From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: Utopia
Date: 16 Aug 92 13:44:57 GMT
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison


In article <l8r87oINNd7n@mizar.usc.edu>
adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (Arne Adolphson) writes:

>In article <ROBERTL.92Aug15152928@luciano.Stanford.EDU> 
>robertl@luciano.Stanford.EDU (Robert Lodenkamper) writes:

>>I think at least a partial classification is possible.  For
>>example, I can't think of anything positive about hate, so
>>classifying hate as negative seems accurate.

>I would rather die than live in a utopia where everyone is
>in a lobotomized state, walking around loving everyone else.

I think you can safely plan to go on living, in that case!

But equating better conditions -- which is all we really
mean by utopia, since no one really expects at achieve an
ideal -- with being lobotomized [I first wrote lobotomixed,
which is a fun typo] isn't very helpful, since it suggests
giving up most of what's us, just to get along better.  Of
course, the feel-good school of pop psychology ("just love
one another") is a bit hard to take and few things are as
annoying as a person who is just *too* good, rather like a
diet of treacle.

But literary excess to one side, I see merit to adopting a
paradoxical point of view, by which we eschew obviously
horrible things like hunger, poverty, mayhem and the like,
at the same time as we cultivate an attitude of acceptance
of what really *is*, out there in the world.

Many cultures are disappearing, swept up by the global
nature of the few dominant cultures.  Much that is
*enormously* valuable to us and to future generations is
fast disappearing.  Things that are the summation of tens of
thousands of years of human experience by societies in much
better attunement with nature than ours are simply
vanishing.

This too is a fact, of nature, if you like.  It's hard to
see it as free of negative value, though it probably is.
Rather, it's just one more thing that *is*.  Yet it hardly
seems acceptable to just cultivate our own litle gardens
while everything goes to hell.

>In any case, I can think of a number of positive features
>about hate, the most obvious being that it's a great
>motivator.

Rather a perversion of the idea of positive, I'd say.

>>Even if one could devise a method of altering human
>>characteristics that would work, would it be right to impose
>>it on everyone?  If so, how should it be implemented?  Hard
>>questions to answer.

>No, they're really very easy to answer.  

If they should be answered at all, maybe.

>No, it wouldn't be right to impose this on everyone.  

Impossible too.

>And since these alterations shouldn't be imposed, you
>needn't worry about how to implement them.

Too easy, isn't it?  I think we still have to worry.  The
alternative is benign acceptance of everything that is,
essentially clapping our hands and saying it's all in the
hands of other forces.  And maybe it is.  I surely don't
know, and I suspect no one does.

You can easily see how I want it all.  Firm believer that I
am in the principle of "aim high," I feel, increasingly,
that it's not the answers, it's not even the questions, but
rather the ability to ask the questions that brings us out
of chaos enough to survive.  And that only temporarily.

<> Unfortunately, as Usenet gets out to the masses it will
<> become diluted. -- Nelson Minar (nelson@reed.edu)
<> *Again*!?!? -- David Preston (drp@dosbears.uucp)
-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
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