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Re: [pf] Sources of ideas; role models and shades of green; complexity.
by Nan Hildreth
22 November 2000 06:07 UTC

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At 06:05 PM 11/21/00 -0800, David MacClement wrote:

>· Even talking and reading about these things is of no more value than
>reading a novel 

For me, being an effective advocate for justice here in oil country, in the
Bible Belt, I've gotta make peace with devotion to both the Techno-Messiah
and Christianity.   

>· If you're Christian, you need Christianity. If you're defending science,
>then you need science to be "right". 

Yes, in a fallen world, like Houston, stories of salvation give us hope.
Yes, innocent folks don't need that. 

>And so on. But this is solely the
>choice or preference of the individual - no-one else's opinions or beliefs
>are of any significance beyond being one more source of ideas.

I agree that bullying others to believe your way is wrong.  

>· The rest of this is (again) my opinion, about goals and the focus of a
>person's activity. Diversity of opinion, multiple ways of action.
>  Complexity.

Yes.   But Brzezinski says that in an uncertain, complex, congested world
then we have no guide but morality.  Part of the solution is looking for
our moral compass. 



Nan Hildreth   Nan.Hildreth@Pdq.net
Houston 

Brzezinski's closing paragraph:  "The global crisis of the spirit has to be
overcome if humanity is to assert command over its destiny. The point of
departure for such self-assertion must be awareness that social life is
both objectively and subjectively too complex to be periodically redesigned
according to utopian blueprints.  The dogmatic certainties of the modern
age must yield to the recognition of the inherent uncertainty of the human
condition.  In a world of fanatical certitudes, morality could be seen as
redundant; but in a world of contingency, moral imperatives become the
central, and even the only, source of reassurance. Recognition both of the
complexity and the contingency of the human condition thus underlines the
*political* need for shared moral consensus in the increasingly congested
and intimate world of the twenty-first century."   (Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Out of Control, 1992, p 231) "