From: mcgrew@klinzhai.rutgers.edu (Charles Mcgrew)
Newsgroups: alt.alien.visitors
Subject: Re:Re: Are we an experiment ?
Date: 28 Aug 92 23:49:06 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.


	u925599@postoffice.utas.edu.au (Chris Stapelberg) writes:
	Great letter, man, thanks!  You have raised some very good,
	logical arguments in favour of the human race.

... thanks very much!

	I make the following assumptions when I refer to us as
	"average": Consider the first spark of self-awareness (i.e.
	intelligence) on the one end of the spectrum and the most
	advanced form of (some would call it spiritual) consciousness,
	i.e the total awareness and oneness with all things, and
	almost paradoxically the lack of self-interest, on the other.


... well, perhaps.  The difficulty is that acting with the complete
awareness of the "oneness of all", one would be paralyzed.  Couldn't
eat meat or (according to whose "oneness" you like) plants, couldn't
use any energy, etc.  Lack of self-interest, taken to this limit,
means basically lack of self-awareness.  If I am part of the one, like
a cell in a larger organism, then I am in large part constrained in my
weirdness; my individuality.

	Now I agree that some people are closer to one extreme than
	the other in both directions, but taking a mean estimate it is
	safe to say that the human race in its entirety falls
	somewhere in the middle ("average").

... I counter that your scale may not be correctly bound.  We do not
know (really) what the best philosophy of life is.  (Robert Heinlein
once said that "enlightened self-interest" was best.)  We also should
not judge all of humanity with the same ruler.  A scratch-the-earth
farmer in Mozambique should not be held up to the same standards as a
tenured philosophy professor in California.  Standards of behavior
that the professor can live with might kill the farmer, and his
family.

	But besides that look at what has become of our moral values:

	Anyone can buy anything.

... that is not quite so.  I cannot buy a B-52 bomber (where would I
park it? :-) I cannot legally buy crack cocaine, so for me that means
I cannot buy it (i.e. it is a moral choice made by agreeing with the
law on that point.)  It is true that people with enough money who wish
to may buy anything; often these people are acting outside the bounds
of society.  These are called "criminals".  Also, "anyone can buy
anything" (to the extent it is true today) has pretty much always been
true.  Prostitution, drugs, corruption, and the like are *not* new
phenomenons.

	People will kill for the smallest payments (food, a few
	dollars, a fuck)

... this has always been true.  The implication, that people killed
for more "worthwhile" things in the past is false.  If its always been
so, then a constant thing cannot be a sign of decline.  That you
*hear* more about it (since "a lady killed for 25 cents" makes good
play on the 11 o'clock news), doesn't mean that it didn't happen
before, it just means its being shoved in your face more.


	Love and marriage have deteriorated into custody battles and
	alimony arguments.

... no offense, but my marriage has not deteriorated in such a way,
thank you very much.  Again, I suspect that you are *hearing* about it
more, and so presuming it is happening more.  People got divorced in
the past, and custody battles are not new either.  It is in some sense
an advance in that the courts no longer presume that the wife is
necessarily entitled to a large amount of alimony, and that the wife
always makes the better parent.  Each case is evaluated on its own
merits, which is as it should be.  (Also, in some sense, some people
are well enough off now that they can *afford* to get divorced, in a
way that they could not before; that the dispute is a genuine one over
how much one or the other needs to have.)


	 Some large religious groups have become either a lucrative
	afterlife insurance scam or a "religious" form of Dungeons and
	Dragons.

... be very careful when you say things like this.  It sounds very
like religious bigotry to me to presume that any religion that people
freely join into is necessarily bad or is a sign of decay.  Who are
you to say they are wrong?  Making a judgement on a particular
religion (or the people that "run" it) is a very, very tricky thing.
The difference between a messiah and a flim-flam man is something of a
matter of perspective...


	Now here is the point. We are declining morally, in terms of
	values and integrity as a human race. Thus we are fast losing
	our most basic infrastructure, the very backbone of a healthy
	civilisation.

... this is a very curious thing to say.  The human race,
historically, has not concerned itself whatsoever with human-race-wide
values.  For instance, as late as 1945, the Nazis were trying to
"improve the integrity of humanity" by destroying parts of it they
didn't like.  In the 1950's, and 1960's, there were various tries at
it in Africa, the middle east, etc., etc.  In the mid-1970's, the
Pol-Pot-faction of Cambodia did the same, in the mid-1980's, the
Iraqis tried the same on the Kurds.  Before WWII, the list is
practically endless.  When exactly were the "good times"?  Near as I
can tell, the *only* real attempts at global solutions have come in
the last 47 years, and are continuing still.  That they have not yet
succeeded is unfortunate, but they surely have not entirely been
fruitless.  (I hope you are not going to put forward the 1960's as a
time of virtue.  I was around, and it wasn't very pretty.  That the
rich white people had a nice time and felt good about themselves (and
grew up to tell us about it endlessly) doesn't change the injustices
that existed all through the decade, and to a some extent still exist
today.)

	And, as any chiropractor will tell you, without a healthy
	skeleton you're pretty much on the decline, whether a person
	or a civilisation!

... surely a person's value is not the sum of their bones.  (Ooo,
how's that for a nice-sounding, but empty rejoinder? William Buckley,
eat your heart out!  :-)

Charles