Posted on 02/15/2003 4:18:25 PM PST by PatrickHenry
LW, unlike bb, unspun is not an avid reader. So far and for the next while, I've read your first and last paragraphs. Here's an answer from me, regarding your last:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/319415/posts
Capitalism and altruism are both wonderful modes of human behavior. I think the threat of a false and twisted idea of altruism which you must be referring to (or, The Tragedy of American Compassion, as it's been written of) has burgeoned and begun to fade in the 20th Century. I think a greater threat is a weird combination of false and superficial ideas of personal liberty and security. The roots that make this apparently conflicted set of desires exhalted as "uberprinciples" so weird are roots fed by such notions as man being merely a complex animal (a very unnatural concoction) and that private behavior has no universal consequences.
But there are answers to the bitterly cold, modern problems that we have had, if we would let our opaque and hardened shells be removed. There is light and there is warmth.
Seconded.
:)
First, self interest is not automatically identical with selfishness. Self interest can and must include maintenance of the community in which one lives, just as housecleaning, though work, improves our level of comfort.
Second, self interest is subjective, and many people enjoy being altruistic. Christianity seeks to foster this in people in whom this motive is latent.
Mutations (and other genetic happenings) propose and selection disposes. There's no teleology, just survival. Sometimes (as in the Toba erruption), location is important. Sometimes disease resistance is important. Sometimes naturally curly hair is important.
I am using the word "purpose" here not necessarily to determine cause and effect. My use of the word "purpose" is to describe relationship between an animal or person and that being's environment (everything with which the being interacts with). If you prefer to substitute words such as "functional relationship," or "orientation" those would work, too.
[You:] Fine, then we agree there is no supernatural source for consciousness. THAT was my point.
I didn’t exactly say that there is no supernatural source for consciousness. I guess that would depend on how one defines “supernatural.” I’m not sure I know how to do that. In a certain way, merely to define the thing would instantly cut it off from “nature” by converting it into an abstract object – an object created by an intending mind. Such a procedure seems virtually to eliminate the entire idea of the supernatural, while clearly putting a premium on the operations of conscious mind.
Let me try to make a difficult distinction clear. There are the laws of physics, physical theories of the universe, mathematics, et al. Arguably, all these things are mental constructs, descriptions of the nature and properties of the physical universe. What they are not is the physical universe itself. The description is already a “once remove” from the Reality it observes and articulates. It is not that Reality itself.
So, are such powerful and enduring mental constructs “natural”; or might they be regarded as “supernatural” in some way? Though perhaps not in the way we usually understand that term these days?
Similarly, is conscious mind – most particularly in its aspect of will (i.e., the power to discriminate and select from alternative potentialities, to make choices) – natural? We can’t say it’s unnatural; for clearly it appears in nature -- at least in terms of its observable effects.
Yet if it’s not strictly “natural” (since it can intervene in the natural and transform it), and it can’t be unnatural, where do you have left to go but to supernatural – if you have a mind to classify such things in the first place?
* * * * * *
Shifting gears. You wrote:
Oh, and proper meditation is silent. Maybe that is the problem, you ever stop thinking about the unthinkable?
Which leads me to depart from my normal custom and actually take umbrage with a correspondent, on two points. First, apparently you didn’t conduct a meditation on the Walker passage I quoted. You analyzed it instead. There is a big difference in the respective procedures. And I’m sorry you didn’t do the meditation, because Walker ended it with a perfectly lovely Zen koan that I thought you would find particularly appealing.
Second, you must think me a moron to advise me that “proper meditation is silent.” Well, Duh! Your reference to me “thinking about the unthinkable,” and do I ever stop doing that, is perfectly gratuitous, and misses the point of the meditation to which you seem to refer entirely.
That particular mental operation involves clearing the mind of all thoughts, of getting rid of all words. Its object is to completely “still the mind.” There is to be no “thinking.” Then, if you can hold this state for long enough (and that’s surprisingly difficult), you get to see what happens next – which is the object of the exercise.
What you describe as “unthinkable” is, thus, partially right. But it misses the object, which is to experience consciousness as a state of pure awareness – that is, keenly aware of the presence of a unique self, a conscious mind, that precedes all thought and which constitutes the matrix in which all thought takes place.
IMHO, you don’t want to “fiddle around” with that particular meditative form.
Meditating a good koan usually is challenge enough. Such a meditation would be “silent,” too.
Thanks for writing, LogicWings.
I gather somebody's been reading Lord Keynes -- and Ayn Rand -- 'way too long. Time perhaps to visit a far more interesting contemporary of Keynes'-- that would be one Joseph Shumpeter.
If anybody is interested in seeing how capitalism must incorporate some sense of altruisim just to survive in the first place, they ought to read Schumpeter's underappreciated classic: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.
Schumpeter does take a rather dim view of the long run, however. He figures capitalism will ultimately become the victim of its own success....
Meanwhile, he esteems capitalism for putting silk stockings "within the reach of factory girls" as the very model, its basic justification and motivation -- not the making of yet "more silk stockings for queens."
Thanks for the "bump in the night," unspun! I do enjoy your posts!
"So we at last find that reality is the observer observing. It is the two parts of our great separation coming together. There is a separation. There is a dreadful and vast separation. But there is no space and really no matter to die but that our own minds did not first come together to create it. Our observation – our coming together – created matter. Observation is the stuff of the space that reaches out past the vast clusters of galaxies. Reality is the fruit of love’s embrace."
The passage strikes me as fine grist for an extended meditation....
LOLOL! That's the way it goes in my world. Thanks for the post!
Thanks for the insights and references! Since I don't read nearly as much as you, I'd point out that crazy feller in the movie, too, regarding Capitalism tempered and refined.... John Nash. Of course the Person who established such notions as the "Year of Jubilee" had already been at work in tempering such working systems of fallen man and world.
I just posted something about fishnet stockings, myself this evening. I don't know which kind Betty wore, but I know she had a tender heart.
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