[The Lizard of Oz]

(02-22-2014 05:35 PM)Peregrine Wrote:  

(02-22-2014 05:31 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

(02-22-2014 05:20 PM)Peregrine Wrote:  

Quote:

This is the most American idea in the world; to older, more experienced, more "sophisticated" civilizations it appears to be hopelessly naive, charmingly infantile at best, laughably idiotic at worst. An old Sicilian or an old Parisian sitting in his coffee shop and staring out at the ancient cobbled stone streets knows but one truth, which is that everyone is what he is, and no one ever changes.

Wouldn't be so fast to call the ancients delusional. The fatalistic view is also popular in Eastern philosophy, where Western concepts of control over destiny are seen as naïve and arrogant.

Indeed. And that is why, while the Buddha gazed at his navel, we put a man on the moon and sequenced the human genome.

I'm assuming that's supposed to demonstrate the superiority of one over the other, but I don't see it. Both views have their own merits.

It can be hard to see the superiority of one view over the other because the quietist and fatalistic view is fundamentally grounded in the unspoken but taken-for-granted assumption that some things can never change. And as long as the human being is basically the same creature as it's always been, it is possible to hold on to the idea that all the vast progress that we have made is superficial, and the deeper realities of the human heart and soul remain the same.

However, this idea is presently to come into direct conflict with reality as the possibility of germline intervention makes clear that no aspect of the world, including the very makeup of what the human being is, will forever resist our inexorable advance in understanding and reshaping the material world that surrounds us.

The old nostrums and the old ideas that there is nothing new under the Sun are being mooted and will one day be decisively mooted by rude new facts that will render them null and void.