============Edward G commented: and at the end of the post appended an
apporopriate and important section, (pp 46) from "technopoly" by Neil Postman
John wrote:
Regarding "A TECHNOCRATIC ASSESSMENT OF SCIENCE AND MORALITY"
John wrote:
Hi All,
I received an interesting email and have some comments on it that I feel
are worth passing on. Your reaction to both the email and my comments
are most encouraged.
December 17, 1999
John Wrote:
Hi Brad,
Your December 10th email was most interesting and worthy of comments.
You [Brad] wrote: �I am well aware that I could not survive "in the wild", and
that I'd probably be long since dead if it wasn't for antibiotics, etc.
I am not against technology. I am against a lot of "crap" that is
associated with it in our [so-called] society. But, if engineers (and,
esp. computer programmers!) can be nerds, far less bad than being a
"confidence man" (ad man, "lobbyist", etc. -- although I'm sure there
�are� some "good eggs" among them...)�
John's Comment:
In writing this you kind of replied to my focus on the change
in lifestyle that occurred in our scientific-technological age as
compared with that which existed for millenniums. I added to that
thought that we live in a unique age and the answer to the problems of
our unique age calls for drastic changes. To my knowledge, Technocracy
stands alone in understanding this unique age. Those people who are
classified as �liberals� certainly fail to understand modern times, our
scientific-technological age.
You wrote about engineers and computer programmers and I�ll address this
matter in the light of �men of science.� These men also live in, and are
affected by, the operation of our socioeconomic structure our �Price
System,� and therefore wear two hats, one as a scientist and the other
as a businessman/woman. As a businessman/woman, they can be just as
nasty as any other businessman/woman. In the business community,
nastiness is all pervasive, it�s a stock-in-trade.
You [Brad] wrote: �I agree. Anent merchandising, I have the idea of a society
in which everybody chose everything on the computer in such a way that
nothing would ever get produced that didn't get
consumed. In WWII, my father was in the Army Air Corps. He said they
had a sign in the mess hall:
� � Take what you want. Eat what you take.� �
�(Almost sounds like "From each according to his abilities, to each
according to his needs" -- now that I think about it....)�
John's Comment:
Your expression above is commonly accepted as
communism/socialism. The people that compose this group � liberals �
find anything short of �doing things for the common good� to be morally
wrong. Technocracy is on the opposite end of the spectrum from this
group and as a matter of fact has nothing in common with them. One of
Technocracy�s statement is �The liberal is the last resort of the stupid
and incompetent.�
============Edward G commented:
John seems not to have a clear comprehension of liberalism, confusing it
with neo-liberalizm.
The concept of liberalizm is that of freedom, especially individual
freedom. It was born at the beginning of the 1st millenium with the concept
of individual salvation. It remained cupid until the Protestant Reformation
allowed it to begin to mature.
The Protestant Reformation wrested the "Keys to the Kingdom" from the
Papacy and offered it to anyone who would avail themselves of the opportunity.
One who did was Henry VIII.
Shortly thereafter the concept migrated to the area of governance and with
Charles I's beheading the "Divine Right of Kings" followed the keys to the
kingdom into the public arena.
The public was slow to assert rights they did not fully comprehend and
those who wielded power soon reinstituted (re-institute-ed) both religion
and governance.
The concept John fails to comprehend is that neo-liberalism is as immature
as cupid.
While a good case can be made for individual (subjective) and relative
morality, it is only a starting point.
Individuals are notably impotent when it comes to propagating the species.
It takes two to tango!
Not only two, but two with a common purpose. That's where neo-liberalism is
left behind and real liberalism begins its progress to a civil society of
voluntary association, that is in a development of moral rules.
The object of moral rules (or morality) is to obtain the objective and
absolute goods of association.
The neo-liberal fails to grasp this because to the neo-liberal all goods
can be purchased, and therin lies the fallacy.
John continued commenting:
"Technocracy�s position is that when we adjust to our
scientific-technological age and install a social structure that is in
sync with this new age, everyone will contribute according to his/her
ability and each will receive according to his/her needs.
============Edward G commented:
This is classic communism and I thought it had been debunked long ago.
Given a rudimentary knowledge of human nature, is there anyone left who
would permit another to determine their own needs or abilities? Except in a
command economy? (i.e. communist/socialist)
John Continues:
This becomes a
fact of life in a proper design of social operation that is laid out to
be sync with modern times. It has nothing to do with morality but has to
do solely with economics � it�s a conservation of resources. Yes, it is
vastly different than today�s method of everyone grabbing all one can
get. This grabbing method of social operation is an accepted behavior
pattern in today�s society. Those who grab the most are accepted as the
successful people in today�s society and are looked up to as models. Of
course, if one gets caught in this grabbing by means of a violation of
the law, and lacks a smart lawyer, that person�s ability to grab will
temporarily be suspended."
============Edward G commented:
The above is a contradiction. John seems to set up a hypothetical utopian
situation, (a proper design) then, failing to elucidate the design, claimes
it is better than the existing order of things.
Mind you, we are not playing �footsie� with words. In Technocracy we
differ from communism/socialism philosophy in that we bypass morality
considerations. What is amazing is: By passing over all morality
considerations and concentrating on the physical factors of our
environment, we have, for the first time in history, a condition where
goods can be produced in abundance. By adjusting to this new
environment, we can have a society that puts to rest all of the
communism/socialism morality concerns.
============Edward G commented:
The concepty of a society bereft of moral law eludes me. Moral law is the
law to which we subscribe in order to have an organized society.
To abandon moral law and place money in its place, (technocracy is but the
logical and progressive extension of bureaucracy and buraucracy originated
semantically as 'counting table')
Moral law predates statute law by the number of centuries that organised
society predated writing.
In fact it is the en-statute-ation of moral law that (Prime Mminister)
Hamurabi did at the behest of Marduc in Babylon.
John concluded:
I wonder if when you got on my web site <www.technocracysf.org> did you
read �A Commentary to Jim Lehrer�? I would like to get your thoughts on
it. I also put two new items on the web site: (1) Police-State
Components in Society, Schools and (2) Gangster Capitalism. I would
appreciate your thoughts on both of them.
Bunches of good cheer,
Peace and goodwill
Edward G
===========The important quote follows:
"The technocracy that emerged, fully armed, in nineteenth century America
disdained such beliefs, because holy men and sin, grandmothers and
families, regional loyalties and two thousand-year-old traditions, are
antagonistic to the technocratic way of life. They are a troublesome
residue of a tool-using period, a source of criticism of technocracy. They
represent a thought-world that stands apart from technocracy and rebukes
it-rebukes its language, its impersonality, its fragmentation, its
alienation. And so technocracy disdains such a thought-world but, in
America, did not and could not destroy it."
"If we ask, then, why technocracy did not destroy the worldview of a
tool-using culture, we may answer that the fury of industrialism was too
new and as yet too limited in scope to alter the needs of inner life or to
drive away the language, memories, and social structures of the tool-using
past. It was possible to contemplate the wonders of a mechanized cotton
mill without believing that tradition was entirely useless." "Technopoly"
by Neil Postman (1992) Page 46
"In reviewing nineteenth-century American history, one can hear the groans
of religion in crisis, of mythologies under attack, of a politics and
education in confusion, but the groans are not yet death-throes. They are
the sounds of a culture in pain, and nothing more. The ideas of tool-using
cultures were, after all, designed to address questions that still lingered
in a technocracy. The citizens of a technocracy knew that science and
technology did not provide philosophies by which to live, and they clung to
the philosophies of their fathers. They could not convince themselves that
religion, as Freud summed it up at the beginning of the twentieth century,
is nothing but an obsessional neurosis. Nor could they quite believe, as
the new cosmology taught, that the universe is the outcome of accidental
collocations of atoms. And they continued to believe, as Mark Twain did,
that, for all their dependence on machinery, tools ought still to be their
servants, not their masters. They would allow their tools to be
presumptuous, aggressive, audacious, impudent servants, but that tools
should rise above their servile station was an appalling thought. And
though technocracy found no clear place for the human soul, its citizens
held to the belief that no increase in material wealth would compensate
them for a culture that insulted their self-respect.
And so two opposing world-views-the technological and the
traditional-coexisted in uneasy tension. The technological was the
stronger, of course, but the traditional was there-still functional, still
exerting influence, still too much alive to ignore. This is what we find
documented not only in Mark Twain but in the poetry of Wait Whitman, the
speeches of Abraham Lincoln, the prose of Thoreau, the philosophy of
Emerson, the novels of Hawthorne and Melville, and, most vividly of all, in
Alexis de Tocqueville's monumental Democracy in America. In a word, two
distinct thought-worlds were rubbing against each other in
nineteenth-century America.
With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-worlds disappears.
Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous
Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It
does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It
makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by
redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by
history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit
its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian
technocracy." "Technopoly" by Neil Postman 1992 Pp. 46
End
Peace and goodwill
Ed Goertzen,
Oshawa,
L1G 2S2,
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SIGNATURE - "Subsidiarity", Defined in the Papal encyclical
"Quadragisemo Anno", as
quoted in "The Age of Paradox" by Charles Handy". "It is an injustice, a
grave evil and a disturbance of right order for a large and higher
organization to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed
efficiently by smaller, lower bodies...".
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