From: Valence (valence10@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Jul 06 2003 - 23:42:39 BST
Hey Steve and all,
Thanks for all the great feedback from everyone on the Giant/Organ analogy.
> Steve:
> I like this analogy. It is also a response to the kind of moral
relativist
> I often encounter who says that since one culture does without a given
> social prohibition then our culture can as well...The social morals that a
society
> evolves, evolve within a network of morals that must be considered as a
> whole.
R
Way to grab the ball and run with it Steve. I think I agree with all of
this (although the centrist in me wants to point out this doesn't
necessarily mean that social morals are NOT interchangeable either). I'd
say it's just like real physiology. The more the donee resembles the donor,
the better chance that their organ-patterns will be compatible (of course,
i'm not a surgeon, so i don't know if that's exactly right, but it feels
about right).
Moreover, it suggests certain things about the ways in which such social
transplants are accomplished. For example, the American military's failure
to prevent the collapse of the Iraqi infrastructure in its quest to bring
democracy to the region appears exactly like the behavior of a negligent
surgeon who completely gutted his patient's circulatory system while trying
to install a new heart. Democracy can't function in a society without the
corresponding infrastructure anymore than a heart can function in a body
that has no veins and arteries.
> > R
> > Not to get to abstract (ha ha), but I would think that when biology was
> > still 90% in charge there was no Giant at all. The Giant's birthday was
the
> > day that social patterns became 51% of the equation and it just grew
from
> > there.
>
> Steve:
> To continue harping on the distinction between patterns of value and a
> person being dominated by a type of value, I like how you distinguish the
> birth of the Giant from the birth of the first social pattern of value.
> Analogous is the birth of philosophy in Greece and the appearance of the
> first intellectual pattern of value which are also not the same in my
book.
R
Agreed again. Carrying the Giant analogy up a level, we might say that
'philosophy' is an organ of a 4th level Giant.
take care
rick
My country is the world, and my religion is to do good. - R.W. Emerson
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