T.H.Huxley
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Discuss 9
'That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to the state of nature, the state of art of an organised polity.'
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Here Huxley seems to be rediscovering the third law of thermodynamics.
ReplyDeleteHumanity can choose its next stage of evolution, rather than wait for nature to go through its usual prototyping followed by nature selection. It's why, in the 24th century,we'll all be Premiership footballers.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds suspiciously like a voiceover in a twenty second advertisement for new cars or deodorant on TV. I suspect it is a clever joint effort by Ugg boots and Nike to get around your comment moderation.
ReplyDeleteFor heaven sake calm down a bit. It is only now that I've read enough on Minsky to feel that I might discuss as distinct from shoot from the hip.
ReplyDeleteHmmn, we don't know what the limits are yet. We don't even know why some things are the way they are. So the notions of progress in this quotation may not be workable.
ReplyDeleteFor example: modern desktop computer systems see the user as fundamentally hostile. The user has to be corralled and controlled; the computer is man and the user is nature, constantly threatening to reduce the computer's efforts to rubble. Suppose it turned out that the more intelligent and sophisticated AI becomes, the more AI will view humans as fundamentally hostile and, furthermore, that this problem is irresolvable. In this universe, that's just the way things are. Only SF perhaps, but I wonder if anyone really knows.
Since when has the polity been organized, and what did he think we were, the cast of the latest Attenborough epic?
ReplyDeleteUgg, your boots are crap.
By organised polity does he mean 'the state' or 'socialism'?
ReplyDeleteIs this about the battle between waring ideologies of a Keynesian existence , the manifestation of the human scramble for independence and improvement - versus the monolithic state that numbs and protects, by seeking to place everybody at one level, even if it means bringing them downwards to do so.
It seems a straightforward expression of conservative pessimism. Interesting though, as it's coming from Darwin's bulldog. Huxley obviously had no truck with the application of natural selection to explain human affairs.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, he seems to be suggesting 'the state of nature', presumably including natural selection, is actually inimical to the development of 'an organised polity'. I wonder in what way? And I wonder to what he would ascribe the improvement of the human race's various states of art?
The organic crunchy con gang think we're in the opposite struggle: trying to preserve our nature against creeping civilisation.
ReplyDeleteIt's a constant struggle keeping track of all these struggles we're constantly having.
Love that point about the hostile desktop, Mark, and yes, Brit, the struggles, the struggles....
ReplyDeleteBrit, I think the world can usefully be divided into two groups: those who believe we are all in a struggle and those who do not.
ReplyDeleteYes, and life is a constant struggle between them.
ReplyDelete'struggle' is an oddly cute sounding word for something that's annoying
ReplyDeleteReminds me of the Leonard Cohen lyric, There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones that say that there isn't.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, Huxley apparently was not at all enamored of nature as a guide to behavior.
Some of this discussion reminds me of George Carlin's Saving the Planet routine.
ReplyDeleteI should probably leave Carlin with the last word on the Big Electron theory, but I wanted to look at Huxley's whole sentence:
That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to the State of Nature, the State of Art of an organised polity; in which, and by which, man may develop a worthy civilisation, capable of maintaining and constantly improving itself, until the evolution of our globe shall have entered so far upon its downward course that the cosmic process resumes its sway; and, once more, the State of Nature prevails over the surface of our planet.'
Until our short stint here on earth is over, before we complete the packing of our bags as Carlin puts it, Huxley is calling for us to "develop a worthy civilisation, capable of maintaining and constantly improving itself." It's interesting that he places us in opposition to Nature, that we need to develop a system that allows us to improve in the face of a system that is often hostile to us, one that is fine with flowing lava into our living rooms and swallowing us with earthquakes.
We live in a time when our economic system has broken down, and our collective political systems have no good answer or direction, nor to the threat of violence going on around the planet. Seems that just for trying to interfere with the violence, we add to it instead, as just for trying to interrupt the economic downslide, it worsens.
And so we find ourselves in a period when the self-advancing systems we had hoped to pass on to our children, are breaking down, that the forces of violence and rogue enterprise that Bertrand Russell addressed per Discuss 7 are winning out. We so wanted Obama to be an interruption on the order of Martin Luther King, that otherwise wise people voted him into office, and others gave him the Nobel Peace Prize just for changing the conversation. It's not working, because there is an essential problem with our approach.
And in this thread we have a new ugly head popping out of humankind, one that sees to it that people are to "be corralled and controlled; the computer is man and the user is nature, constantly threatening to reduce the computer's efforts to rubble," as Mark put it above.
We have been unable to stop violence, because the people who take control want violence as a control tool. We have not stopped roguish dealings, because that's how our financially successful people become financially successful. Our systems that were supposed to be based on higher morals and wisdom, have been corrupted, or rather have never shaken the corruption they were designed to, or at least supposed to.
Of course now, it's not only us versus Nature, but us versus the Computer. And this machine thinks it can win by killing the mother of its enemy.