Modern Ideology
by Moses I. Finley
Page 129 (1983 Penguin/Pelican edition)
In Voltaire's Bastards : The Dictatorship of Reason in the West , John Ralston Saul presents a trenchant criticism of the modern failings of the Enlightenment ideals. Saul gives several names to these failed ideals: "logic", "technocracy", "rationalism", "reason". We might also add "Machiavellianism". (Update: Or perhaps not. Machiavelli's emphasis on realism and flexibilty may distinguish him from my "controllists".)
But his criticism is not so much for these in and of themselves, as for the confusion of mean with ends -- the modern view of "rationalism", et al, as ends in themselves, rather than as highly-useful tools to work for human happiness.
(-- Saul opposes as "good" ideals: "humanism", "common sense", "simplicity".)
As I regard myself as an apprentice to the Enlightenment, one who still holds its great ideals but welcomes criticism of them, I've decided to label the bathwater Saul identifies "Controllism" . A clumsy term, I admit, but I'll use it here until I discover a better.
- Note that I'm making a separate page on "Controllism" here in order to distinguish it from authoritarianism and/or totalitarianism. For my purposes, the latter represents an egotistical, "because I say so" approach to governance, while the former is more "because the equations / plan / system says so." -
- I suspect that most authors discuss what I'm calling here "controllism" under the rubric of "ideology". There may or may not be a shade of difference: "Ideology" perhaps connotes an abstract-theoretical or philosophical lens (The American Heritage Dictionary online gives "ideology" as "(a) body of ideas ... a set of doctrines or beliefs" ), while my "controllism" is meant to describe the attempt to force real-world events to conform to a myopic "objective" or "rationalistic" schema. In fact, this distinction may well be moot and "ideology" may be the best term overall.
"Most design methods create new structures from first principles; while the principles are well-known, their application to a given context isn't proven, and the resulting structure may be entirely novel, and perhaps unsuitable to the problem at hand. ...
Patterns focus on aesthetics and human comfort: Most design methods focus on the needs of the computer (or read "bureaucracy") ..."
"Centrally planned economies tend to be frozen in time. They cannot readily accommodate innovation, new ideas, new products, and altered specifications.
In sharp contrast, market economies are driven by what Professor Joseph Schumpeter, a number of decades ago, called "creative destruction." By this he meant newer ways of doing things, newer products, and novel engineering and architectural insights that induce the continuous obsolescence and retirement of factories and equipment and a reshuffling of workers to new and different activities. Market economies in that sense are continuously renewing themselves. Innovation, risk-taking, and competition are the driving forces that propel standards of living progressively higher."
"As far as I can form an opinion, theories like orgone are not necessary in physics or biology at this date (although who knows about the future?) However, I think it is modeltheism -- falling in love with one's own models -- not to realize that different territories may need different maps."
Wilhelm Reich in Hell
by Robert Anton Wilson, page 31
-- but see a page on this site on The Ionian Enchantment -- "a belief in the unity of the sciences -- a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws." (Edward O. Wilson in Consilience : The Unity of Knowledge, ch 1, discussing the idea originated by Gerald Holton). Different models for different aspects of reality, certainly, but it is one of the bedrock foundations of Science that these different models are all pieces of an overall meta-model, the Grand Description of Reality.
"Pseudo-science for Popper included any system of beliefs that relies on pre-determined 'laws' of human behavior. To qualify as science, propositional content must be testable and must be capable of being proven incorrect. This notion was in sharp distinction to the view of most scientists of the day: that science discovers immutable laws by observing nature, developing hypotheses and verifying them through experiment. Instead, Popper described science as trial and error, or conjecture and refutation. Science represents a Darwinian natural selection of the survival of the best tested ideas, which appear to have truth content because they have not yet been proven wrong. Science is and must be forever different from dogmatic forms of thought because its assertions are always tentative."
"Would, could, should. Eliminate those terms and you probably have the key to human happiness. It all happens not in reality but in the ideal world of some thinker."Of course, Buddhism has been telling us this for the last 2,500 years or so --
"There exists in psychiatry a condition of mind called the Ganser syndrome -- or the syndrome of approximate answers. The syndrome describes the behavior of people who seem to be faking insanity, but faking it so well that they eventually take on their insane role permanently. In a sense, they calculatedly drive themselves mad."
The Making of a Counter Culture :
Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition
by Theodore Roszak
page 165
In his essay "The Laffer Curve" (Scientific American, DEC 1981, and included in The Night Is Large : Collected Essays 1938-1995), Martin Gardner lampoons the (Arthur) "Laffer Curve" of Reaganomics, which supposedly modelled how the optimum tax rate could quite easily be calculated.
Gardner proposes instead a "Neo-Laffer Curve" (let's call it the "Gardner Curve"), which is more realistic, and utterly useless.
(Take a look here -- Laffer and "Gardner" Curves given as figures 3 and 4 )
"Some of you may share the mistaken belief that the Laffer Curve, named for Dr. Arthur Laffer, was tested and found wanting during the Reagan Administration. Nothing could be farther from the truth."
"While 'science-driven policy' in itself sounds reasonable, the clincher here is that scientific knowledge is typically incomplete and involves uncertainty. Business says: Don't regulate us until you, the government, have in hand all the scientific facts."
"Here is Michael Shermer's 'Boundary Detection Kit' from his book Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense ....
Shermer then offers up a trinary system of normal, non, and borderlands science, giving the following .9 (highest) (most reliable) to.1 (lowest) (least reliable) in relation to their level of scientific validity:
... is it just us or are all of Shermer's very own beliefs given the highest ratings? It must be very convenient for Shermer to have his own beliefs be so expertly derived that they are virtually beyond question at .9."
"On one side you've got the monotheism of Control, the one-to-many system which has dominated the West at least since the Industrial Revolution, possibly since Gutenberg; possibly since Moses. And done a damned fine job of creating civilization, I might add. A necessary thing in its day.
Surging toward these battlements of God Above All are the galloping, barbarous hoards of pantheism, guerrillas all, from the Cypherpunks to Newt Gingrich. I sometimes wonder which of these I really want to win, but I'm pretty sure which one is going to. It's B-52's vs. punji sticks. It's machine against nature. Sooner or later, nature takes the game."
"The "first superpower" idea and geopolitical approach is a form of idolatry. In this case the false gods are military and economic power. Idolatry is defined in the Christian and Jewish traditions rather precisely as seeking to control God's universe through man-made means (the "idols"). The idolatrous stance is contrasted with that of a person humbly and respectfully and with gratitude embracing God's universe and appreciating his or her place in it. ...
You do not have to be a Christian to feel the wisdom in this approach to life."
"The most ordinary things are to philosophy a source of insoluble puzzles. With infinite ingenuity it constructs a concept of space or time and then finds it absolutely impossible that there be objects in this space or that processes occur during this time... the source of this kind of logic lies in excessive confidence in the so-called laws of thought."Ludwig Boltzmann. Populaere Schriften Essay 19.