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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Riley37" data-source="post: 7396403" data-attributes="member: 6786839">So you say. Are are telling Shidaku, that the beliefs S. holds, cannot be beliefs which S. has examined... because anyone who examines those beliefs, without exception, will naturally and inevitably reach the same conclusions you have reached? That strikes me as an arrogant perspective.Perhaps you should demonstrate that *you* have examined the ideology which denounces global western society, when you accuse others of failure to examine their own ideologies, and when you also jump to conclusions on which ones they practice. Motes and beams, beams and motes.Whoah. That is not an accusation to make without strong cause. Could you specify *exactly* where S. has made such claims, on that topic, referencing S.'s precise words, in full context?That fear, which you know *because you read the Phaedrus*, which you are now mentioning *by written word*, over the Internet, across millennia and from one continent to another... fellow human, your ideology has some non-trivial blind spots.If you assert that writing has decreased *your* mental capacity, I won't argue, but get honest about Socrates and his understanding of "brain capacity". Did he follow Alcmeon's theory... or was he the source of Aristotle's belief that the heart is the seat of intelligence, the brain is a cooling mechanism for the blood, and humans are more rational than the beasts because we have a larger brain to cool our hot-bloodedness?Some related points:I cannot, with full confidence, claim that the *sum* of my knowledge exceeds that of, say, the Mbuti whom Colin Turnbull describes in "The Forest People". They know things I don't, and I know things they don't. But I do, with confidence, by direct observation and comparison, assert that the *range* of my knowledge exceeds that of my parents and my grandparents. I know about the extermination of smallpox (yay western global culture), *and* I know about the proliferation of industrial carcinogens (boo global western culture). I can draw a more accurate map of the Earth than they can, because they grew up with the Mercator projection, and I grew up with the *questioning* of the Mercator projection. I have travelled more than they did, and met a MUCH wider range of my fellow humans, because that's more readily available for me than it was for them. I play D&D, and TRPGs more advanced than D&D, *and* I also know some old-school skills such as conveying coastal landmarks by recitation of sea shanties, and I know folk tales from a much *wider* range of cultures than my parents or grandparents. I look at the Moon, and I see the "Man in the Moon" of my grandparents, and the Rabbit in the Moon from the story of Chang'e, and Neil Armstrong's footprints.Mental illness runs in my family. I am a member of the first generation whose resources to mitigate the consequences includes formalized cognitive-behavioral techniques, and medications more specific (and less destructive) than hitting the bottle. Hand in hand with that, I'm in the first generation which can admit the family pattern, openly and without shame, or at least not as much shame. You got a problem with me calling that "progress"?So if you wanna wax all nostalgic about the Good Old Days in which humans knew at most a thousand of their fellow humans, and only within 100 kilometers, and they used bronze tools and they *liked* it, uphill both ways, then de gustibus nil est disputandum. Make Infant Mortality Great Again! (Also death in childbirth for mothers.)More that just a matter of taste, though: take a dozen farmers from the Bronze Age, ask them to feed a hundred people, and if you're person #83, *you gonna starve*. Take a dozen farmers from some over-industrialized agribusiness farm in the USA, allow them only the tools their great-great-grandparents used, and they'll feed more people than the first group. They'll take a day or two to get over farming without tractors, but they know what a horse-drawn plough looks like (they've seen an antique, as I have) and they'll figure out how to make one, while the Bronze Age farmers don't know that such a thing is even possible.About a generation ago, German farmers taught a tip to farmers in India: if you don't let the fruit touch the ground as you harvest it, it lasts MUCH longer before going bad. *In the absence of any other change in methods* that means more edible food reaches more people. Whether they cut fruit off the vine with bronze sickle, iron sickle, or ergonomic stainless-steel shears, the *knowledge* to use a wheelbarrow or bag, to reduce contact with the ground - that knowledge has value independent of the hardware. The transmission of that kind of knowledge, becomes more possible, than when each human knows only some of the nearest thousand other humans.But I digress.</blockquote>

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