...maybe on this very ground swept clean.

One of the foundational beliefs of our Founders was the constrained vision* of humanity... that sense that our human nature fundamentally limits the kind of society that can work.

And yet from Plato** to today it doesn't stop the utopia builders. In the past, they simply tried killing everyone who doesn't go along with the plan as being insufficiently selfless/committed/whatever.

Our Founders thankfully came from the tradition that said "if Men were Angels..." and decided the only reasonable action was to design a system to allow for human weakness by setting (politically) one self-interest against another and (commercially) harnessing individual self-interest for the good of all. Quite ingenious, really.

That never set well with the Utopian crowd though. Oh, there have always been the voices here and there looking to create the New Man. But only recently has it become a literal prospect -

Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction

Um. Yeah.

Here's the thing though.. it's not the tech itself that makes me squick.***

I'm just about through with John Ringo's Council Wars series, and LOVE the idea of people tinkering with their own soul-houses with such whimsy. Let the furries go off to become unicorns and centaurs and dragons and walking cats and suchlike.. I think it would make the world all kinds of fun.

Heck, give me little Janey's My First GeneKit from 2200 and I'll happily set to hacking my own source code (I always did want elf ears... and a better memory would be nice )... but let Mr. "in the Public Interest" in there?

squick.

To quote that bad boy from Norau...

"stay out of my genes!"



All and all though.. this is sure gonna be a fun century to live through. :)













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* Bill Whittle, to quote a friend - "you make my elbows sweat."
I could listen to that man talk for hours. :)

** Seriously.. the dude was messed up. No wonder the Athenians had enough of him.

*** Plus, how cost effective would it be, really? You don't see Castro or Kim Jong Il dumping feel-good meds into their local reservoirs, even though the tech's available and folks have been making sci-fi movies about that very prospect for decades.

.. Because they don't have to. Ordinary human envy, schadenfreude, fear, and resignation work fine as control mechanisms.

Foundational Heresy

I confess, I'm becoming less of a fan of representative republics all the time. Not just for the near inevitable tendency to slide into mob rule and economic ruin, and not just for in inevitability of important decisions made with a two-year election horizon in mind - while loaded with graft to boot.

No.. I think what bugs me most about it is what it does to the people.

I just spent a couple weeks with dear friends in Seattle. On most things we look pretty much eye to eye... I'm prolly a little further to the conservative side of the libertarian spectrum, they the left - but by and large we're within spitting distance on most questions of the day. Lots of their friends come over for a Yule party (at this point I should mention they're gay - as is the better part of their circle of friends).

So. Yeah.

The good thing about being plopped in different water from time to time is how easily you see all those old habits of mind from the other side. As in... constant carping about how dumb/evil/whatever the whole of the Other Side is.

So here I am sitting in a nice living room chatting with lots of folks in a beautiful forest and thinking "man, if everyone would just shut up about politics for two hours, I bet I could set my most hardcore gun rights friends down at a dinner table with my Californian hippy friends and Alaskan pilot friends and Tennessee musician friends and we could have a grand old time together. Can you imagine the stories?"

Then someone says something acerbic and that little fantasy goes out the window.

Take just one marriage-
Wife likes trees. Good, fine cool.... but Those People who value Money More than Trees are Evil.
Husband likes his guns. Good, fine cool... but Those People are Trying to Disarm Us.

.. so a marriage is strained by a bunch of asses in Washington who can't keep their hands in their own pockets and are using people's loves and passions to stay in a nice cushy office.


And that's what I don't like about republics -- that it's seemingly impossible to handle the issues that arise without the scum of the population rising to the top, and setting everyone else against each other for power.

But as Churchill said, the other options are even worse. Philosopher Kings? Feh. The number of "good" absolute monarchs from Cincinnatus to today could probably be counted on two hands. Pure democracy? There is no tyranny like the tyranny of the majority. Who knows, maybe the Singulatarians will come up with some un-bribable, un-corruptible AI for the job... as if the Diebold hacking fears weren't interesting enough.


I've come to accept all this back and forth wrangling as necessary - that the screaming and nastiness from both poles of any debate is needed to achieve some kind of dynamic homeostasis in the community... that we need both the hippy and the logger.

And yet... for all I've learned, all I've done over the last couple decades, I confess at the root of it all there's still so very often the little girl sitting in the corner, looking up tearfully at everyone she knows and thinking

... why is everyone yelling at each other? I thought we wanted to be friends.




So. well. time to go be productive today. Happy New Year. ;)

Culture Shock

... back in the 48 for a couple weeks. I keep forgetting until I'm down here just how different it is.

Technically in the same country, and yet... not. The cities are packed tight, and even in the rural areas you're never far from road or rail. Footprints everywhere you look. And... no moose downtown.

It puts me in mind of a line from Jefferson's letters from France once upon a time. I can't lay hands on the original text, but it was something to the effect of "wow... you can buy *anything* you need here - not like back in our rude country where folk make do on their own." You can guess the rest of the lessons he drew from that.

Now... to figure out how the heck to get this "VPN" thing working. The 21st century doesn't give up its grasp that easy, and work calls.

Primary Sources

You know the one thing I really like about living in this time?

How easy information flows now. I mean - anyone else remember your grade school teacher making you poke through musty old cardback telephone-books of periodical citations for some paper or another?

These days though... this "Climategate" thing happens and anyone with a mind to can go sorting through emails and readme documention and make up their own mind. A newspaper posts a naggingly incomplete news article and others chime in online with their version of "the rest of the story.*" And it's all a few strokes of a keyboard away.

That is just freaking amazing. (Not to mention a little scary, as the door swings both ways)

Pardon the flummoxed look here. There's a very real part of me that's not quite ready to leave 1750, so 2010 still throws me for a loop every now and again. :)




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* edit - which after causing a little uproar were investigated and falsified, all within a week.