Political compass for the21st century

[pbrower2a]

(05-09-2020, 05:50 AM)Blazkovitz Wrote:

(05-08-2020, 11:42 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I've got to throw out my arrow of progress, the Enlightenment ideals of human rights, equality and democracy.  It's far older than the 21st century, but still a good one.

These ideas have been mainstreamed, and moreover mean different things to different people.

Human rights? Ayn Rand advocated human rights, but she defined them as "freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men". This was the original 18th century idea of human rights. The advocates of inclusivity and so-called Millennial social justice believe in this concept in theory, but they believe it might be overridden by somebody's right not to hear nasty words, or to be recognized as female despite having a penis, or not to hear scientific arguments against teachings of a 7th century nomad shaman. Yet others might say the greatest of human rights is the right to economic security, something like universal basic income. I don't want to debate which concept of human right is the best, all of them have some validity. But today there cannot be one political orientation based on human rights.

The 18th-century idea of human rights fell short of what everyone assumes now: the abolition of slavery and the right of women to participate fully in the political process. I have heard people speaking of themselves as "Tenth Amendment citizens of the United States". Notice the choice of ordinal numbers. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth somehow are missed. 

I think we have a reasonable assumption that people not use filthy words around children. OK, there is Tourette's syndrome. One has the right to be ignorant and wrong.  The gender-identity stuff remains creepy. 

As for economic insecurity... any severe deprivation is a compromise of freedom. Economic elites can easily see themselves entitled to the toil of people incapable of saying no to whatever terms are offered. Hopelessness, helplessness, and desperation are not freedom.   

Quote:Economic equality is Red, the Populist/Proletarianist/Socialist sector. Inclusivists also believe in equality of sorts, they say that all religions or all sexualities are equal. But I think that economic equality is more important. Extreme inequalities of wealth could eventually result in human splitting into two different species, something like Eloy and Morlocks.

Or aristocrats and peons, bourgeois and proletarians. H.G. Wells knew about that divide, one still being worked out in his time. It still exists, and it seems to intensify in a 3T. 

Quote:The idea of progress is deeper than any of these orientations. If we define progress as growth of social complexity (extropy), different political orientations have different ideas on how to keep progress going. Yellows think the market is biggest engine of progress, Reds think it's the working class. Nationalists could point out that different cultures aren't equally likely to contribute to progress, so they prefer not to let people from backward cultures in.

(05-08-2020, 11:01 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Of course, the pro-market section right next to the theocratic just LOVES Darwin!

A hardcore libertarian would probably say it's your business if you teach your child Darwin, Blavatsky or Genesis. Just government out of the classroom!

My personal idea: to allow a child to grow up without hearing of the wonders of Evolution is a form of abuse.

Technically, entropy is the exhaustion of energy and the deconcentration of resources. Progress is anything but natural. It may begin with the random luck of noticing some phenomenon that one can exploit once for good effect and keep exploiting it. But all in all, anything worth achieving requires some effort... and even maintaining things require effort -- energy and natural resources. Everything tends to rot or dissipate over time.

I say this as I contemplate the pessimistic view that Arnold Toynbee has for all civilizations over time. Entropy ultimately overpowers effort. Such may take a long time or a short time, depending on how well the civilization does things. Once entropy overpowers effort for an extended time it is over for that civilization. 

OK, entropy in our world with respect to the Sun consuming its hydrogen in fusion will take billion years, and all human life will be in deep trouble should it be around in a billion. The sun seems to radiate more heat each billion years, and it won't take much more solar radiation to make human life first unpleasant (a summer like that of Dallas about where Edmonton is), then difficult (summer in Riyadh), then impossible (about 55 C, or 131 F, when proteins start to gelatinize). At 70 C the moist greenhouse effect becomes a runaway situation and temperatures over a few million years become like those of Venus. But even that is far off, and we have another Ice Age on the way as Africa slams into Europe and drives the Mediterranean Basin high and dry like the Himalayas and Australia slams into southeast Asia or into Siberia and Alaska -- also raising a mountain range similar to the Himalayas. An ice age wouldn't be so great either; at the last glacial maximum there wasn't enough food to support the current canine population, let alone the human population. 

But even without those long-term horrors, Humanity has shown eminent capacity to much things up. Toynbee's final stage of life for a civilization is the Universal State, the political entity that absorbs a whole civilization and becomes hierarchical, corrupt, unimaginative, and repressive. Civilizations thrive when they are able to innovate their way out of trouble, give a stake in the system to the proles, do the unglamorous but necessary maintenance, constrain cults of personality, and recruit talented people to solve problems. The Universal State  -- think of the Roman Empire as the prime example for being best known  -- became increasingly hierarchical over time. It tried to solve all its problems with brute force, which proves as destructive as it is temporarily effective. Its slave system ensured that there would be no middle class capable of entrepreneurial or technological solutions to social distress. Government got bigger, but no more effective except at devouring and wasting resources. The government failed to promote human investment in education, so even the Latin language underwent changes that created linguistic chaos that mas literacy might have prevented. I can think of innovations that would have pushed classical civilization into something much like the modern world: steam power and a printing press. (A Greek tinkerer had invented a primitive steam engine around the time of Christ, and that tinkerer bragged that it would do the work of fifty slaves. "So what would we do with the slaves?"

Gutenberg's first printing press was in fact a grape press for pressing the juice out of wine -- the Romans had plenty of those. Anyone who can carve can make wooden type, and the Romans had plenty of wood. The Romans had a sophisticated mass society; they just did not know how to use it.The Venetians, Florentines, and Dutch had mass societies and allowed those to promote progress. That made all the difference in the world.