[FRA:] Enlightenment under attack

[steve.devos at krokodile.co.uk]

Matt

This is not in my view about the 'religious hogwash' or some other 
imbecilic apocylyptic tendency.  I was getting rather tired about the 
argument about the value of the thought of the 'enlightenment' ,  to be 
against it is to be 'fascist' or otherwise and so on...  My own tendency 
is to ask why is it that the current mass-extinction event is 
unaddressable by the thought ?  Psychology and social really doesn't 
address the issue - as these are ultimately humanisms with all that that 
entails. Just as to fall back into darwinian theory equally fails 
because we are at the point when the only thing driving evolutionary 
change is human activity. Rather, I suspect that given that for the 
forseeable future human beings are now uniquely responsible for 
'everything' that happens within this locality - so then a philosophical 
proposition and position needs to take this into account.

Re the 8 year old --- when that happened to my children i'd already 
innoculated them against that unpleasent virus by playing them  sun-ra's 
"it's after the end of the world"  and told them that god, satan and 
somewhat later that man was dead, and that anyone that believed any 
human life had greater value than that of george the cat was either an 
idiot or hadn't thought about what they were saying...

best
steve

matthew piscioneri wrote:

> Steve,
>
> at the risk of incurring your wrath, I tend towards the view that a 
> more productive critical line in the issue of *mass extinction* is to 
> concentrate on the social psychological-n-social control aspects of 
> the debate...how *both* sides are locked into a self-seeking campaign 
> of generating social fear. I'm getting tired of having to 
> de-brief/counsel my 8 year old about the end of the world. The same 
> old religious hogwash about humankind's fall from grace and guilt and 
> self-hate from the one side; and the same old exploitation of the 
> material fear and greed instinct from the other.
>
> It might be useful to remind people of Darwin's thesis that all 
> species have a finite lifetime and that ours is one twig on that big 
> tree of life -- we were never destined for species' immortality or 
> eternal dominance of the earth...no, the ongoing rise of the machines 
> should put an end to that species' self-delusion. Now that should put 
> real some fear into those useless buggers out there who find it 
> difficult to rub two brain cells together at anyone time :-).
>
> cheers,
>
> mattP
>
>
>
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