[ExI] Devastated ideologies (was: italian politics as exi-chat subject)

[Bryan Bishop]

On Thursday 06 March 2008, scerir wrote:
> Giorgio Israel (great supporter of Pope Ratzinger,
> and well known mathematician of Rome university
> 'La Sapienza') published a book ( you can see
> the cover here http://gisrael.blogspot.com/ )
> in which he explains how both wings (left and right)
> of our political scenario try to make up their
> devastated ideologies with neo-scientism and technophilia.

My first thought: this technophilia has exhibited itself here before and 
on wta-talk in the sense of anti-"let's just do it" tendencies. 
Somebody was laughing at me the other day for suggesting that we build 
teh tech. Odd. Another thought that I would like to add, from my 
general observations on the state of those ideologies and the "old 
world". The status quo takes a lot of time to update. Lots and lots of 
time. The opportunity to update a unit relaying the status quo is rare, 
so old information is always being propagated throughout society while 
the freshest and newest information has to find its own context to keep 
alive (and that's fine). But on the other hand, we have significantly 
large organizations ("Left" and "Right") and ideologies still 
propagating and still abducting new minds even though there's no real 
power that is necessarily making news releases to gain eyes and get 
possible neophytes to convert (peculiar). Today I was sitting in a 
psych class that was talking about 'developmental psychology', going 
over the theories of Piaget and the like, staged versus continuous 
development, emotional taxonomies and whatever else. The designs of the 
studies were simply wrong -- *no*, you _don't_ do longitudinal studies 
or cross-section studies, not at all -- that's studying a 
mystical 'normal' brain and the normal status quo does not necessarily 
represent something that is within the possibility space of the 
construction or growth of the human brain, it's not psychology at all 
(perhaps social studies, but only on a "pop" level, since real social 
studying would involve more, you know, hard (read: real) studying).  
And the theories of, say, Maslow, were developed so as to promote a 
more 'humanist' idealization versus the other negative images of humans 
at the time and while there's nothing necessarily wrong with his ideas, 
they are not as intense as they could be. And what about marxism? Or 
libertarianism? Republicanism? Capitalism? Objectivism (cringe)? These 
are archaic, in more than a sense than "they are old" but that they do 
not fall into any particular coherency when, on the contrary, it seems 
that many historical figures were 'fighting' for coherency. So this 
idea of coherency (sometimes poorly guided, but if one is careful it 
can be a powerful tool, yes) and defending our own ideologies does not 
necessarily help the general situation at all ... perhaps instead we 
should be working on the art of self-creation, design of new ideas and 
societies from the ground up, integrating and sharing novelty from 
where ever it may come from. But it seems that one must have their own 
internal journey of personal growth and development to come to this 
conclusion, to some extent isolated from society. Maybe we can propose 
some solutions to the Keepers of the Devastated Ideologies in an 
attempt to minimize their damage while seemingly maximizing their 
missions? Or alternatively start teaching parents how to help minimize 
the damage of society on their children as they grow up and prepare for 
the future ("the future is now / the singularity is now"). 

> The above may have something to do with those
> current threads here (Italy and transhumanism).  

Definitely.

- Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/