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| date | 2000-12-14:13:48 |
| Humans |
A friend of Caro's has a comment in his .sig file that uniformity makes the best worse and the worst better. This is nonsense, and pessimistic nonsense at that. It all depends on how uniformity is achieved. One way of achieving uniformity is to make the best worse and the worse better. Another way is to make the worse better. Another way is to make the best worse. The goal does not in general determine the means of achieving it--most problems have multiple solutions. If they didn't engineering would be easy, because we wouldn't have to pick and choose between such a large range of similar but not quite equivalent ways of solving a problem. One well-known way of increasing uniformity is through selection, natural or un-natural. Stephen Jay Gould talks about this in one of his early books, when he was still more concerned with biology than politics. He takes as an example breeding chickens for size, and points out that after you've bred for size you wind up with a population of very large chickens that is not very diverse, and therefore not very much subject to selection on size any more. But selection isn't the only way to increase uniformity without making the best worse. Humans have this remarkable capacity: the ability to learn and change and grow. By training and practice we can get better, most of us. Doing so makes us more uniformly good. Take literacy for example. Once upon a time, it was the province of only a select few. With the advent of the printing press and the ideological shift of the Reformation, and the growth of economic and political conditions that made reading and writing valuable skills, more and more people learned to read. The population over this period went from being uniformly illiterarte, with a small number of literate people, to very non-uniformly literate, to finally very uniformly literate. Did this make the best worse? If so, how? The most literate people today can read as many or more languages as the most literate people a thousand years ago. The most skilled caligraphers can create manuscripts as beautiful as those illuminated in the Middle Ages. A population that is uniformly literate does not damange the literacy of the most literate one little bit--indeed, it enhances it by making it more probable that some genius of letters will arise from the great mass of humanity, and not like "some mute inglorious Milton" lay sequestered in a country hamlet. So the claim that uniformity makes the best worse is empirically false. It is also intensely, intensely conservative. Any attempt to improve is doomed, it implies. The mass of humanity is hopeless. History does not bear out this claim. The mass of humanity is now and always has been coarse, stupid, pig-headed, grasping--they "hoard and sleep and feed" and don't know the good when it slaps them in the face. But the "cream" of humanity--the aristocrats, the engineers, the scientists, the artists, the thinkers--have been not so very different. I don't know of any "great man" who didn't have faults in proportion to his greatness, from Einstein's multiple failure as a husband and father to Jefferson's monsterous enslavement of his children to Aristotle's hideous political views or Newton's bizzare religious beliefs. If one were to focus merely on the defects of the great, one would conclude that there is no greatness. The same is true of one focusses only on the defects of the common, and it is no more just. I am not here arguing that we don't owe a greater debt of gratitude to the best than the worst. We do. But it is simply wrong to write off the less able, to assert that to seek greater uniformity cannot be achieved by improving the worst without taking anything away from the best. People who seek the best should seek uniformity by teaching, leading, showing the way. People who fear the worst should also seek uniformity by the same means. Caro once said to me that one of her inspirations was the vision of thousands of people saying, "Definition. Genus..." and going on to define a term. Such a simple thing, yet something that undoubtedly qualifies as increasing the uniformity of the population with respect to philosophic reasoning. This is part of the mission of Enlightenment, and no small part of the reason I support it--because it gives us an opportunity to promulgate objective philosophical methods to a broad audience, instead of broodingly focussing on a narrowly defined elite. Enlightenment does support the elite--people trained in philosophy at the graduate level--and that's an important part of the mission too. But that alone is not enough--we do not shun uniformity, because we seek the best. |
| Creatures |
Nut is my favorite cat. He's getting old, like all our cats, but still retains the character of his youth. When we first brought him home he was tiny, the runt of the litter. He could walk under his sister, Bolt, who was the largest of his litter-mates. He was so small I didn't think he was going to live through the first night. He had a bit of cold, I think, although I didn't recognize it at the time. So we was moving slowly and not too sure of himself, and he could easily fit into my cupped hands. But he was bright-eyed and curious and friendly, and so he has remained. He likes to sleep on my pillow at night, and I like to have him there. He'll come wandering up the side of the bed after I've gone to bed. I'll often be reading, and he'll nudge my book aside and maybe chew on the edges a little, letting me know that he'd really like to cuddle up and sleep. He purrs all the time, deep and warm, with a little trill on the edge. Sometimes he curls up beside my head, other times overtop, lying against the headboard of the bed. He will at times reach out a paw to try to touch Jan's nose, which she hates, or mine, which I think is kind of cute. It feels good to hear his purrs rumbling through the pillow as I drift off to sleep, and to feel his warm fur against my head, and know that this creature is my friend. |