Is it ethical for technological automation to be stunted, in order to preserve jobs?
Marc Andreessen can be quoted as saying, "...software is eating the world...". Another way of stating this is to say that automation is downsizing jobs across the planet. This is obviously a problem for a lot of people, especially those who become and remain unemployed because of software, Artificial Intelligence and automation more generally.
With that said, is it ethical for technological automation top be stunted, in order to preserve jobs (or a healthy job marketplace)?
This is, in my humble opinion, one of the more important dialogues that our modern society needs to be having. In some ways, we already are having this dialogue; not just here, but throughout our cultures. Technology is advancing, and people are beginning to push back. This is a tough one.
With that said, is it ethical for technological automation top be stunted, in order to preserve jobs (or a healthy job marketplace)?
This is, in my humble opinion, one of the more important dialogues that our modern society needs to be having. In some ways, we already are having this dialogue; not just here, but throughout our cultures. Technology is advancing, and people are beginning to push back. This is a tough one.
Comments (254)
Couple of problems with that. What 'healthy job marketplace'? First, what's a job marketplace but people selling their time and strength and skill to other people? How does one assess its state of health? Why assume it's healthy or can remain so with more automation? Second, what is technological automation? To whom does it belong? What purpose does it serve? What is its ethical standing? In what social organization? Some unexamined assumptions under there that need considering before any ethical standard can be applied to the question.
And then: What else happens when automation eliminates jobs? More goods are produced, faster. More resources are used up faster. more waste is produced and released into the air, water and land faster. It literally eats the planet. Meanwhile, the people who have no jobs have no income. So who's buying all that product? Does it go straight from the factory into the landfill, like the packaging it comes in? People have to clean up the waste. They have to be paid for that, so they can afford the goods the machines produce. That's usually done from public coffers, not private ones, so the people that are hired to clean up the waste are also the ones paying the taxes that pay their own salaries. Where is the surplus value that buys government services?
That's just the unaccounted logistics. Ethics are still waiting in the hall.
Going back a bit in time, you might ask was it ethical to produce the horse and cart which meant that a lot fewer people where needed to move goods around?
I think there is a simple moral answer. If the excess people involved can be given other more interesting work to do or/and they can still access the basic needs of survival, then the tech should be brought in.
If not, then the new tech should be slowly phased in, and the old system should still be used until it is assured that any changes will allow the workers to experience zero reduction to their social or economic status.
Quoting universeness
By what agency? Who is in charge of deciding and carrying out these policies?
It's ethical, but probably impossible or at least infeasible. Science will be science. Technology will be technology. The solution may be something like universal basic income.
On the other hand, the unemployment rate is low and demographers say there won't be enough workers in the future as birthrates decline.
Democratic agency. The consent of the majority of all of the stakeholders involved or the consent of the majority of their democratically elected representatives under a very robust set of checks and balances.
:clap:
Everything you type here is accurate when it comes to the current state of affairs. You identify that we cannot have production techniques which cause dangerous environmental/ecological impact. I would rather such tech was not brought in until it could be brought in without any such impact.
Recycling must also be as close to 100% as we can make it or else the tech should be delayed.
Available jobs don't go down due to technology, what happens is that some jobs are replaced with technology, however new kinds of jobs also pop out.
One difference is that those new jobs require more skills, ex. higher education, while old jobs are usually those requiring raw workforce with no special education such as high school.
That depends on taxation and government spending. Our potential is to let people die in poverty or provide public assistance so everyone has a decent standard of living. Of course, if government subsidizes its population it needs revenue. If people are not working, they can not pay taxes, so now where does the government get revenue?
In the past, revenue was taken from people who had income-producing property. Income taxes came very late in the game of civilization. The computers and robots are all property. That could mean a return to taxing property simply by redefining what that means.
When the 1958 National Defense Education Act was implemented, a high school teacher explained to the class that we should plan for a future when people did not work 4-hour jobs because automation would replace the workers. Well, here we are in the automated brave new world and we are no more ready for it than we were in 1959.
Some may argue, we must not tax automation because that would retard our growth. To that, I will say industry is supported by the government. If we are not working together for the good of all, things will get very ugly, and allowing that to happen may be the best use of human intelligence.
On the other hand, employment is extremely important to ordering our lives and I am not advocating leaving people unemployed! In my later years I am experiencing the shortage of people willing to help the elderly stay in their homes. I also see a lot of environmental work that can be done and the arts could absorb a huge working force. We need new ideas for a new reality and it is very exciting to think about the civilization we could have, verses the human suffering and cruelty of our past.
I generally agree that it is infeasible to significantly throttle down the pace of automation. Universal basic income may be one temporary solution, but ultimately a shrinking of the population will ensue because we simply wont need as many people as we have now. That shrinkage is supposed to produce all kinds of dire economic effects but I think ma y of these analyses are flawed.
Utopia!Quoting universeness
In a capitalist world, you cannot have any other kind. Nor have we had any other kind since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Quoting universeness
How, where, when and how fast new technology is used is controlled entirely by the owners of the means of production - who also control the terms and conditions of employment. They can be regulated by government and mitigated by collective bargaining - unless they also own the government, which, in capitalist societies, they mostly do.
Quoting SpaceDweller
In what proportion? For every 1000 jobs made obsolete, how many are created? What happens to the 999 people and their children?
Quoting Athena
But does it have to be employment in the old sense of working for a boss who takes half or more of the value of your work as profit and does whatever he wants with the product? Might 'work' not be re-imagined so that independent people spend part of their time pursuing their creative endeavours, part of their time in co-operative efforts that benefit the whole community and its environment, part of it in games, social activities and entertainment, and part in solitary contemplation?
Fantastic, hopeful, encouraging words that our next generation so badly need to hear as they can make it happen.
No, just a better way of living.
Quoting Vera Mont
So, you agree, we need to change that and reject the capitalist world?
Quoting Vera Mont
So, again, you agree we need to change the owners of the means of production and their control over the terms and conditions of employment?
I support a non-party based politics with no presidential style elections, no monarchies/aristocracies/autocracies/cults of personality/cults of celebrity/plutocracies or theocracies. No money or some money but a universal basic income to keep such under control and balanced.
A democratic socialist/humanist administration which implements a resource-based economy.
YES!!! and a UBI would support this!
for that we need statistics.
People seeing negative things and ignoring positive things is nothing new.
Of course! They're killing us all, right alongside the trees and butterflies.
Quoting universeness
Sounds utopian to me
, by every standard of Utopia with which I'm familiar. Hell, I invented one of 'em.
Quoting universeness
Obviously. It's an essential first step toward sane self-governance.
Quoting SpaceDweller
Here's a start:
:
I keep hearing as how "we" need to retrain displaced workers and make sure people enter "the job market" with higher academic credentials.... the very thing the grand old party of American Business, rah,rah,rah opposes with all its might.
Quoting SpaceDweller
It's true. Neither is people seeing positive things and not supporting their claims.
A while back, if someone asked me the same question in the OP, I would have said that automation will carry us all to the sunrise and a happy ending.
Man was I wrong in that thought!
You nailed it when you said that a marketplace is full of people selling their skills and strength. The Earth should be taken care of by people who see a future and hope in their own abilities to affect their surrounding. You take those out of people and you get instead a shell of cogs walking around and thinking nothing but paycheck or the next gig or the next short term assignments. We would be full of people who now must constantly metamorphose according to the latest technology, no matter how useless this new technology is, how cost-prohibitive, and how short-lived its appearance into the limelight because there's always the next best thing to come out of the showroom.
We would be a bunch of followers of the "cool", with the name of the billionaire attached to its logo, and no longer able to understand what it means to be connected to the earth.
Yeah, that's a depressing state of being. (We have mass-produced pills for that!) Not being connected to your work - what you figured out, what you devised, what you designed, what you crafted, what you made - that may be even more intimately soul-parching. TS Eliot had a pretty good take on it.
(We could do better than this!)
An axiom of Marxism is "labor creates all wealth". If substituting software and machinery for labor also creates wealth, we could -- if we so wished -- distribute the wealth created by machines among the laborers who lost their jobs.
Labor is an essential part of us; in a myriad ways, the work we do defines us -- positively as well as negatively. I have performed tedious detail work that I would have given to a machine in a flash, had one been nearby. On the other hand, creative work I have performed (not "art") was immensely fulfilling.
In a phrase: People over profit.
The nefarious few are most happy when the abused majority believe that any real improvement is utopian, beyond their reach and a forlorn hope. So, those sounds you are hearing are capitalist signals.
Stop thinking in the exact way the nefarious few want and need you to think.
I am glad you gave how we might use our time, some thought. If that is what we want then we have to change two things.
I believe capitalism is best for some things but not Laizefair capitalism built on the autocratic model. We can retain capitalism and replace the autocratic model of industry with the democratic model. I am confident the democratic model would strengthen families and reduce all social tensions because it is about being cooperative to achieve shared goals. Also, it prepares everyone for advancement increasing equality.
The second change would be replacing education for technology with the Athenian model of education that we once used. The focus of this education is good citizenship and lifelong learning. Its goal is well-rounded individual growth.
Before 1958 we used the Athenian model for education. There are two ways to have social order, authority over the people or culture. Our choice for democracy also meant liberty that was protected by education for good citizenship. In 1958 the US replaced that with education for technology and left moral training to the church. The US is now in very serious trouble!
Education for good citizenship was also education for good moral judgment. We could do that without the Bible by using literature exactly as the church uses the Bible for making good Christians, but secular literature does not depend on religious superstition. As Athens did, we created American mythology with American heroes and we destroyed those heroes and that culture when we replaced the past education with education for technology that prepares the young to be products for technology and consumers and makes them dependent on "authority and the experts". We stopped transmitting the culture that made our liberty possible. Now Christians think they created democracy! They have no understanding of democracy.
I must defend that last statement. Knowing the characteristics of democracy does not equal understanding democracy as rule by reason and what science has to do with good moral judgment. Democracy is about knowing truth and that requires education for logical thinking, not reading the Bible, and being ignorant of everything else including the transmission of a deadly virus.
""we could -- if we so wished -- distribute the wealth created by machines among the laborers who lost their jobs. Yes, that is what I said, and will add to that, replacing the autocratic model of industry with a democratic model and preparing our young for reality, not superstitious myths. Never a God nor technology is going to save us.
It is not just industry working for profit, but all our bureaucracies are working for the power of the bureaucracy, and this crushes individual liberty and power. We used to laugh at communist Russia because their paperwork clogged the system making it hard to get anything done and leaving a train filled with food to rot on the tracks because no one had the required authority to move it. Now, this is a US problem with things that took 5 minutes to resolve, not getting resolved for several months.
I am trying to help a gentleman who has severe brain damage in part because of a stroke and in part because of being a victim of a crime. In over two months he still does not have a social worker, and now proving his social security number is his social security has set us back for at least another month, meaning someone who needs help could freeze to death this winter. In the past, this would have been resolved in a couple of days at the most.
I have started talking about the beast. It is a great analogy. What has changed is our bureaucratic and business organization. Now we have shortages that we never had before, and a huge homeless problem while at the same time employers can not find workers? It is like Covid turned our world upside down and dropped us causing everything to break down. Our faith in technology and failure to value our human potential and trust each other, is a huge mistake!
They can not make it happen without better information. How many people here know about autocracy versus democracy, instead of left and right, and that democracy is a social order? Autocracy is also a social order. There are social, economic, and political ramifications of replacing education for good citizenship, with education that is preparing our young to be products for industry. How many of our young have a good understanding of democracy and leadership?
We destroyed our heroes in the US and stopped transmitting the culture we had. We educated for a technological society with unknown values. Now may the biggest liar win and if that fails, pull out the weapons of destruction and call yourself an angel of death doing the work of God. So much for dropping education for good moral judgment and leaving moral education to the church.
I can't quite picture that - unless you mean something different by capital than I do. This may not be the venue for an exhaustive discussion of capitalism. Suffice that I believe it's entirely surplus to requirements - an unnecessary complication of and drain on the economy. Quoting Athena
Sounds good. Teachers would be on board with that. Most of them would be thrilled to teach to the student's need and ability, rather than the board's, state's industry's, universities', parents' and church's competing demands; would rather spend more time with the children than the paperwork. Why not just make all schools a fusion of Waldorf and Montessori, with a dash of Lyceum mixed in when they get older?
Quoting Athena
Christians have as many self-delusions as Americans - and are about as accurate in the use of words.
Quoting universeness
I have, some time ago. I do not use the term pejoratively; I wear it with proper humility: I'm a utopian pastoral socialist by conviction, though I cannot live up to the ideal. I'm also on the brink of extinction. If I were younger and less tough, some jillionaires would make a fetish of serving my flesh in their exclusive club restaurants.
You make some great points here. I appreciate your comment.
There are indeed some technologies that have a negative impact on society. And those technologies should indeed be regulated. As to whether automation is detrimental to society, the answer depends on where one is stationed.
When we automate something such as trains (which used to require coal shovellers for the furnace) jobs become obsolete but new ones emerge based on the new technology (electrical engineer specialising in trains).
All of humanitarian endeavours cannot be automated unless humans no longer existed. So long as humans exist, human problems will be adressed by humans (not automated). If we became automated ourselves (uploaded our consciousness to computers) we would as a robotic race still face robotic limitations that require workers to resolve - even if we left our organic human bodies behind.
In essence, whatever progress we make (automation), there will always be more Progress, advancements to be made (work to be done).
It's certainly true there is still a great deal of work to do before we achieve a better global human society.
I think today's youth are up to the task and I agree they will still need all the help they can get.
I don't concur with all of the reasons you cite for why we are where we are now but that's not as important as the fact that you do your best to be part of the solutions and that's about as much as anyone can ask of any individual.
This has too much personal depth in it for me to accurately unpackage. I can run it around in my head, but I am sure that whatever interpretations I come up with will not match your intent closely enough.
You would need to explain your logic and the emotional drivers behind the imagery you invoke.
If you simply mean you now feel you are too old to be an effective warrior in your quest for a better world, then you would be better having a PM exchange with @Athena on that stuff as you could probably both be a support for each other imo. I am 58, I don't know how I will feel about fighting the good fight, when I am a lot older. That's if I ever reach 'a lot older.'
None at all, among the world population of 0.35-.40B. And how many of those jobs are available to the 6.5B of today's world? I'm not sure how many of the factory workers in Bangladesh can relocate to the head office in New York and take over management of communications. If if two of two or three of the others get a chance to learn web design before their families starve.
The wall one hits is always the same one: proportions. The reason automation benefits owners is that they have to spend less on wages. It's the only reason they do it: to make more profit, not to make better jobs.
Quoting Benj96
There is only so much service anyone needs, and private enterprise won't pay for most of it. If you're not earning, you can't afford a tennis coach, a geriatric nurse, a dog-walker, a plastic surgeon, a butler, or a masseur. If the Republicans are in charge long enough, all personal services will be available to the wealthy alone - including elementary school for their kids....
Of course, that's short-sighted: when enough of the incomes dry up, people default on loans, repossessed homes and cars sit empty and consumption bottoms out at subsistence level. The whole economic system breaks down, requiring either massive government intervention and reorganization or the grandfather of all social upheavals (because, this time it's global). But I think short term is all they're planning for now.
Quoting universeness
It basically means I reject the charge of thinking the way the exploiting class wants me to and that I don't consider 'utopian' a bad word.
Probably the New York managerial job is available to them if they demonstrate their thinking and policies would lead to a larger profit margin for the owner. A capitalist will likely promote those that promise improvement in capital acquisition.
This is however unlikely given the level of education standard in bangledesh. Not impossible for a pure businessman to émerge from that pool but less likely than those with a western business degree.
Automation certainly reduces the need for man power but never completely as machines still need manufacturing, engineering, servicing, disposal/recycling etc. And those Hands made idle by automation will naturally gravitate towards the next task/job/occupation that still requires manual handling/labour.
There are jobs that it doesn't pay/is not financially viable to automate - for example humanitarian occupations that favour human well being/life quality over money-making schemes.
How do you for example automate career guidance councelling? When it is in direct conflict with global automisatiom of all jobs
If you are actually campaigning and working hard to help make a better human civilisation and someone suggests you are trying to create a utopia and utopia means:
[b]an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect:
synonyms:
ideal place · paradise · heaven · heaven on earth · Eden · Garden of Eden · Shangri-La · Elysium · the Elysian Fields · Happy Valley · seventh heaven · idyll · nirvana · bliss · Arcadia · Arcady · Erewhon[/b]
Then how can you think that such is other than a suggestion that your efforts will fail and that you cannot make a better human civilisation than we have now.
Quoting Vera Mont
You suggested the system I advocate for is utopian. I maintain it is not and it is offered simply as a better way for humans to live. You should withdraw your response above but if you don't want to then I will not insist any further.
That's 1 out of 3.5 M unemployed.
The profit margin dictates replacing expensive employees with cheaper ones, more employees with fewer employees, at every step.
Quoting universeness
I spent a lot of my life doing that. At one time, I believed improvement was not merely possible, but that it would continue on beyond me. What I have seen instead is the erosion of much of the social progress my generation brought about. I no longer believe human are capable of sustained progress. I'm not even sure enough of us want it.
Quoting universeness
Well, good luck, then!
So you have become hopeless, that's a shame after all your hard work.
I have not become hopeless, and I am confident that there are billions like me.
Quoting Vera Mont
Gee thanks! You have dropped the battle flag, others will pick it up and drive on, we cannot do otherwise, there are too many in need.
This is a goof question but why do you call it ethical? it has to do what with ethics? It has to do with practicality, with usefulness, with power, with economic reality, but what does it have to do with ethics?
It''s the second thread I see you've started with "is it ethical" and neither one has to do anything with ethics.
Why the obsession with ethics?
About having a ways to go before achieving a better global society. That is such a big subject and I believe technology is a big part of that. The "New Age" is a time of high tech, peace, and the end of tranny. Certainly, the internet is a big part of change around the world.
I am also thinking of John Kennedy's Peace Core program.
Quoting Peace Corps
That explanation missed a big one, help with farming. Actually, we have big farm corporations because of research on how to help farmers in poor countries. Unfortunately, that research led to destroying small farmers because the best way to feed the masses is lots of fertilizer and huge farms. In a country like India where many owned small farms the change was devastating. It appears the focus of the Peace Core has changed a lot since the beginning. The new focus is social engineering which was not in the original program.
That social engineering is part of education in the US and this should not happen without a lot of social discussion which brings us to the benefit of the internet.
Hum, what should the family look like in the New Age?
I studied gerontology at the U of O and as I age, I have a better understanding of what I suppose to learn. From both angles (book learning and experience) I would say as we age our focus is increasingly on the young. Of course, that is not true of everyone, :lol: pain can greatly narrow our vision, or some never did much thinking as they went through life. However, those who thought their way through life, are even more valuable in their later years.
There was fear that a growing older population would be selfish and use their political power to benefit themselves. That is not what I have seen because the closest we can get to immortality is what we leave for the young. The greatest heartache of the people I know is the young not listening to their words of experience and they are struggling to hold their tongues. However, we can become politically active. We can testify at public hearings on all levels of government. We can join organizations that are doing the work we want to be done.
10 Most Popular Fraternal Club Organizations https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/10-most-popular-fraternal-club-organizations-saulino-cpcu-rplu
The Older Americans Act is all about keeping us socially connected and involved. That Act entitles us to decent housing, transportation, and continuing education and gave us nutrition sites and senior centers. :lol: Because of the fear of what we will do with our united power, we can't use our senior centers for political purposes. But I must stress our entitlements are to maintain us as contributing members of society.
I like the challenge of trying to answer your question.
I begin with a definition of ethics "moral principles that govern a person's behavior or the conducting of an activity."
A moral principle of democracy is equality and while at first technology greatly increased our equality, at the stage it is now, it is making us unequal and increasingly marginalizing people who can not keep up with the technology. For this reason, different levels of government have worked to provide low-income people with the ability to use the internet. The disparity between the advantaged and disadvantaged became obvious during the pandemic and the need to home-school. And it is so much more than this!
Not everyone has a college-level IQ and Head Start programs have not been the equalizer we hoped they would be. The 1958 National Defense Education Act lead to focusing education on those who are headed for college, and those not headed for college have been cheated out of the education that would benefit them. And worse, increasingly employment requires those very high degrees and there are fewer jobs for those with just an average IQ. A society that supports those with a high IQ and ignores those with just an average IQ is not ethical. Marginalizing a mass of people tends to lead to rebellion. A moral being cause and effect makes disenfranchising and marginalizing people immoral and unethical, right?
Then there are the elderly who are being closed out by technology. I love technology and believe it is vital to the New Age but I hate the use of technology that makes many older people dependent on someone helping them make a doctor's appointment, or complete appointments because of the blankety-blank technology that has replaced receptionists.
Now I can move on to the possibility that everything is breaking down because of reliance on technology that is not working for us. Tools should remain useful to us. Tools should not be taking over our control of the moment and order our behavior.
We are in a period of transition and this is not the first time civilizations have been through periods of transition, however, I am very worried about our future and that makes this thread about logical thinking very important.
I am very concerned about what our education for a technological society with unknown values is coming to. I think our faith in what technology will do for us has as many negative effects as religion. I am worried about the family. I think humans need family and the homemaker. Just as doctor's offices and businesses need the receptionist. Technology has disrupted the family order that ordered the whole of society. Eliminating the receptionist is another break in social order that has negative effects. :lol: The receptionist is kind of like a comma in a sentence. It helps make sense of everything.
Bottom line, things are getting better and they are getting worse. Hopefully, as we continue forward, things will be more better than more worse. :lol:
Yes, that is hopeful. Meanwhile, the Proud Boys are marching and the glaciers are retreating, entirely oblivious to each other.
All those previous upheavals in human civilization - including, let us not forget, the complete eradication of previous civilizations - were confined to a locality, affecting no more than one continent at a time. The train we've been collectively seeing approach for the past century and done nothing to avoid, is about to crash into the entire globe at once.
My hope is for the post-crash civilization. (even if it's ants)
One aspect of your posts that I find reinforcing is your exemplifications that are happening or have happened in the real world. A lot of posters don't offer many actual exemplifications that they have read about or witnessed in detail. It adds such a lot to posits when good exemplification is included.
As a teacher of 30+ years, before I took early retirement, I don't think I only ever focussed on merely producing trained monkies for the tech world as you seemed to suggest is happening today.
I think there is a great deal of social and moral training/debate/discussion that goes on, at least in Scotland's Secondary Schools. I was involved with a lot of 'link' initiatives with employers and universities such as 'The Glasgow University Ambassador scheme' etc. The morality, ethics, politics, social impact of my field of Computing Science was very much an aspect of what and how I taught the subject, but perhaps it was not as big an aspect as it should and needs to be. There was the enormous pressure of getting through the material, preparation, intermediate testing and reporting, etc etc in preparation for the big final exam. So, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to get the balance correct. But the pupils I taught seemed to have a higher quality of inputs compared to what I remember receiving or being offered when I was at school.
Absolutely!
Quoting Athena
Again, absolutely true!
Quoting Athena
YES WE CAN! (Ok I am quoting Obama a little, but he was certainly not the originator of these words, it was probably first uttered in a different language, in some disagreement between two early tribes of homo sapiens) Something like 'nu no cnu' (or no you can't) responded to with YU WU CA! (no translation required)
Quoting Athena
:grin: It would be a site for sore eyes to see all those centers of age and experience rebel into a politcal force that helped smash trumpism and its like, for ever.
As Elvis said:
Quoting Bret Bernhoft
Until now, the dilemma was presented with the opposite situation: Is it is ethical to fire people because job automation? ("Job automation" being the practice of substituting technology for human labor to perform specific tasks or jobs.) And it made some sense. The same case was presented a few years ago with "human cloning", which also posed an ethical dilemma.
The case though that you are presenting here --which is the opposite of the above, as I said-- is somewhat vague. I personally have a difficulty thinking that stopping or slowing down technology in favor of the human life can be unethical! Because, while firing people poses a problem of survival and well-being, the opposite --i.e. keeping people at their jobs-- supports these two elements.
Now, I can't remember right now a case where technology was stopped or slowed down because of ethics involved, but there must certainly be a few such cases, because, as I said, it makes sense. Technology development in the vast majority of the cases, supports human life in various ways. An in the remaining cases that it does not favor people's lives, as, e.g. in the case of firing people that I mentioned-- it is almost inevitable in our times, to a point that does not poses an ethical problem. As is the case of a company that has to fire a number of people in order to survive itself.
Finally, job automation exists since ever. Technology was always used to replace routine tasks by machines. Remember a time in the very past that people were used to carry messages from one place to another, travelling very long distances? Then, these "human pigeons" or messengers at some point they well replaced by elementary post oppices, as in ancient Rome, using chariots, etc. Then telegraphy was invented and no human was require to transfer messages. And today, we have Facebook's Messenger! :smile:
I don't think that any of these developments created an ethical problem to humans. Rather the opposite. Imagine, if they were stunted in order to preserve those messengers' jobs ...
So, I don't think there's a question of ethics involved here.
How can the post-crash civilization, which is almost 100% guaranteed, have hope without preparing the young for that? All industrial economies depend on oil and that is a finite resource. When it is gone it is gone and economies will crash. What we need is a way of producing energy that does not depend on a finite resource, and lithium is even more finite. Lithium also requires a lot of water and that has become a scarce resource that is getting even harder to come by. Copper is harder to come by. We no longer have copper, silver, and gold in our money because those minerals are now comparably scarce and too expensive. Our coins had real value and that is no longer true. Our coins lasted for centuries and that is no longer true. Thinking what our coins are made of doesn't matter is a mistake. We have to believe a lie to believe it doesn't matter what our coins are made of.
Anyway, education is our only hope. If our young are not prepared for democracy, that is not what they will have after the crash. If the literature for democracy does not survive, as a little of it did survive the fall of Rome, then the future will not carry an awareness of democracy.
If the young are not prepared for democracy they will not have democracy.
Thank you for your explanation. Teachers generally feel like I am attacking them and not the system. My grandmother was a teacher when it was a very low-wage job with no benefits. She was totally devoted to teaching because her generation believed they were preparing the young for good citizenship and that was essential to having a strong and united democracy. That is why I keep hammering away at the importance of education for democracy. It is a very idealistic understanding of democracy and education.
At the 1917 National Education Association convention, we were preparing for WWI and it was the teacher's job to turn her students into patriotic citizens who understood why our democracy must be defended. One teacher argued schools should be models of democracy and that teachers should have the power and authority to teach as they see fit rather than be under the authority of the administration. Another speaker said we should model Germany's education for technology because of its great war successes and advanced technology. For technological reasons (relatively low technology) our education continued to focus on patriotic citizens until the military technology of the second world war which gave us air warfare and the nuclear bomb.
The US, being a young nation with huge resources, and dominated by Christians, flipped into the German model of education and our industrial background made this more radical and war-focused. In the past it took us at least a year to mobilize for war. Now we can strike and do more damage in 4 hours than any nation could have done in several months. We were known for our resistance to war. Now we believe it is our military might that makes us great and this is the will of God, thanks to Billy Graham and how presidents used him and Christianity to turn us into what we are today.
We decided to prepare our young for a technological society and leave moral training to the church. That was a huge mistake! We went from using the Conceptual Method of education to the Behaviorist Method and the Behaviorist Method is good for training dogs. It does not prepare the young for independent thinking and that is why this thread is so important! There are many reasons for our moral crisis, as has always been so because humans are not born knowing good citizenship. Even in primitive tribes, the young must be taught how to be adults. From tribes to the present we must have a culture to have social control instead of a tyrant and authority over the people. I am saying we prepared our young for Q-anon just as Germany prepared its young for the Nazi party. The Behaviorist Method is good for training dogs. It is not the education people in a democracy must have, and neither is Christianity. Faith in technology or God is not better than faith in what well-educated humans can achieve.
I never saw that Elvis performance. It brings tears to my eyes. All our democratic campaigns should be using that song. He embarrassed the soul of democracy. Our democracy and liberty do not mean doing and saying anything we want whenever we want. Democracy is about achieving arete and the highest morality.
"Arete - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org wiki Arete
Arete (Greek: ?????, aret?) is a concept in ancient Greek thought that, in its most basic sense, refers to 'excellence' of any kindespecially a person or ..."
That goes with Greek debates about the good life and morality, and the need to expand our consciousness for good moral judgment.
Thank you so much for that Elvis video.
We have lots of ways - have had for thousands of years: wind, rivers, tides, sun, ground-heat. Not wasting so much of it would be a good start. Maybe making fewer people - but then, weather, its resultant competitions, and the crash , along with the usual war, famine, pestilence, etc. will take out much of the surplus population. And more efficient living arrangements? Cities are already moving underground; that'll help some people survive.
So, yes, there is likely to be a viable remnant of humans - always assuming, which is a big assumption - there is no all-out nuclear war - and they will likely start some kind of human activity. (Probably killing one another over the last clean pond, which they will contaminate in the conflict.)
Quoting Athena
No, it isn't!
Quoting Athena
The best way to prepare them is to teach them elementary survival skills: how to find your way home, how to build a fire, where to dig for water, how to build a raft and a lean-to out of wreckage, how to season termite stew, how to avoid pissing off the big guy sitting next to you.
There are some good books, like https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15798335-scatter-adapt-and-remember
I think if we educated for a better reality our young would be on a path to a better reality, as our literate forefathers were on the path to democracy, instead of being consumed with notions of doom and gloom that robs of the ability to move forward on a positive path. A positive for Christianity is assuring people, God will make everything good again. Well, that is not all good because God did not build Noah's ark and I think life is what we make it, not what a god makes it, but staying positive is very important to working for what could be instead of slipping into despair like the horse in the movie, "The Never Ending Story".
The Behaviorist Method is good for training dogs.
Athena
Excuse me, but can you give me a hint of how you came to know of the Behaviorist Method of education and training dogs? Your flat-out denial of professional dog trainers using the Behaviorist Method to train dogs is a shock to me. It is as shocking to me as denying the sunrise begins in the east. We might add commercials and political campaigns are also based on the behaviorist understanding of our behavior. Ring the bell and we rush to buy the item that we might be able to buy in the future. Shocks us with the bad behavior of a candidate and we will vote for the opponent. No political discussion or debate is required.
How can the post-crash civilization, which is almost 100% guaranteed, have hope without preparing the young for that?
Athena
:lol: Ever since patriarchy replaced matriarchy women have lived in fear of pissing off the man, but women's liberation has changed that. Now we have a better understanding of what we can achieve when we are united and our children are doing better than they ever have in the history of civilization.
I have survivalist books and I understand very well the threat of tyrants and bullies. That is what we must educate against because things will not be good for humanity if those jerks are the only ones with power.
:up: Elvis did one or two politically relevant songs, but not many. I think his biggest song containing a vital message about an example of how bad things can get, if we don't pay attention to the nurturing of our global youth is one you will probably know well:
It's annoying that so many folks who seemed to have fought the good fight when they were younger, can now only offer some survivalist post-apocalyptic, dystopian prediction of the future of humanity. I am sure it makes the nefarious rich and powerful happy, that their efforts have managed to reduce some older more experienced people to such a depressing viewpoint. I think such a viewpoint is a minority one, especially amongst the global youth. I think the young schoolgirls in Iran right now, who are burning their Burkas and jumping on images of the Islamic theists, currently running their country, are answering your attempt to look into your crystal ball darkly at their future. Hopefully, by the time they get to my age or older, they will have found common ground and unison with the youth of America who hate trumpism and evahellicals, and Russian youth who hate Putin, and Chinese youth who hate the fake communist-coloured plutocrats currently in charge there. I could add many other examples of such global youth who despite their differences in culture, tradition, creed, nationality etc, in reality, they have common cause.
Quoting Athena
:clap:
I know more about dogs than I do about behaviourists, and like them a lot more. Whatever is not a good method for humans, is no good for dogs, either. I'm opposed to treating any sentient being like a machine. Yes, I reject professional dog-trainers, advertising copy-writers and political propagandists who use such Pavlovian methods, all for the same reason.
Quoting Athena
What's that to do with teaching the young civil bahaviour and manners, in order to keep internal conflict to a minimum? I also question the presumed prevalence of matriarchal system in any age. Not their existence, mind - of course, some existed. Humans have tried pretty much every kind of organization at one time or another. The ones that seem to have worked best were egalitarian and consensus-based, but with some specialized areas of responsibility and jurisdiction, rather than dominated by any group based on sex, class, caste or occupation.
Quoting universeness
We lost. I'm sorry that my admission of defeat annoys you.
Quoting universeness
I'm sure you're right.
Quoting universeness
Hopefully.
Losing battles is very very different from losing the war. The struggle continues without you.
Quoting Vera Mont
Quoting Vera Mont
I think that deep down, you are screaming and shouting inside your young memory, in support of those Iranian girls Vera. I am not sure your admission of defeat is as final as you project in your typing's. You could still be quite dangerous to those you think, won. You might shove a blunt instrument right up their ..... when they least expect it, if they piss you off enough.
I had a friend - he's been dead for some years now, so he can't get into trouble - who planned out his one-man revolution with a 12 guage and a rusty dump-truck. Being more a disciple of MLK than Garibaldi, I just write books.
See, it's not that I stopped being angry; it's just that I'm too proud to take up the currently fashionable position that the contest is valid only if I win. I get flak from conservatives for refusing to acknowledge their POV and more flak from progressives for accepting reality. Of course there will be more battles before the human race packs it in for good - conflict is what we do.
It's not the winning Vera, it's the helping out and the adding your voice and the support in any way you can. Writing often offers a powerful pen, which is indeed often far mightier than a sword or a 12 gauge.
Good for you, that incoming flak has not cowed you completely. You should continue to relish the conflict if you know your cause is just! I just need you to be in support of us humanist/socialist/democrats.
If you do not support such then I am always willing to discuss the tenets with you if you are willing and with no malice aforethought.
All he ever did about was rant and vote.
Quoting universeness
Insofar as I am able, in a redneck riding that's just returned the conservative incumbent who, every election cycle, promises to improve education, and and consistently votes against the schools, teachers, public service unions, and for every piece of crap legislation aimed at dismantling the social infrastructure painstakingly built by liberals and socialists. But, hey, they give lovely big tax incentives to developers who build unaffordable 4000 sq ft homes on endangered wetlands or plan to automate away another 500 jobs.... but instead close the factory, take their government subsidy and move to Indochina.
Sounds like you should find a community with viewpoints closer to your own and move there, if you can.
It sounds like you live in and around something which I would consider a pressing enemy camp.
Which of us doesn't - now?
I will not stay in lonely street at the heartbreak hotel.
I didn't think it was about personal life-satisfaction. I have no complaint in that department. This is a very good place to live. The air is clean, the corn tall and the hens range free. My neighbours are decent, hard-working, church-going people. And politically so naive that they keep falling for the same lie every four years. The conservatives stroke their prized self-image as righteous individualists and they sign away their power of attorney.
You don't have to politically self-flagellate. Living a satisfactory life yourself need not clash irreconcilably with fighting the good fight. For me, it would depend on how deep that 'political naivety' was and how many were incurably infected with it. I could not stop calling it out so I would not thrive in your neighbourhood, as you describe it, unless I did have significant support.
It would be like living in a community which was populated by > 90% diehard capitalists. I think I would move if I could, as the amount of flack would be just too much and too often.
What?? I ain't into guilt or shame, baby!
Quoting universeness
Of course not. The one thing has no bearing on the other, as far I'm concerned. You told me to move, after I said my vote doesn't count here. I won't, of course, and so what? My neighbours and I don't talk politics; the flak is all virtual, and avoidable.
The reasons I'm no longer fighting are rational and strategic.
The Luddites were not the dumb joke-butts they're made out to be in modern times, but they made a strategic error: fighting a war they could not win. John Brown, too. Every great cause begins with a few martyrs before it can get rolling properly. One, or a half dozen martyrs are noticed, get put on placards and banners, inspire the troops. But once the revolution has been put down, why line the highway with crucified rebels? I'm opposed in principle to waste.
1. Helps the overpopulation crisis.
2. Provides ability to not drive off the highway when there is a low and thick fog, so that you can't see the road, but you can see tops of light standards and crucifiction crosses.
3. Revenge is sweet, no matter which side of the debate you are on.
4. Protects wildlife... a healthy portion of food served up to scavengers.
5. The bases of the crosses provide a clean, sheer surface on which one can hang signs of upcoming yardsales and garage sales, as well of lost cats, piano lessons and agencies of fortune, dog grooming and rooms to let.
Spartacus, spare the cuss!
Revolutionaries are a breed. A different one. I can't resist the lure of weeping with sentimentality, and I am not joking, when I encounter partizan action, resistance fighters, underground movement, etc. in my readings and in everyday activities.
"Mom! There is a handgranade in my peanut butter and jam sammich!"
"Yes, deary. Just don't tell anyone at school."
I didn't TELL YOU to move, I suggested you move if you are miserable where you are, but you seem to have backtracked on that original claim, you did not originally suggest that all the flak you were receiving was virtual and avoidable. BUT only if you dont talk about one of the most important subjects in life with your neighbours, politics. I could not do that.
Quoting Vera Mont
I do not support the luddite imperative as I don't see new tech in quite the same way they did, but they are certainly remembered, as is John Brown. He certainly did not fail as the American civil war delivered what he wanted. His death served his purpose and goal, he therefore completely succeeded.
After Spartacus was defeated, the Romans are reported to have lined the Appin way with crucified rebels, yes, but their empire was destroyed by those who were akin in culture and tradition to those crucified ex-slaves. After his defeat, the Scottish hero William Wallace was hung, drawn, quartered and the 4 quarters of his body were sent back to Scotland. This had the opposite effect to what was intended as 9 years later, the Scots kicked the English out and became an independent nation again.
The sacrifice of Spartacus and William Wallace were not wasteful as both got exactly what they fought for in the end.
This is not a cause-effect relationship. The rebellious slaves were wasted manpower. That's what I don't support. John Brown made his point in the church, not at Harper's Ferry; his death did not precipitate the insane civil war which killed off maybe 700,000 men, plus however many civilians, plus the violence on the back burner, waiting for the next conflagration. The founding fathers did.
Quoting universeness
One is an example. The next four are heroic. The thousand(s) after that are simply wasted, like the people at Masada. Their death does not alter the course of history.
Quoting universeness
Yes, and I'M SORRY I SAID THAT! Wasn't intended as combative. I never said I was miserable; I commented only that I can't affect current politics, either by voting or fighting. It wouldn't be any different if I moved to an orange, red or even green riding; it might feel cozy, but we'd be just as outnumbered. It's a downward turn of the wheel, that's all.
I disagree. Rome did not exist in a bubble. The actions and atrocities committed by its forces were widely reported at the time, probably quite slowly but it seems a given that their actions would be reported by those who witnessed them or took part in them at the time.
Quoting Vera Mont
In his personal memoirs, Ulysses S Grant writes about the fact that his father and uncle worked for John Browns father in the tannery he owned in Maysville Kentucky. He writes:
"I have often heard my father speak of John Brown, particularly since the events at Harpers ferry. ................................................... It was certainly the act of an insane man to attempt the invasion of the South, and the overthrow of slavery, with less than 20 men."
Browns story and actions had a very definite effect on those who were against the policy of slavery used by the South and was an influence on the direction towards the civil war.
Quoting Vera Mont
Well, I understand and have some common ground with your pointing finger towards the 'what a waste of peoples lives' idea but I do think that many of these sacrifices where not in vain. The Jewish people revere those who died at Masada to this day and probably will forever more.
Quoting Vera Mont
Ok, if that's how you feel about it. If you don't want to be a political activist then all you can do is vote, just like your angry friend did. BUT keep writing and shove that 12 gauge into the basement somewhere!
All I ever had was a .22 and I didn't keep that very long. Like I said, I'm not combative by nature, aptitude or inclination.
Quoting universeness
Yeah... that's the thing... why I'm idling away here. There's a glimmer of an idea for how to finish the stuck chapter, but it doesn't want to coalesce on the page. Hate when that happens; it makes me crotchetier than is my wont.
I have a replica targe (traditional Scottish shield) and a replica broad sword that I can hardly lift. So you Americans with your .22 and your 12 gauge's will probably defeat me in a neighbourhood dispute, unless I do a sneaky attack, at night, when all your church going, republican supporting neighbours are sleeping :chin: :lol: Nah, that would be dishonourable!
Writer's block :scream: I am sure you will break though with a ground-breaking, original, eureka moment .... now! or .......... now! ....... or .......... maybe later!
Quoting Vera Mont
America should have offered the presidency to Carl Sagan when he was alive.
How about Sean Carroll or Brian Greene? Cosmologists/leading edge physicists would make the best presidents of America imo.
No, because a better question would be: "is it ethical to keep people working themselves to death in a system that doesn't care for them?
Define if capitalism is healthy or an illusion of healthy. The way the world works today consolidates wealth to a very few on the backs of workers working themselves to death.
Automation would cut out the "working to death" part and present a conundrum for the wealthy in that there won't be people having money to purchase the goods they produce with automation. So in order to keep the economy running, some kind of universal basic income is required so that the loop is kept intact. The less people work, the larger that UBI needs to be, leading to more freedom for the people to do what they want instead of "working to death".
Essentially, automation is a capitalist's dream of cheap labor and high income, but it would kill the market if no one has the money to buy products or services these capitalists provide. So essentially, it's the end of capitalism by maximizing capitalism.
The more advanced automation gets, the less we will be able to keep capitalism as it exists today and in the end, we would require a new system to replace the old.
If we do not figure out a working system, this will lead to future wars and conflicts.
It might also be a little disorienting, seeing as how you'd be sneaking around the wrong country.
Quoting universeness
Not exactly - plot hiccup. What I want to happen next can't, so I need to figure out how to get from here to there.
Quoting universeness
I suppose they couldn't do any worse... of course, I don't know their politics, but I guess at least NASA would get full funding again.
Quoting Christoffer
I'm thinking, the first salvo of war # 28 or 29 by this weekend... But that won't be about automation.
The only question we need to decide what's the ethical response to any technology :
Is man made for the factory or is the factory made for man?
(And once that's settled, the logical questions of any new inventions: Does this machine do humans and the world they live in enough good that justify and offset the harm it does? Do we know how to nullify or mitigate the harm? Will there be lasting fallout? Is there a less harmful alternative?)
The biggest risks in terms of war will not be tyrannical leaders' delusional dreams of bigger empires, because the rest of the world is pretty much fed up with those kinds of people. The biggest problems we face will be the result of climate change. We might have billions of people being forced to relocate to areas of the world that are habitable and the consequences of that are just ignored worldwide. Even if it seemingly happens smoothly, the following years will have a dramatic shift in culture clashes and democratic shifts due to the number of people affecting other nations' elections through sheer numbers of new voters from entirely different cultures. If we thought that the immigration crisis of 2014 produced a problematic situation right now, just imagine what billions of people might do. This might lead to an actual world war 3 starting as civil wars in regions of the world heavily affected by an influx of a large population.
Automation might even be a solution to this since a nation's economy wouldn't take a hit by millions of people not speaking the language and not having a job in that nation. With automation and UBI, that economy might even thrive. Of course, that is a heavy simplification of the consequences, but comparing an automation/UBI economy with the traditional neoliberal capitalism we have today, the latter would collapse under such massive immigration due to climate change.
And to answer the other questions. Man made factories, so the man isn't made for the factory. And studying the destructive effects that a neoliberal capitalist system has on humans, there's no question that automation is a good progression. However, humans need to do something with their time and not all can manage a sense of purpose without work. Some will work with what they like, some will probably revive extreme religion in search of purpose and some might go insane. For this there need to be a new philosophical movement that focuses on existential questions from the perspective of a life without work.
For this, I'd turn to Star Trek, seriously. In that story/lore, money doesn't really exist anymore. The reason why they are up there in the universe is our need to explore and answer big questions. If we would reach such a society, I'd be really happy, because it's basically putting people into the ideal place where we use our intellect to solve problems and focus our purpose on expanding knowledge. Capitalism is essentially putting us in a system of irrelevancy, where people aren't really relevant anymore, only the cashflow that upholds the stability of living.
We are essentially robots in a system. Why would it be bad to replace us with real robots and be free of that system?
This thread has moved fast and I lost track of what people are talking about. Sorry, everyone.
This post is back to the beginning and I love the lines "a better question would be: is it ethical to keep people working themselves to death in a system that doesn't care for them?" along with this line
"The way the world works today consolidates wealth to a very few on the backs of workers working themselves to death." However, this is such a big subject it is like being lost at sea with no sense of direction.
Especially in the beginning of industrialism humans were treated very badly but it lead to wealth and that wealth is essential to progress, education, hospitals, and public utilities. When something like printing makes art and books cheap, low-income people can afford them and that makes their lives better. I worry about how many liberals understand the importance of good jobs and big industry that provides those jobs and those affordable products and wealth? Exactly how do we establish an economic and social system that works for everyone?
There was a time when we had a family order that meant the woman stayed home to care for the family and the community as well. I think her role was vital to a humane society. The family was financially supported by a man. This was not ideal because the division of labor became too great. When women went to work, increasingly women and children fell below the poverty, because the women worked for lower wages than men and they had to pay for child care unless someone in the family cared for her children, and the divorce and abortion rate began to climb. At the same time, two people working in the family meant more families buying homes and more families buying homes made one paycheck too small and the cost of housing too high.
Who is caring for the people? What else happened to our social order besides an increase in jobs and wealth? How about community planning and banking? Can community planning and banking be adjusted to better serve the people?
And my favorite- what if we replaced the autocratic model of the industry with the democratic model?
Wonderful idea! How? Who are "we" and where do "we" get the power to take decision-making out of the hands of corporate boards? Before anything positive can happen in education, industry, utilities or infrastructure, you need to clean up the democratic process. At this point, that's a helluva tall order!
It's still doable, but only with a huge surge of support from the polity. At 51/49% split in electoral clout, I don't see whence that impetus can come.
I very much like your awareness of culture and how mass migrations can be very disruptive to established cultures.
The original purpose of free public education in the US was to teach good citizenship and thereby prevent social problems. There are two ways to have social order, culture, or authority over the people. To have liberty there must be a culture that makes that possible we replaced that past education with education for a technological society with unknown values. Some good things came out of this and it appears some bad things are also coming out of leaving moral education to the church and not transmitting the culture we once had.
For how to manage life without work, families and cultures have given civilizations social order for thousands of years. For sure we need to discuss what that might look like today.
I believe education is essential to democracy. Democracy is like religion. It can not be the way of life if that way of life is not taught. Same as there would be no Christianity if it were not taught.
Here is a google page with many choices for learning about the Demming institution. Beside links it is on Twitter and Facebook https://www.google.com/search?q=Demming+instution&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS926US926&oq=Demming+instution&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i13i512l3j0i13i30l5j0i8i13i30.8570j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
I know that. Also the other way around. There are very powerful forces pitted against public and democratic education in the US right now, and they've been making considerable gains.
At the same time, the same states that curtailed women's reproductive rights and ban books.
The "we" to which you belong is being pushed to the margins.
Except when that ends up being the norm for a majority of people, then we need a society tailored around a non-work existence.
The problem with deciphering capitalism is that it doesn't have a constant value. In a poor nation, capitalism can very rapidly improve the quality of life for the people and increase wealth. But as soon as capitalism enters a stage where the majority of the people already have accumulated wealth it starts to tap into just being about cash flow, earnings, and gains. It stops being a system of change and instead becomes a "Baudrillardian eldritch horror" in which people become a slave to it, regardless of whether they want to or not. It starts to corrupt the people and divide them into rich and poor and over time increases that gap until the rich becomes so powerful that they essentially take over power from the government.
This is the state where people start to work themselves to death. Because they're not part of a society that is gaining wealth as a collective but rather has become a new type of slave society. In this new type, people live in an illusion of existential value that they cannot distinguish from any other reality. People lose track of basic existential questions like love and death and replace them with a monetary valuation of status. People start to think they are in love with someone when they're basically just together with them because of the status it produces, they get children because that's a family status, and they have a certain job which is a further acquired status. In the age of the internet, this has also been intensified as people project these statuses out to people surrounding them, further blinding them into this system.
This is the Baudrillardian horror, modern western capitalism has evolved into an unseen monster that people think is "quality life". It's so ingrained into our psychology that we're never even questioning how this life works. Everything we do is part of this capitalist mentality, everything is about some kind of status or monetary gain and loss, and the most obvious sign of this is how much more popular "quick fix" existential treatments have become. The desperate search for "meaning in all the chaos", without people understanding what that chaos really is.
And so, some, like Marx, developed political philosophies that examined the inner workings of capitalism and alternatives to it. But Marx is also outdated since it focuses entirely on the industrial age of development, which had entirely different inner mechanics, especially lacking the Baudrillard perspective.
With so many people in the world today, with such a technological explosion that the last 150 years have produced, it is impossible to maintain a society based on Marx's ideas and it's also impossible to maintain a society of modern capitalism. Because essentially any political philosophy regards the citizen as a cog in a machine, without essential value other than its function.
If these cogs are changed into automation, into robots and we dislocate humans from the traditional machine, then that becomes an existence that has never been available on a large scale before. We are so ingrained in the idea of "work" that people don't know how to manage their time outside of it. It has, throughout history, either been about survival or monetary gain at its core and occasionally, for a few, been a place of meaning. But on a large scale, how can everyone find meaning?
That is the core problem that philosophy and people need to solve when advanced automation starts to reshape society.
Quoting Athena
The lack of moral philosophy in school, not just in higher education, but as a core part of the curriculum, is part of why people are left to figure out our peaceful, good values on their own without guidance. Parents don't have time to educate their children about this because they need two jobs to pay the bills and in the end that only teaches their children that monetary gain and the appearance of wealth are all that morally matter.
We need moral philosophy in schools, teaching how hard it is to handle morality and letting kids think about these things as they mature. Moral philosophy, with all its examples and theories, can enlighten people to think in a more complex manner towards the next person and have the ability to guide them into figuring out values on their own. If a whole generation had the same basic understanding of these things, then the existential discussions they tackle as adults, all the political polarisation etc. would be much easier to resolve. The core problem I see with polarisation and tribalism today has to do with people acting like they understand moral complexity without any training in it whatsoever.
And in a society free from religion, it's key to find empathic values and theories that act as the foundation for everything.
If you can't have "decided principles" through religion, then the principles need to have a rational, logical, and empathic core that automatically makes people gravitate toward that logical good as doing otherwise would lead to misery. A truly liberal society free from religion requires the people to understand morality as a system that is logical and not decided upon them.
Non-work is not the same as non-job. As mentioned earlier, people can work for their families their communities, the environment, the future, the protection, welfare and enrichment of their fellow humans, the welfare and rehabilitation of other species, their own betterment. There is plenty of work to do that's far more rewarding than the pittance bosses dole out.
That is exactly what a liberal public education would promote, and that is exactly why all demagogues hobble and cripple public education wherever they can.
If people start thinking, they may stop fighting one another for the crumbs off the rich man's table. They might put down the placards and talk to one another. They might even stop supporting power-mad leaders.
I think you forget about the reality I describe. With advanced automation how much "work" do you think will be done? If an AI can plan with more precision towards something like a better environment in the future, what work will you do if that AI does all the work organizing society towards that improvement? If proven to be more precise and better than a human worker to do that assignment, why would anyone assign or accept that work to be done by a human?
This is what I mean when I talk about the "Baudrillardian eldritch horror"; people cannot fathom a society without work because it's so ingrained in our psychology that we cannot detach ourselves from that reality, we cannot think through other concepts than it.
The work we can adress to humans as an existential value are work that focus on creativity, expression, art and philosophy. The only thing that robots cannot replace is the human perspective, the collective or the individual point of view that informs the individual or collective creative output. But almost all other jobs can, with enough algorithmic AI development, be turned over to robots.
Most work you are referring to, while being spiritually healthy for people to do, is still related to a grind that gets replaced by advanced automation. Without that grind, what is left of that "work"? The intention? The exposure?
Quoting Vera Mont
It's not, because we do not fully have a logical moral system, if we had, moral philosophy would have been fully solved. But what I'm talking about is actually teaching moral philosophy as a core part of the curriculum, that is not in motion today. We may have a good educational system (well, Finland has the best from what I know), but it's not fully at the level I'm talking about.
Quoting Vera Mont
Exactly, but even in nations of Scandinavia, which has a good public education of the highest level, it's still not at the level that I'm talking about, because it's not preparing anyone for anything else but living under this Baudrillardian eldritch system.
The world is not prepared for full advanced automation.
Not so much forget as discount. Quoting Christoffer
As much as people want to do.
Quoting Christoffer
For whom? To what end? What motivates AI to do that? Quoting Christoffer
For the sheer joy and satisfaction of doing it!
Quoting Christoffer
People like the feeling of satisfaction when they have completed a task they set for themselves; the elation of overcoming a challenge, solving a problem. People enjoy exerting their physical capabilities, in sports, but it's more meaningful to do so in the creation of something concrete. People also enjoy sharing work that serves their sense of community, like a pot-luck supper or barn-raising. Have you ever seen men happier - in the sense of abiding contentment, rather than momentary joy - than when a group of them is huddled over a malfunctioning engine or a recalcitrant tree stump? I can't prove it, but I have a feeling most sick people and little children would prefer to be cared for by a loving adult than an efficient robot.
Quoting Christoffer
The fact that something can be done, doesn't mean that it must be done. Besides, given that fact that most automation (that's not military) is controlled by commercial interests, as it keeps eroding its paid work-force, it incidentally erodes its customer base and the government's tax base; it has to reach a point of diminishing returns where no money is changing hands at all. UBI is a temporary stop-gap, as it also depends on redistribution of money.
Once there's no more profit to be made, who directs the robots? This, to me, is the central question about automation. (Based on the very large assumption that the whole house of credit cards doesn't collapse before that vanishing point, and all the billionaires head for the mountain strongholds.
Quoting Christoffer
Very much the opposite is in motion in America. Introducing moral philosophy, depends on a sensible school board operating under a sensible government with a generous budget. In Finland, you may be able to do it; in the USA, not under the current political trend.
Hi, really enjoying your posts in this thread. Not my particular stance but you are explaining the arguments rather succinctly. It is "easy to digest" I suppose you could say while still being very meaty in points to discuss. I have not read every one of your posts in this thread with focus and perhaps am somewhat engaging in "drive-by philosophy" more so than commonplace economic model discussion but, if I may..
Quoting Christoffer
Even fundamentally, the laws of the Universe are in play. Life itself, and all physical and biological aspects of it revolve around: energy. Ability to do work. There is no bastardizing this reality of existence as mere "needless slave labor by evil men". You could be the last/first person on an entirely new and lush world teeming with life- you will still "eat by the sweat on your brow", to quote religious scholars.
Let's imagine an unrealistically perfect and entirely automated world. Literally every exertion of energy the average person "must do" to live what is considered a "basic life" is no more. You wake up, enter your bathroom, smile at your mirror to have your mouth intricately cleaned on a professional level in a matter of seconds. You jump in the shower and essentially rotate clockwise for a minute or two and step out as if you just got back from a spa retreat. Your favorite breakfast is just being finished from the ingredients in your fridge onto a nice covered plate for you to enjoy at your leisure. Or perhaps you're about to take your "food pill" that delivers the nutrients and other necessities of a 5-course meal every 4-6 hours. We now joke about "staving people" the way someone would joke about someone having polio or some other long-vanquished ailment of time's past. You look out the window and see your Roomba-eseque landscape artist mowing the yard and spy your trashcan rolling itself out to the curb to be emptied by its fellow automated brethren. Energy, let us not forget about energy, for the sake of simplicity let's just say someone invented a drinking bird that actually works.
As you go about your motions of existence, knowing they will profoundly affect nobody nowhere, including one's self, you may stop to think... is this life? Surely I must be fortunate. Are there unfortunate people out there who still live in the hellish pre-automated world of labor from dawn 'til dusk? Should they be "rescued" from their purposeless naivety? Do they have a right to live as they please? Are they subjecting children to the needless suffering of another way of living? Do they have a right to do so? Do they have a right to oppose? How should such opposition be treated? Freedom to live as one pleases vs. freedom to create and subject other human beings to what is now "purposeless labor"? Think I'm far off and people won't start to think like that? Back in the day people use to subject their children to leech treatments and other forms of bloodletting in the interest of public health. Today, if someone sees you covering your child in leeches or drawing blood from them "to help them", you will have a SWAT team called on you. Even the old "chicken pox parties" are starting to garnish negative attention. Idle hands are the devil's playthings.
Basically, I find you're simply saying "everything we do is because we want something done" .. of course everything we do is supposed to "do something", we don't "do things" because it has no purpose. "Status and monetary gain" cannot be used as a blanket simplification to gloss over or detract from the intrinsic properties they bestow (or deny) to people: "who you are and what you can do". One doesn't become a "master craftsman" just so he has something to say after his name in introductions. One doesn't work to gain wealth simply because they're "supposed to". These are all done to advance a goal or desire, goals or desires that would exist regardless of the economic model or level of automation. Sure, if you're in possession of little resources, you will likely end up working a job out of necessity vs. pursuit of desire. This would also be the case if you were born or later experienced a handicap or just otherwise aren't that talented. These are also independent of economic models or social systems.
Quoting Christoffer
I think this statement needs to be dissected properly. Any economic model can be substituted with the true driving force which is "government rule" or "the way things are". Whatever economic model you declare to be operating under, willingly or not does not change the nature of the resources and accessibility of said resources that give the non-resource (currency) value. Needs and wants are still needs and wants unchanged regardless of how you facilitate their fulfillment or accrual . You need exchange. Be it cash flow or resource distribution. You need resources not to lose value/become a burden by sheer volume or unexpected turbulence. Be it by adjusting currency through administrative means or just making sure your time, work, and resources spent don't slowly eat and dwindle each other (so to speak ie. that your efforts result in at least producing something you did not have before). Growth is also an intrinsic part of life. You didn't start life as a full-grown man now did you? You also likely didn't start with a full-size factory or operation from the get-go if you have one now. Without growth you have decay. Nothing is truly stagnant. You expect to have children or at least that other people will, correct? The more people who sit down for a pie, the less pie is available. Therefore, you need growth. Be it tangible wealth in your pocket or larger (thus more expensive and labor intensive) operations in whatever the field may be.
Anticipating your thoughts on the matter. Cheers
Where to? Pie is round; the Earth is round. Finite.
Quoting Vera Mont
Why do you discount the major factor for my argument? Without it the whole notion of non-work becomes just nonsense since nothing in the world would produce necessary resources for any of us to exist. My argument focus on the singularity event of advanced automation, when almost any task can be turned over to software and hardware rather than a person.
I wished this was just a flimsy thought experiment, but just as uncontrolled exponential climate change and nuclear war is a thought experiment scenario, they are also possible futures that needs to be seriously considered. So is this. And you base your counter argument on ignoring this very fact.
Quoting Vera Mont
How do you combine this with an industry and government using automation for any practical task? What work, other than renovating your own house, writing a book, painting, other arts, cooking a fine meal and so on, are you referring to these people doing?
You need to specify based on a task that is by its core and value impossible to replace with software and hardware.
Quoting Vera Mont
I recommend studying how AI functions. Most people who discuss automation does not have good insight into this field of science. The most common mistake is to think about AI as basically just general purpose AI, or rather, sentient AI.
To try and be short, sentient AI is useless. It's basically unprogrammable and would only have the function of being a sentient alternative perspective to humans in philosophy, but it has no inherent function, it basically becomes just another sentient individual.
The AI that actually will be used, and is already being used to a great degree, is advanced algorithmic AI, synthetic intelligence, neural network intelligence. This is simply an AI that is specifically tailored to a specific function.
Automation will be programmed to adress certain tasks. Like, in this example, optimize planning of changes to an environment in order to improve it for inhabitants and the ecology. It will be performing fast administrative changes to mechanical workers to streamline environmental work for that specific end goal. There are no administrative personnel, no human workers, the only input is the intention placed on the algorithmic AI to perform towards this end goal.
Which either leads to a paper clip scenario as its worst outcome, or it functions well. Maybe it functions even so well that the input doesn't have to be by a human, but rather a top level algorithmic AI which functions as a broader planner where environmental issues is a lower branch.
You see, the question you ask is too simplistic to cover how AIs actually work and how it will probably be utilized in the future.
Quoting Vera Mont
Of course, and who has the privilege of doing this job? Because no one will pay for it when there's an almost infinitely cheap labor force through robotics.
So you can't build an industry out of it when it requires that people work for free. And of course there's that little problem in which among the billions of people who live on this planet, most of them do work that is a necessity for income rather than doing what they love.
Who will provide the resources to work for free, doing what you love, without having demands from the employer to perform in competition with companies who utilize automation?
But you are right, people will work with what gives them joy. The problem you won't seem to include in your assessment is how you can grant everyone to be able to do what they love. Both in resources, but also in value.
Here's scenario you have to consider.
Imagine that the lack of work makes millions, maybe even a billion people to pursue work in areas that robotics and software can't replace (which becomes just a handful of occupations). For example, a billion people choose painting. Yes, AI's can paint, but art isn't just scrambling inspirations together with paint and produce a painting, it's also about intention in combination with a viewer experiencing that intention, art requires the artist and the receiver.
This leads to an oversaturation of artworks. Billions of paintings ending up in artistic noise in which artistic meaning gets lost. There are not enough museums to show the paintings, online resources becomes more saturated than millions of posts of TikTok. The experience of painting loses all meaning when so many people collectively only works with it and the feedback becomes based on shorter than glances interpretations than never dwell any deeper than a few seconds.
You need to follow your questions to their logical conclusions, this is philosophy we're doing here.
And then add the fact that not all, far from all people actually has any interest in creative work or work that fulfill them. Plenty of people have no such ambitions, what will they do?
Quoting Vera Mont
...have you followed everything to their logical conclusions? How can you reconcile all of this on the scale of billions of people? Stop and think for a minute. The problem is not what people want, feel is meaningful or value etc. The problem is that we are stuck in a system of thinking that is based upon a capitalist foundation that automation breaks at its core.
Your arguments are based on how automation works today, not the implications of future automation. You are stuck in the desert of the real basically.
Quoting Vera Mont
Stop and look at the world today. Look at the forces driving everything, driving progression etc. Then, ask yourself what's stopping advanced automation from happening in the future? It's not really a question of "must be done", but rather it's a question of "something that will just be".
Here's the kicker: you need to dismantle capitalist culture at its core and replace it with something else before automation happens, in order for it not to happen. But since, as I've explained, capitalist culture is a Baudrillardian system, people cannot invent something other that isn't part of the core system already in place as the resources and tools to invent something new needs to come out of the system already in place both in practice and in psychology.
Quoting Vera Mont
Here you actually start to get to the point I'm talking about: the actual collapse of capitalist culture.
A) UBIs start to increase as taxes on the income placed on the companies who manufacture also increase. At some point there is either a balance that works, or companies gets taxed into no ability to produce, even with cheap labor by robots and the economy collapses entirely as a system, throwing the world into a total capitalist collapse and soon follows, as a natural outcome of that chaos... war.
B) The capitalist system follows to the very end point, in which transactions stop as all the wealth of the world has reached the accumulated highest point, the small group of people who owns the world industry run by automation. This is the scenario you point at. As all money has accumulated it loses all value, but the rich already has the resource wealth and no incentive to keep producing towards the people who are not in monetary and resource control. This also leads to a chaos and... war. However, the risk here is even greater as war might be towards the people in control of resources and that is essentially a losing battle, giving total power of a few over the rest of the world as they control robotics as a means of controlling the rest of the world population.
Scenario B essentially manifest the very extreme version of a company owning "your data", they end up literally owning you as you have no possible way of organizing a revolution against such accumulated resource power. Have you seen "Mad Max Fury Road"? What you see being portraid as society in the beginning, with Immortan Joe controlling water, gasoline, genetic bloodlines and ammunition as resources form a high tower bunker, is basically this scenarios end point, but without the ability to strike back as an army of militarized AI robots would stop any rebellion in an instance.
Quoting Vera Mont
I already consider USA as a ticking time bomb of uneducated people collapsing the system because no one cared to actually educate people into sensible, empathic and thoughtful people. It will be the end of USA at some point. Nations with a good strategy of education will become the future superpowers, but since most of them are really small nations, there's a risk of them being snuffed out by wrestler presidents and delusional self-proclaimed emperors just because of their threat to educated people in their nations (much like Putin's fear of western culture "invading" Russia and threatening his power).
So, as an end point. You seem to see the very dangers that I'm pointing towards, but you may need to drive them to their logical conclusions. Automation is much more world changing than I think people realize.
I must say that it's rare to see someone with objections in an argument be so humble and respectful as you are here. Such things gives me hope for humanity actually able to argue for progression of knowledge and solutions rather than how discussions are usually perceived. I salute to such things and wish far more people having such qualities.
Quoting Outlander
Problem with this division in a future world society is that you also said:
Quoting Outlander
...if so, then there wouldn't be people in a less fortunate position.
But, you may want to read what I wrote just above this post, which is engaging with the actual nightmare outcome of automation.
Quoting Outlander
What I mean by "Baudrillardian eldritch horror" is that we are unable to comprehend the exact nature of how capitalism affects our psychology in the world today. We have replaced actual reality with a capitalist point of view that fundamentally drives our core values in life. I'm not merely speaking of accumulating wealth but of how we categorize value around us, how we shape our day to day thoughts under a capitalist rule-set. Many proclaim their notion of doing something for a value that is individually fulfilling to them in contrast to monetary value, but very few people can separate that individually fulfilling value with a journey to gain status through that fulfillment.
In essence, why do people want to do something personally fulfilling? This is a generalization of statistical importance, since it's already quite clear that a very small percentage of the world population actually pierce through the system on an intellectual level, most people do not have the ability, through never learning it, channel it or being open to it, to break down their inner driving forces and they do not see the tentacles of capitalist industry shaping their desires and sense of purpose in life.
Here I can draw on my own actual work in marketing. I've studied and worked with manipulation of people's desires and ideas of themselves through marketing. This is a main source of knowledge in psychology driving my argument. And the scary truth of the matter is that the industry, the capitalist industry on a global stage has essentially shaped people's core psychology of meaning to the point that they are unable to distinguish between what is a true introspective purpose in life and what is a manufactured one by the capitalist culture and industry of the world.
That is why I call it "Baudrillardian eldritch horror"; "Baudrillard" as in how we are unable to distinguish the simulated life of what the capitalist culture tells us (through marketing) and a life outside of those puppet pulls, while the "eldritch horror" is the capitalistic system itself that is so ingrained into culture that it is impossible to fully comprehend by the sheer complexity of its Kafkaesque nature.
The conclusion being that our capitalist culture has effectively hijacked our sense of subjective ability to find meaning and replaced it with a manufactured one that is easily controlled on the market.
Quoting Outlander
How can you distinguish between needs/wants that are universal and ones that are invented by how society and culture program you as an individual? How do you know that your needs and wants are actually pure and honest when your identity is a product of the culture you were nurtured into?
Quoting Outlander
If all people collectively moved through history with this mindset, we wouldn't have poverty and inequality. However, neoliberal capitalism has pushed the world globally to individual monetary gain and a mindset thereafter. We do not think of growth as sharing a pie, we view growth as individual growth. A person in neoliberal capitalism controlling automation will be able to direct their growth into accumulated wealth for themselves but have no incentive to grow the pie for the many and even individuals outside of such wealth wouldn't view things in such a collective way until capitalism essentially collapses and our psychology is shaped through a new type of model.
And before pointing out that plenty want something good for others, society as it is shaped today, produces far more people playing that individualistic capitalist game than genuinely caring for the world as a collective and shared space for all. Even people who proclaim to care may very well, even unbeknownst to themselves, be slaves to a status of caring, shaping themselves an identity within the system. A manufactured identity of being someone who cares, but essentially follows a value increase in status by being that capitalist archetype.
Maybe that is an obvious reality for us, but how many people in the world spend hundreds of thousands of words dedicated to thinking about these complexities that shape society?
We are more controlled by the system in place, i.e neoliberal capitalism, than we fully comprehend. Our psychology is more programmed by this through an entire life nurturing these systems than we realize. Even notions of breaking free of the system may very well just be part of the system itself.
Just like how in marketing, we create a desirable identity of rebellion against the system, and then earn money selling products based on such a rebellion to people proclaiming to be anticapitalists.
It does. And that is how capitalism operates. I pointed it out as a demonstration of that fact. Not because I believe its the ethical thing to do.
My beliefs are that those at the top, ought to have the greatest sense of responsibility and duty to those at the bottom. Not an easy task for sure.
They must exert their knowledge and wisdom and position of power in an effort to serve the most vulnerable/uneducated and protect them from exploitation. They may not even enjoy the responsibility but see it as a duty they must rise to.
If at any point such a leader is not truly serving the foundation of their society, then they ought to resign and let those who are take over the wheel of the ship of humanity.
If one wants to speak for everyone, they had better be sure they have the skills to do so.
Haha that's the spirit :)
I did. My conclusion was a little more conclusive, is all.
Quoting Christoffer
Yes. So when I asked "For whom? To what end? What motivates AI?" That is what I was asking. Who drives it, and for whose benefit? That's the central question of the future. AI doesn't just churn out product willy-nilly, or design environmental clean-up operations for its own amusement: somebody has to program it to do those things; somebody has to want those things done.
Who? Why? For whose benefit? To what end?
Quoting Christoffer
Of course: it's the obvious conclusion. One of the reasons it will happen is automation. As mentioned previously: Workers become unemployed by by the thousands, then the millions and billions. They stop getting paid, they stop buying luxuries, they stop paying taxes. It's never been easy for governments to tax the rich in proportion to the wealth they suck up; it's considerably harder with global mobility and electronic concealment of assets; it's not going to get any easier when the profits dwindle due to an impoverished consumer population. Even if a government is able to - in spite of fierce resistance by capitalist interest blocs - pass UBI legislation, collecting the funds to cover even the barest subsistence level payout will be damn near impossible - and become absolutely impossible as corporate profits and taxes dry up.
Household debt is already close to a breaking point and inflation isn't helping. National debts are high enough; corporate debt is not so far behind. Once the banks own all of everybody's imaginary future assets, what happens? Everybody defaults. What happens to money? What happens to capitalism?
Quoting Christoffer
We already have lots of wars. Climate migrations will start some more. So will the totalitarian backlash that's engulfing more and more democracies. Once the economy breaks down, who pays the warring armies? Who buys the munitions? Who makes the machines? When money stops making money, there will be no more investment; no more capitalists. Once they're gone, whoever takes over the broken pieces of civilization will have to decide what leftover automation they want to keep and to what purpose. I don't know who that will be. Whatever we think of it now won't matter then.
I don't think ethics enters into the picture or the process.
You make a good argument and you speak of the biggest reason I am opposed to Christianity. I have a book about the organized Christian opposition to the Nation Education Association and I have dealt with Christians who hate John Dewey.
I may not agree 100% with John Dewey but I highly respect him. The following is why so many Christians hate him. That link is restricted but the explanation given here is good. And if you are familiar with my post, you know where I agree with him.
Quoting Kory Sorrel
About the increased banning of school library books, I wish school librarians and teachers had better judgment. I strongly disapprove of socially inappropriate books such as "Captian Underpants" being in school libraries and the classics not being in the school libraries. When I teacher has to explain to young children that what makes a book funny is inappropriate behavior and they should not behave like that, then prehaps it should not be in the school library. We work hard at home to teach our children how to behave and I can not imagine a thinking parent wanting the school to make socially inappropriate behavior okay.
That brings us to social engineering and what you said about a philosophical debate about what is good citizenship. This is a very difficult subject and my favorite approach to it is what science has to do with good moral judgment. Today one of the most hotly debated issues is our sexual differences, and :lol: the importance of wearing a mask. How many people wouldn't mind if they needed open heart surgery and no one in the room was wearing a mask? If someone thinks that is okay, that person needs a science lesson and it is shocking how many people are scientifically ignorant. Our sexual differences is another scientific subject, but unfortunately, the Bible is the only book many people read and trust and when such strong emotions are tied to religious beliefs it can be impossible to have a rational discussion about some things such as our sexual differences.
I am sure today many more books that could be highly offensive are being published and sold to schools. When I objected to a school's choice of books, I was told children will read "Captain Underpants" but they will not read the classics. That is amoral thinking and its focus is on the technology of reading, ignoring how the book could lead a child to believe unacceptable social behavior is condoned and funny and Mom and Dad are just out of touch with the modern world. Now, this is a very sensitive subject! Who is the proper authority over children, the school or the parent?
What a delicious subject! :nerd: The historical Roosevelt family would certainly agree with you. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
? Franklin D. Roosevelt
Andrew Carnegie was as morally compromised as Doctor Jeckly and Mr. Hyde. He talked a good talk about the dignity of man and was known as a philanthropist, but when it came to the reality of economic competition he took the wrong side of the coal miners' fight for fair wages. He was cutthroat when it came to getting rich. At the time the science of Darwinism made our industrial reality very ugly, with the elite believing they were superior and entitled, and that created a terrible reality of using and abusing laborers. But Andrew Carnegie met your criteria of benefitting society.
And when coal is cheap, many families could enjoy warm homes. Throughout our industrial history wealth was built by exploiting laborers and it made the good life affordable to many. We would not be where we are today without human sacrifice. If the masses want better lives let them take advantage of education. If we give them free education and they do not take advantage of it. then of course they will have little value and why should worry about them? They made the choices that left them valueless. My family is among these people who did not make the effort to be educated.
No worry, no one is paying for wars in the US because we do them on credit. :joke: That sounds really stupid but we are not paying for wars as we once did. The world wars were funded by selling war bonds, and while much was done to make people patriotic and willing to support the wars, we drafted the men our nation needed to sacrifice in the struggle to win wars. Until technology replaced the troops needed to win a war. With technology, we don't have to draft people into a war and that makes it much easier to hook us into wars that we can carry on without disturbing our daily lives.
In the future what will organize the people and how will that organization be maintained?
Democracy is like religion in that it is a way of life that must be learned. A democracy may choose a Mussolini or Hitler and tyranny may rule. What does that look like? How is power gained and maintained? Should we prepare for the collapse of our civilization and if so how?
Quoting Athena
Fascinating Athena. I never knew about the Roosevelt families philosophy. Thank you for highlighting it for me.
Quoting Athena
Oh that's a shame. Perhaps you are the new enlightened family member that shows them how the world works and how to empower themselves to lead a more fruitful life?
Education can be be recieved from others or from the self (through rigorous/thorough and balanced observation - all things considered).
We ought to listen to wise teachers. And when our wisdom parallels or overcomes theirs, we ought to offer it in turn to those less educated. It's our duty to give those tools to the ones without them, level the playing field as it were. Restore the balance to avoid exploitation.
Does the technology not get used against civilians though? A drone dropping a bomb on a city may not be a human pilot, but the people the bomb is dropped on are still civilians all the same.
If the drone drops explosives on a purely technological and automated post then that is better in that people were not involved. But sadly tech operations and people (engineers/programmers/installers) are not inseparable. The tech doesn't arise out of thin air, so human victims are always a potential.
I did mention the world's debt-load - with three links to graphs illustrating it. That's what will break the capitalist system. It runs on the expectation of future growth. When expectation outruns the capability for growth, you get a recession or depression. Then the government has to step in and recycle the assets. But now, the assets are not available to government: they've been block-chained and bit-coined and legerdemained out of reach.... if they ever existed in the physical world where people need food and shelter.
Wars used to grow the economies of the victorious nations, both in the arming phase and the rebuilding phase, because patriotic [mostly female] people worked their asses off for little pay to produce munitions and supplies for the [mostly male] troops and the soldiers got paid and spent money like there was no tomorrow, which for many there wasn't. The war profiteers raked in the money and hired more people and invested in peactime construction and made more money, leaving the government to care for with all the damaged men who came back.
When you wage war on margin, you're gambling with your national economy. And when wars are waged not for territory and resources but hegemony, there is no material return for the winning nation. Once the government runs out of credit, runs out of funds, nobody will supply all that stuff we blow up in wars or the drones that drop the the explosives.
Quoting Athena
Local war-lords. By force of arms. Except, they won't be able to get into the rich people's bunkers, which will be occupied by the late rich people's ex-servants and ruled by the self-promoted ex-mercenaries.
I need to take your post in smaller pieces. :lol: A weak brain you know. Let me begin with I love your post because it is mentally stimulating. I argue because that moves the discussion forward.
"If these cogs are changed into automation, into robots and we dislocate humans from the traditional machine, then that becomes an existence that has never been available on a large scale before."
You reminded me of a story about a White man going to the top of a mountain with a native American and looking down on a large city, with great pride the White man says, "before all this what did your people do?" The native American said, "we sang a lot". Our athletic games come from ancient times when people had time on their hands and a person could gain status by accomplishing physical feats. Civilizations had many gods and many festivals and we would do well to take the money out of our community events and get back to participating because that is what a community does. I used to love going to the fair with my children and we all entered something and won ribbons. Now the fair is a money-making event with no appeal to me at all! I don't want to see the newest and best pans or whatever. I want to see how my family compares with all the others.
I was a homemaker. That means taking care of all the family needs using my domestic skills, and also participating in the community as a volunteer and sitting on decision-making committees. In a democracy, we should all experience committee work because that is where we learn on democracy works. In the past, I would have ground corn with other mothers and grandmothers and we would talk about how things are and how they should be, and what needs to be done. It is time for the strawberry festival, isn't it? What do you plan on bringing? I ramble and I may not have made a point, but I think there are still women who remember when life circled around our families and perhaps making music together. And planning for our community. :broken: Thank you for giving me a place to share what I value and to talk about democracy and achieve arete.
"But on a large scale, how can everyone find meaning?" Everyone can turn to their family and if that is not a pleasant experience, turn to the community and act on your talents and interest. We the people, give us all meaning and purpose when we understand democracy and good citizenship. :heart:
Your "Baudrillardian eldritch horror" has also been called "the beast." Even in ancient times, Rome was the beast consuming everything its citizens could give in exchange for bread and circus. I especially see this when the wealth of the nation depended on importing metals and gold, which required armies to secure that source of metal and gold, leading to military people coming to power and taxing the people into poverty as well as taking their sons to keep the beast healthy. I have a problem with Jesus saying to turn our backs on family and put God first. I think there are good reasons to put family and community first.
The Seventh Day Adventists and some other despised sects managed to balance both. So, oddly enough, have some Catholic monastic orders. In relatively small numbers (my guesstimate is, under 3000) groups of people can sort out their priorities and the division of labour in an equitable arrangement of some kind. Many kinds of arrangement can work.
Don't blame Jesus for the craziness of Big Church; he was just giving a handful of discontented men an excuse to leave their lives of oppressed drudgery - neither the Abrahamic Judean state nor the Roman occupation gave them a lot of scope for personal meaning.
It's the large organized religions, washing hands with the secular elites, that promoted uncontrolled fecundity, to ensure unlimited cheap labour and expendable armies for their wars.
You speak of modern economic realities that I know very little about. I am sure that information is very important here. I googled an explanation of chain blocks and bookmarked it. I will need time to assimilate this new information. It is very foreign to me so I can not simply go from what I know to this new information.
How does a government step in and recycle assets?
"When you wage war on margin, you're gambling with your national economy. And when wars are waged not for territory and resources but hegemony, there is material return for the winning nation." should the word "no" go in that sentence, "there is no material return".
Nations have fallen because of excessive military spending. I like Nintendo's original Gengis Khan game because you have to keep your economy balanced or you lose. We are highly aware of Rome's military expenses leading to increased taxes that hurt the economy.
The neocons wanted military control of the mid-east, which would mean more affordable oil for the US and high profits for oil companies. This requires a partnership with the government that pays for the wars and supplies the military personnel while companies like Haliburton get extremely rich supplying the military needs. That is the Military Industrial Complex. Our economy benefits only if the cost of gasoline stays low. If we don't get that cheap oil, we have a Roman situation of destroying our economy by taxing the people too much to pay for the acquisition of resources. Higher taxes and higher prices for oil and everything dependent on oil, are crushing us. We have not lived with finite reality very well.
The future you speak of is possible but this last election in the US gives me more hope for democracy than I did have. I seriously need to give time to look into education in my community. If democracy is not learned our democracy is not protected and I am not sure we are doing a good job of preparing our young for democracy. I think if we are serious about defending our democracy, we also need to get serious about replacing the autocratic model of the industry with the democratic model.
I have been watching old western TV shows and they are terrible! Again and again, the shows are about people with guns and rifles having power and those who are inept with the gun or rifle are the losers. Star Trek's Captain Kirk is the John Wayne of outer space, and the new Star Trek Generation is "group think" and less individualistic. We need a balance of individualism and "group think". Do we want a future that is ruled by a force of arms and self-promoted mercenaries?
Oh, oh, I think we are getting further and further off the topic of labor and technology, however, when Billy Graham, the Evangelical leader, met with Eisenhower, we could liken that moment in time with Constantine announcing he saw a cross in the sky and said the Christian god would make it possible for Rome to win wars, and he made Christianity a legal religion in Rome. We got "in god we trust" on our money and "One nation under God" was put in our pledge of allegiance and we all knew we had to save the world from those godless people in the USSR. Now we believe a book about kings and slaves taught us about democracy, evidently forgetting the Bible is what made the power of those born into royalty legitimate.
God is good for wars and wars are good for God. Except for the Greeks. Those oddballs didn't think highly of a god of war and they were too retarded to have an empire. Although they did colonize much of the known world. :chin: And when we want wisdom and culture we do turn to them.
In the past gods and goddesses were connected with nature and that means they had to be kept happy or bad things would happen. Today this is environmental science. We understand the forces differently, but both, are understanding doing the right thing has good consequences and doing the wrong thing has bad consequences.
As scientific as we think we are, we are doing a very poor job of living with finite reality and each other. Christianity is part of the problem because Christians ignored the wisdom of aboriginal people. Christians rejected the notion that Gia, our planet, is a living organism that we must take care of and we destroyed the environment for many years and created an economy dependent on oil, knowing in the 1920s that this was a bad idea. We have ourselves completely disconnected from the rhythms of our planet and the heavens.
I believe spirituality is a vital part of having mentally and physically healthy lives. I am a part of something much bigger than myself and what I do or do not does matters. Science gives us better information about what should and should not be done than the mythology a religion built on a belief in miracles!
The Greeks asked, how do the gods resolve their differences. They answered, the gods argue until there is a consensus on the best reasoning. That is science, and democracy is an imitation of the gods.
It is also the meaning of logos, reason, the controlling force of the universe. Science looks for the reason, not the reasoner, and our judgment must depend on good reasoning, because the reasoner is not going to clean up the messes we make, nor give us a new planet to screw up. This is unless we believe the destruction of Florida (by water) and California (by fire) are the work of God and not a man-made problem. How different are we from the ancients who tried to appease a god when a natural disaster hit?
I wouldn't bother too much about the mechanisms whereby money is moved around and hidden away: they change almost daily, to stay ahead of international law-enforcement and monitoring agencies. The point is that capital is mobile while government (and its ability to levy tax) and the work-force (not so much citizens as 'human resources') are stationary.
Quoting Athena
Regulation, tax reform, public works, welfare legislation. https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-history-primary-source-timeline/great-depression-and-world-war-ii-1929-1945/franklin-delano-roosevelt-and-the-new-deal/ Similar measures were taken by the Bennett government in Canada. In some other countries, of course, the political upheaval knocked down existing regimes.
Quoting Athena
The trouble is, not enough of you (and not enough of us, either) are serious enough about it to stop the large minority that are eager to destroy it outright. The destroyers have a huge advantage: they're never hampered by truth, principles or scruples.
Quoting Athena
It doesn't much matter what 'we' want. They are what is.
Quoting Athena
Not really. Big Religion, like Big Business, is in the business of enriching and enlarging itself through its control of governments and populations. It reinforces the authority of the ruling elite and trains the peons to know their place and obey their betters, as wells the aforementioned boostership of overpopulation and subjugation of women.
Quoting Athena
That sounds suspiciously like an empire to me.
I know it's off topic, but as an SF aficionado, I have to defend the Star Trek personnel. Starfleet is a military organization, with a chain of command and uniforms and all that, (and Kirk was a bit of a maverick) They're not supposed to be independent individuals. There is plenty of individualism and scholarship in the civilian population of their time, as well as entrepreneurship - just no money used in the Federation.
Okay, I am not sure but I suspect people who have the same information tend to agree and that disagreements are the result of not having the same information.
I am going to start with quotes
This is to get a laugh and lift our spirits....
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex. Aldous Huxley
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/aldous-huxley-quotes+
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. Aldous Huxley Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/aldous-huxley-quotes
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. Aldous Huxley Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/aldous-huxley-quotes
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/aldous-huxley-quotes
In the past, personal and political liberty depended to a considerable extent upon governmental inefficiency. The spirit of tranny was always more than willing; but its organization and material equipment were generally weak. Progressive science and technology have changed all this completely. Aldous Huxley That is certainly true about Eisenhower's warning of the Military Industrial Complex.
Now back to Roosevelt and the New Deal. Hoover and Roosevelt worked together to give us a fascist form of government. That is leaving property in the hands of private owners, but regulating industry. WWII intensified the new relationship between government and industry because government contracts were greatly increased, bringing us to the Military Industrial Complex Eisenhower warned us about. Eisenhower could have put the Military Industrial Complex in place without the bureaucratic organization that Roosevelt and Hoover gave us and because we do not talk about the bureaucratic and then education change and the Military Industrial Complex, none of that exists in the minds of citizens.
However, in a college text about Public Policy and Administration, it is mentioned that the US adopted the German model of bureaucracy and this shifts power and authority from individuals to the beast, the governmental bureaucracy over the people. This bureaucratic organization begins with the Prussians and is what made Germany strong enough to engage the allies in war.
Now during Eisenhower's administration, he asked congress to support the National Defense Education Act and replaced our Domestic Education (education for good moral judgment without religion, and the culture that made liberty possible) with education for a technological society with unknown values and that brings us to where we are today.
People know fascism for the horrors committed by Nazis, and I have a book for teachers explaining how they should treat every child exactly the same, and they should be impersonal. At all levels of bureaucracy, policy demands being impersonal and a person can be fired for violating policy. What rules, is policy not individual moral judgment. We were sold this reasoning on the idea that it is more efficient. We mostly are totally unaware of the bureaucratic and educational changes and what that has to do with what is happening today.
Okay, I love the original Star Trek, and if you can watch and compare the original Star Trek with the Next Generation. The original Star Trek comes from education before 1958, for independent thinking and good moral judgment. The Next Generation comes with the change in education and "group think". While some may think the group thinkers are good for democracy, they might want to think about China and about our reactionary politics and the very biased media we have today.
Star Trek frequently had the theme of a computer-run society. We have a computer-run society now but don't see it that is humans controlled by policy. The National Defense Education Act shifted the purpose of education and who makes the education decisions. Even if we threw all our weapons into the sea, we are organized by policies set by others, and not family order and independent thinkers.
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy. Aldous Huxley
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/aldous-huxley-quotes
Our effort to establish a base on the moon is being presented as an idealist challenge for the glory of mankind, not as a desperate star wars race for the control of the moon and whose missiles will be there. We have gone beyond fear of a nuclear bomb to star wars and I don't mean the movie but the reality of controlling missile bases and satellites. Our high-tech military is very vulnerable because it does not work without our satellites that can be taken out with the same technology of hitting an asteroid off course.
NASA says China wants to control the Moon in shocking claimhttps://tech.hindustantimes.com tech news nasa-sa...
Jul 20, 2022 NASA is concerned that China might control the entire Moon. China has sped up its target of building a research base on the Moon within eight ...
Heavens no! I wish but the last thing the young want is advice from an old person. Books advise grandmas to hold their tongues and experience has taught me the wisdom of what they say.
There was a time when a great-grandson was my best buddy. Then he became a teenager and I told him I was losing him and he sweetly said, "I will always love you." That was a long ago and we haven't spoken much since then. I used to have so much fun with the great-grandchildren. We went on adventures and did science in my kitchen. I still can't let go of the things I had for them. I am hoping to pass the really good stuff on to another great-grandson when he is old enough.
I am not sure we can turn the clocks back to when grandparents were more important than technology has made them. Our whole culture has changed. We are much more materialistic than we once were and our children are exposed to so much and are pushed so hard in school that they don't have the time to just be children.
In responding to Vera Mont I felt aware of how drastically military technology has changed us. I don't like to think about that but denying our changed reality is not a good thing. Even when we entered WWII we thought our best military advantage was our patriotism and our individual judgment. That is what we educated for but the technology of WWII changed all that. In the past, it took us a year to mobilize for war. Today we can enter a war and do more damage in four hours than several troops could have done in several months. Our patriotism is no longer needed. We can wage wars without disturbing our morning routine. That is not how it was in the past and with enemies like China, I don't think we can ever again demobilize as we once did after every war. We are as focused on war as the Prussians who lived for the love of war as much as the US lived for the love of God and family.
When was this? In which decades of its existence was the US not engaged in any armed conflict?
Not until after the capitalists broke all their toys and a millions of lives. I don't think they could have nationalized industry - or very much else - given the popular mind-set. Obviously, what call fascism is not quite congruent with my definition.
I expected that reaction. Unfortunately, I can not copy and paste the charts of US military spending and I hope people follow the link and take a good look at the US commitment to war and military force. Our past commitment to military spending was nothing compared to what it is now. This is a huge change, huge! Please look at the charts. The US was known for its resistance to war, not the power of its military force.
Quoting Christopher Chantrill
The founding fathers of the US feared standing armies and intentionally made it difficult for the US to go to war and they gave citizens control of the purse strings.
This is part of the US constitution....
Article I, Section 8, Clause 12:
[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; . . .
[/quote]
And I offer this evidence that the US was not interested in being the military power it is today...
How did the capitalists break the system? I think our economy goes up and down in relation to the supply of oil and its demand, the same as Rome's economy went up or down in relation to its supply of gold. Both of these economic swings are tied to military expenses. Advancing technology increases military expenses and that starts to hurt the taxpayers. That is a big problem with standing armies. If your economy depends on having military might, because the source of gold or oil you need is under the control of another nation, you have to have a good economy.
Prussians came to see the economy as a very important part of modern warfare, and for that definition of fascism...
I didn't ask about spending. I asked about involvement. https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/50473 15 or so years of peace since independence. And that doesn't include land disputes, water disputes, incursions into Mexican territory, cattlemen vs sheep-men, black ops, "advisory roles", clandestine arming of hostile factions and coups, missile-rattling that didn't break into a shooting war...
America was never about family and God! It's always been about wealth, power and conflict.
The spending boondoggles are just capitalism cashing in on militarism. What would you expect? When money's there for the taking, they'll take it.
Quoting Athena
That's right. Not at first. The ambitions grew with the successes; since the Monroe Doctrine, their scope and reach kept growing until they were a World Power, Big Four, Policeman of the World, NATO boss, The West, the top banana. That's expensive. Especially when you start losing.
Quoting Athena
They kept speculating on the stock market until they created a Great Depression. Quoting Athena
Do you really? How did demand for oil cause the 1929 market crash?
Well, whatever the truth of that, teaching children as if it were still 1955 just won't get them through automation, pandemic, population displacement and climate change.
Well I think a grandma has something no book or information source or technology has, and that's personalised/individual knowledge of, and care for, their grandchildren. The people that know us best - our strengths and weakeness, are family, right?
A grandchild can be as knowledgeable a book worm as they like in life but if they don't feel cared for, listened to, in this individualistic, materialist society they are growing up in then I'd imagine theyd feel pretty lonely and isolated.
I never feel lonely when I'm with my grandmother. Yes she may not have the most up to date experience with advancing cultural changes and tech, but what she lacks in that sphere of knowledge she makes up for on good old fashioned life lessons.
The more fundamental truth of things doesnt change with time otherwise it wouldn't be the truth of the matter would it? And wisdom I guess is being able to define those same base values in a system or society that is forever changing.
That is something my grandmother is good at. I can give her the most complex headache of a situation where I can't make out the wood from the trees.
And she will whittle it down to one or two most profound yet simple questions and the clarity one gets from that can't be found in the vast majority of books.
My advice would be don't underestimate yourself :)
No, unfortunately, other things are happening. It seems the instinctual drive is social acceptance and status with one's peers. Also, it is common for young mothers to want distance from their mothers and heaven's forbid grandmas should give advice about raising children! Our wisdom gained by years of working with children, reevaluating ourselves, and seeing our youthful mistakes, are not appreciated! The research on mother-daughter relationships is new and I like what this one says. https://ct.counseling.org/2020/01/uncovering-the-root-cause-of-mother-daughter-conflict/
"I have concluded that society sets mothers and daughters up for conflict." I think that is especially so with the social changes we have been through.
This thread is about technology and employment but it very much could technology and family relationships and changed social order. I very much blame education for a technological society for the breakdown of the family and parent/child conflicts.
On the other hand, statistically, children who have involved grandparents have an advantage over those who don't. But during the teen years, grandparents tend to be unappreciated. Some of my friends have told me when the young adult gets older the relationship can become a good one again.
Quoting Benj96
Oh yes, I am quite sure that is true. But it is not just the children and grandparents having this problem. Education for technology and what technology has done to our lives is hurting all relationships, and once in a while it has improved relationships! I love to see a father in the park with his children. I am hoping men will become better husbands and fathers. For bloody sure autocratic industrialization that took the father out of the home and held him in a hierarchy of power and exploited the laborer, harmed families as much as slavery did. Technology has taken the mother out of the home too. If the father is an active father, the technological family may do even better than in the past, If the father is not in the home, or is not helping in the home and with the children, things are worse. Our women have the freedom of barbarians and I do not mean that as a compliment.
Quoting Benj96
Now that is a true philosophical statement. I love it! :heart: I have to go to work. I will ponder what you said and look forward to getting back to you.
Well they managed to raise their own daughters and sons. So if a mother thinks she turned out okay some of that is at the very least a credit to their own parenting. A grandmother is a tried and tested testament to parenting.
Dont get me wrong I undertand that a daughter wants to prove her own worth as a mother. That's natural.
But I think it would be foolish not to take heade at least in part from her own mothers concerns. Raising children is a group effort. Especially when everyone's intentions are wholesome and with the childs best wishes at heart. You may have your differences for sure. But of course you have similarities too which ought not be dismissed.
Quoting Athena
Yes absolutely it's the right hope to have. And I agree industrialisation and demands on men these days make it seem exceedingly difficult to Juggle family responsibilities and work ethic simultaneously. Employers need to respect down time. A concept that is not conducive to pure capitalism.
Quoting Athena
Well I think it's a wonderful thing that mothers can now participate as true bread winners for the family, it must be incredibly empowering, almost on a par with the husband if not in some cases exceedingly so depending on their respective professions. But someone has to take care of the childers.
Its a fine balance indeed. I would personally be happy for a wife to succeed in her career while I raise the children. And I think that dynamic is increasing. A long awaited one.
Quoting Athena
I look forward to it also Athena :) all the best at work and we shall chat soon again!
I think you are speaking of a very small percentage of the US population. I believe 100% that the great majority of US citizens were about family and most of them worked for very low wages, like my grandmother who was a teacher, and my mother who was a keypunch operator. Of course, being a teacher was much more meaningful to my grandmother's generation of teachers who thought they were defending our democracy in the classroom. Being a keypunch operator was just a way of paying rent and putting food on the table. I did not know my father until I was 18 and he 100% stood for the idea that women stay home and care for the family and the man supports the family. He did not get rich but as an engineer, but he certainly earned more than the women.
Not until women's liberation did women have equal rights to education and job opportunities. All economic and social factors assured we stayed home and cared for our families. Some women became teachers or nurses and they were not paid well. The increase in wages for women is amazing when compared to the past. But no one earned that much until after WWII. Fortunately, housing didn't cost that much and one wage was enough to support most families.
Your bias on what is important military information discourages me in discussing the military situation with you. I think it is a mistake to believe things are as they always were for the US.
Likewise.
Back to your statement. What is the truth we are talking about? We are in dangerous territory now because what is true in one culture may not be true in another culture. What may be true at one point in history may not be true at another point in history.
In the past wisdom of elders was appreciated but with our technology today, who asks anything of a grandparent instead of going online to get the information? You know a teacher will value online research more than what a grandparent says. Oh, oh and painfully oh, often people do not agree about history. Were we White folk justified in enforcing segregation? In Isreal, you can be sure the Jews do not tell their children history the same way the Palestinians remember that history. These are very touchy things and we come to these truths with our different perspectives.
The challenge is to state a truth that is everyone's truth. You know what I mean? I think that is a huge challenge.
I have checked what I said about culture and grandparents. I was surprised to find so much information and enjoyed reading different reports. I need to check with my library about getting more information from the published papers.
I am aware that the US has used military force for economic reasons and I have very strong feelings about Roman/Christian behavior that is unacceptable and based on an unjust belief in their superiority and entitlement. However, neither are the same as today's political/military actions. The goals were much smaller than they are today and they involve all of us more than in the past when the military conflicts were very small, compared to world wars and now world domination.
I am thinking the world wars, fundamentally changed the US attitude about war and this change is expressed in the 1958 National Defense Education Act. This is a good subject for a thread about technology changing our lives. I liken what the world wars did to the US with Athens after the Persian wars. Athens started forcing other city-states to continue paying tribute and the other city-states supported Sparta in crushing Athens. Leading Socrates and his followers to find fault with democracy.
Quoting STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL PEACE RESEARCH INSTITUTE
I say it wasn't a fundamental change but a stage. Their success in the world wars fed their ambition and expanded their scope and thirst for conquest. I say they followed the course of all empires, from smaller to larger to boastfully vast to too big to handle and the next step is too big to survive.
Did technology play a part in that? Of course; it always does. Having muskets put American colonists in a position to massacre Native Americans armed with bows.*
Same in other areas of warfare
At the ends of WWII, hoovering up German military eggheads plus access to all the British innovations didn't hurt their technological odds, either.
*And double-crossing native allies was a well-established over 300 years before they did in Afghanistan. Also a routine practice for empires: The Spaniards did it in South America; the British did it in India; pretty much every European country screwed over Africa....
And that is what is driving the spending on military technology. I should have saved the link I posted for this reply. It starts with air warfare and the nuclear bomb. Before those two things the US felt protected by the two oceans so it did not spend on developing a high-tech military force and it had a domestic education not education for technology.
Our lives did not change as rapidly as they are changing now and this changes everything. Constant rapid change disturbs the stability we need to feel in control of our lives. The whole ball game has been changed and Russia and China are threatening.
China has a much larger population than the US and this will mean many more highly intelligent college graduates. Not only will China have an advantage because of having a larger well-educated population but their eugenics program may assure China has more people born with a superior intelligence potential. With an interest in how technology is changing things, you might want to read this article about China's eugenics program. https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838
Are you saying the 1958 National Defense Education Act was not a fundamental change? Education in the US was modeled after Athens's education for well-rounded individual growth. That is the complete opposite to education that specializes in everyone. I can not think of anything that could change the US more radically than going from education for well-rounded individual growth to specialization.
Pericles of Athens spoke of the importance of being well-rounded in a democracy where the people hold the power to make their own laws or change them as needed. When people are specialized they must rely on the experts instead of trusting their own authority. A democracy needs people interested in many things so they can participate in a government that does many things.
Right now the US is experiencing culture wars and this is directly related to the change in education and ending the priority purpose of preparing everyone for good citizenship. We went from education for good moral judgment to amoral education, specifically so nothing would slow down our technological progress. We went from preparing everyone for independent thinking to "group think".
This is no longer the democracy we were. A decision that could be made in 15 minutes now takes months because of all the paper involved, and it is totally insane to think this is more efficient. Bureaucrats and teachers are so burdened with paperwork and so controlled by the policy, they have little time for anything else, like actually getting the work done. I would bet 5 years after covid is no longer an issue, we still have empty shelves in stores, and other obvious signs of a system breaking down because we have taken authority away from individuals who are now controlled by policy and paperwork. This is not the democracy we defended but what we defended our democracy against.
Yes, I am. It's not the 'after' picture I disagree with, but the 'before'.
Quoting Athena
Where? When? How long? For which children?
Athens is where Socrates was snuffed for his critical thinking seminars? Where only the sons of well-off families could get any education, and where you would never have been allowed to teach? Yes, a similar system was in place in some parts of the United States for some part of the 18th and 19th centuries, available to some white children.
Need we mention the vast differences in church-sponsored education, in racially segregated education, in income levels?
Even 'common' town supported schools were not free, and smaller communities could barely support a single teacher in a one-room school. Then there was the mishmash of Christian schools and private schools of all kinds and various philosophies, some of them specializing in the education of women.
I think we do need to mention child labour:
This makes the 1958 reform just another step in 20-year process.
If you are really interested in the history of education you will love reading Paul Monroe, Ph.D.'s book "A Text Book on the History of Education published in 1910 or James Mulhern's book "A History of Education" copyright in 1946 and 1959. I am sure there are more but these are the ones I have and you should be glad to know how mucheducation is the result of philosophy from ancient times and increasingly so with Descartes, Locke,Spinoza, and Hobbes. Those who know only education for technology, for military and industrial purposes, and totally new and different experiences of education, and therefore a new and different experience of being humans.
You love philosophy so you should love knowing the Greeks debated such things as can a person learn ethics? At what age can they learn? There was a time when the Greeks thought only by age 30 were they ready for such education compared to the pope who said something like "Give me a child until age 6 and we will have him for life", which goes better with the philosophers I mentioned and their focus on education for good ethics. Something I come to appreciate even more, since reading Confucius and his contemporaries who were concerned with training one's self to be highly ethical.
It is very hard to answer you in a post short enough for people to read. Would you like to focus on 1635 and the Latin school, versus religiously controlled schools? That is where things get very interesting. Enlightenment versus Christianity.
How about passages from the 1917 National Education Association Conference? That book makes my heart swell with patriotic feelings. It really gave me a passion for education for democracy.
"The National Child Labor Committees work to end child labor was combined with efforts to provide free, compulsory education for all children, and culminated in the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, which set federal standards for child labor."
Child labor is shocking and that might be a problem because it could throw us in denial of the wrongs of autocratic industry that killed the children's mothers and fathers. The sin is complete disrespect for the well-being of others. We had child labor laws before that. And that sin is devoid of the thousands of years of philosophy that are available to us. :grin:
I think I have to stop working. It is interfering too much with my time for answering you. I really want to discuss the child labor act that kept children out of mines and industries during school hours and how industry tried to close the schools as we mobilized for WWI, claiming the war caused a labor shortage and they were not getting their monies worth from education because they still to train labors and what technology and war had to do with keeping the schools open.
I prefer something a little more up-to-date. It's fine that both the Greeks and Americans taught their upper-class boys patriotism, citizenship and Hellenistic and Christian values respectively. Sometimes, in Athens and New England... All I'm saying is that the pink rear-view mirror does not show the whole landscape in its true colours. As for militarism, there were boys of 12 in the Civil War and 14-year-olds enlisted in WWI. That's one side-effect of patriotic fervour I consider unfortunate. Maybe I have a few issues with your characterization of all public education since 1958, but there is no point going into that here.
Suffice it to say, no slant on education could ever have been evenly applied to all states, and whatever way the curriculum was tweaked, it would not have altered the course of technological development.
Whoo that was insulting! "true bread winners" :rage: Quick let me put on my philosopher's hat and see if I can deal with this like a reasonable person.
Exactly who do you think put food on the table in 1836? The woman was almost every industry needed to meet the family's needs. She likely made all the clothing, all the soaps for laundry and bathing, she of course washed those clothes, hung them on a line, and ironed them. She likely chopped her own wood for the cooking fire and if she was well informed she regulated the heat of her oven by using different woods. She planted and tended to the garden, harvested the food, and preserved it. Then she put the food on the table and people did not have the health concerns we have with processed foods. But speaking of health concerns, a well-informed woman knew the healing plants in her area and she took care of everyone, often without the help of a doctor. Everyone meaning not only her family and extended family but the sick and elderly people in the community as well. I considered my domestic skills were my contribution to the breadwinning and I enjoyed winning ribbons at the local fair :grin: and sitting on important decision-making committees.
The term "just a housewife" came up with women's liberation and it made me furious! I am not sure how we came to be so disrespected but it was in the air. At the same time, I was thinking other than providing a paycheck our husbands were rather useless because progress had also reduced the need for a man. We were no longer afraid of being attacked by Native Americans, and the only time I held a gun was to protect a friend from her abusive husband, so how did we get through this period of time with men having a hirer status than women?
Throughout history, women held things together when men went to war, and some of them were just as good on the battlefield. Today, I think it is clearly women who are advancing civilization and I think it was the grandmas who got us on the track of civilization.
Money is a part of life, but not the only thing of value.
You appear to have a very closed mind on this subject and I am afraid arguing with you will only make matters worse. I hope someday you are enlightened by the philosophy behind democracy and what education has to do with that.
Oh I'm sorry Athena! :( I didn't intend it as an insult, honestly. Perhaps I need to reconsider how I explain myself.
I meant bread winner in the purely capitalist capacity which doesn't consider bread winning to involve raising a family (which ofc it ought to). It only uses sums (of money) as the "bread" for which I spoke in this case.
As in generating income for the family unit. As we know it's very difficult to stay at home and raise children while also having a full time job. Working from home helps immensely ofc but isn't applicable to every job.
Time is limited and we cannot do everything at once sadly. We must delegate responsibility within and for a family.
You're absolutely correct. I agree. I was referring to how modern society pits the bread against the home. Which is a terrible shame as bread is made at home too. Whoever holds down the Fort enables others to go beyond it to fetch additional resources knowing the home is not going to fall into disarray without them. Again i do apologise if it came across as sexist it was not what I meant so I'm doing my best to clarify the context on which I meant the description
Yes, quite right, and no better a portrayal of such then WW2 when it finally dawned on prospective employers that women were and always have been just as capable as men to assume roles in society beyond what was previous thought, beyond the pigeon hole patriarchy had placed women in: clerks, engineers, mechanics, construction workers and business etc - the list is as endless as the jobs it describes, and it was women who kept society running while men committed barbarian acts of aggression against one another on the war front.
So WW2 was a pivotal point for society in finally accepting that women are very much valuable assets to a society and not just merely "a housewife". Whatever that was meant to mean in the first place!?
But I suspect it meant subordination. :(
I hope i clarified well what I was describing. It was contextual to western societies persistent double standards.
I would never dare assume women as beneath men. Ever.
No worry, I know you had no intention of offending and you get gold stars for your explanation of why you said what you did. :heart: Yes, it is today's capitalism that has our values really screwed up. But we should remember Adam Smith. He understood the importance of morality to economics and just assumed educated people would also be moral people and that it would be the educated people who ran the show.
By the time my second child was ready for kindergarten, I thought I was losing my mind and I absolutely had to get involved in the world outside of my home! I totally expected to complete my college education and have a career and help pay for children's educations. I found out too late I did not choose my husband as well as I thought I had. And so goes life. I will just leave this subject by saying someone needs to care for the children and there are sooo many good things a homemaker does, but we should not be limited to domestic responsibilities. Unfortunately, not all men are secure enough to allow their wives the freedom to actualize themselves outside of the home. At least that was so in the past. When men supported the family and women stayed home to care for them.
As you express the wisdom is not this or that, but this and that.Quoting Benj96
Benj your input is essential to a better exchange of thought with @Vera Mont. Socrates was a poor man not one of the elite. People are not paid to think about how to raise human potential and yet we know of Socrates not many of the elites of Athens. Democracy is about education such as education for good moral judgment that Adams Smith assumed educated people would have and everyone becoming better human beings. This is not exactly a capitalist value.
I have a different perspective, and use - as you have seen - different source material.
Matters won't get worse from argument; they won't get better from refusal to engage; odds are, they won't change at all. I'm open to any of those eventualities.
https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-history/socrates
Ah, now I love you. :heart: And thank you for leaving the argument against women staying home to care for the family to me.
When my children were teenagers during the 1970 recession, Dad walked out leaving me to take care of the home and support the family. I would have loved to have had a wife! It would have been wonderful to be able to focus on my job and how to maneuver into a career instead of trying to do it all. I would have loved to come home to a clean house and a meal and have someone else to resolve all the problems young people have. Old books advised women about taking care of everything so the man would be free to focus on his business or career.
When I was a member of the Cicero Society, I watched the older men coach a young man to assure his success. These men had wives who never left the home and their wives were like helpless children when it came to knowledge of the greater world. Fortunately for their wives, these men had stocks and their wives were well taken of when they died but I would not want to be one of them.
I have known older women who absolutely hated their husbands and were very thankful when their controlling and possibly abusive husbands dies. I have read a journalist's record of pioneer women who were passionate about the injustice they suffered when we went to war because of slavery but did nothing about the slavery they endured because we called their slavery marriage. Some of them could have been married off at age 14 to an older man who wanted someone to do his laundry and cook for him, and back in the day rape and abuse of a wife were sanctioned by law.
I was raised by a divorced mother and when I say women have the freedom of barbarians, I do not mean that as a good thing, because they can be forced by circumstances to work for very low wages and deal with all the problems of poverty when raising their children. Today that means more of them are homeless with their children and the assistance programs can not take care of all of them even though the lucky few needing help can receive much more assistance than in the past.
Something I regret about philosophy is the lack of women's voices. Many philosophers dealt with the education of children, but the mothers' perspective is missing. I think I have more words and experiences to say what is wrong with being a full-time homemaker than I have for the Dick and Jane or Leave it to Beaver models of the good family life.
I am struggling here, I do not know how to philosophically express the injustice of patriarchy and the value of matriarchy. The injustice of autocracy and the value of democracy. And thank you for throwing me into this quandary by leaving me the argument against the ideal.
:lol: And now I must rush out and buy the rest of the Thanksgiving Dinner that I must make for the helpless men in my life. No matter how hard we try, it seems nothing is that easy to explain with absolute certainty. :chin:
Gross patriarchy and gender inequality at its finest :(
Quoting Athena
Oh I disagree. I think you're doing a very good job of explaining your qualms to the forum contributors. Philosophy is for everyone, it's a discussion, the minute we think it is a speciality, elite subject or something that requires some certificate or qualification then true organic philosophy does on that table.
Quoting Athena
"An" ideal to be sure. Nobody knows exactly what ought to be the true ideal to pursue. Hence the existence of such forums no? To explore eachothers thoughts, experiences and personal input into the great argument so that we may gather the facts, beliefs and interactions neccesary to hopefully see the wood from the trees.
Yes and certainty is a very difficult thing to capture. Just when one things they have ultimate certainty someone throws a wrench in the cogs and we are left to consider the exceptions to such a case. I hope thanksgiving goes well for you and your family. Have a great celebration :)
So what is your point? Socrates' father was a sculptor and Socrates followed his father's profession. Having to work for a living is not as good as being wealthy because of owning property. As a sculptor, Socrates faced hazards to his health and the problem would have increased with age. Socrates could have avoided death, but I think his ego and old age problems saw his immortality rested in being put to death. Had he been a younger man, I think he would have chosen to save his life rather than his ego.
His trial was about being an offensive person, and his punishment was up to arbitration. He was voted guilty by a very narrow margin, but his suggestion that he be treated like a hero instead of punished resulted in increasing the number of people who voted against him in favor of the death penalty. I think his ego got the best of him, but that is what made him famous. Had he been less annoying, we may never have heard about him. The young would not have admired him. Sort of like Trump, he thrived on everyone talking about him and his act of defiance turned people against him.
It is said his philosophy career was begun by a desire to prove the oracles wrong. Perhaps that annoyed the gods who then used men to end Socrates' life. That is not a serious statement, but I think Socrates was foolish at the moment and I don't think he cared if he died because old age is not nice to us.
This thread is about how technology changes our lives, and it was political technology that was changing the lives of Athenians. In the past, Socrates' would have been judged by the Oligarchy, but in Pericles' democracy, it is likely the majority of those who judged Socrates were farmers who would have stronger feelings about people knowing their place and staying in it, being conservative instead of a progressive out to change things, and even worse, acting as though he was entitled to the honor given a hero!
Whatever, I have totally enjoyed looking for more information and coming to new conclusions.
I just criticized Socrates for being defiant and foolish when his life was on the line, but being defiant can make a person deserving of being treated like a hero. You are so gracious to say we all need to be heard in our struggle to know truth and I certainly believe that is true of hearing the woman's voice. I think Socrates pushed for that and that we may owe him that daily meal given to heroes. I have always thought he stood for freedom of speech in the goal to know truth and he gave his life for that.
However, I am not sure if Socrates' and Plato's relationships with women were something I could value? This ties in directly with the women's liberation we have had, which to me, is more oppressive of the feminine element than what we had. I loved the Hippy period that raised our consciousness of the Gia, Earth, Mother goddess. My life and my children's lives would have been totally different if my husband at the time had also been caught up in that cohort's fascination with love and peace and valuing the mother as I did. Women being anything else may be masculine, not feminine? However, I did hear a leading woman in the space program use domestic terms to explain what is important about our space program. That is, just because a woman does what men do, she does not have to think totally as a man does but to be competitive she needs to think as men think. Plato's republic and the city being everyone's parent, while those in power are not organized by families, scares me because I think that is the path to tyranny.
I could be so wrong but I fear men bring us to tyranny and on the other hand women may retard technological progress? Those nations that advanced technology were patriarchies and I do not know of any matriarchy that advanced technology?
However, now I think of how age changes us. I wanted to be devoted to family but as my children aged and I aged, I wanted to be more active in the community, and like many women in my cohort, we thought we would return to college and have careers when the children were old enough. To our horror, our husbands were not supportive of that. Later in life, I regret I did not embrace math and science when I was young. But I also think my human experience would not have been complete without going through the mother stage. What do I mean by a human experience? A well-rounded emotional trip with changing relationships as we all age and in time become our parent's caregivers. I have concerns that technology and materialism are disconnecting us from the human experience? And maybe that concern is more on topic.
Yes, you have a different perspective and think it is the perspective of your cohort which is different from the perspective my cohort, A cohort being a period of history that shapes our consciousness. You remind me of the introduction to a very old textbook that explains people in a democracy can be very critical of democracy and then the book goes on to explain democracy and how our criticism is about resolving problems, not a desire to destroy our democracy and replace it with something else. I am just not sure your cohort has the rest of the explanation of democracy.
You sure do not know the military might we have today is not what we had in the past. We did not always feel responsible for supporting democracy around the world and we were very resistant to giving tax dollars to the military. When Eisenhower first served the Defense Department, his wages were so low he rode the bus to work.
Joseph Campbell said mythology is about teaching the young how to be good citizens and that we need to share a mythology for psychological, social, and political reasons. The US created its own mythology and passed it on to its young until 1958. Then education for technology destroyed that mythology and the national heroes that went with it. Technology has drastically changed the benefits of those serving in the military.
Joseph Campbell said Star Trek is the closest thing we have to a helpful mythology. The social organization of Star Trek is more like Plato's Republic than the family of gods and the mythology of the gods, which did organize Athens when Socrates was poking holes into what people believed.
You and I disagreed about the changing role of technology and war, and I want to point out that the Greeks and Romans both had war gods, but they had different ideas about the good or bad of a war god. The Greeks spread a culture that has endured. The Romans spread an empire that fell. We might admire Roman accomplishments, but the Romans depended on Athens for their technology, like the Borg takes technology. The US is becoming like the Borg but in the past, it did stand for God, family, and Country. Forgetting what we stood for means we have fought every war for nothing.
Says stonemason in that biography, and Socrates definitely joined the army. Served with distinction.
Quoting Athena
Good. The fabled Athenians, Pericles' vaunted Athens, engaged in war, international trade, slavery, patriarchy, money-lending, Saturday night pub brawls, political infighting and hypocrisy with as much gusto as every other nation-state on the face of the Earth. So did the fabled young American Republic. When you idealize a shining moment as if it were a sustained condition, you fail to see the grubby century in which it was a moment of importance.
Quoting Athena
Technology, as well as the sequelae of the great depression, as well as the economic push and psychological imprint of WWII and the consequent geopolitical reconfiguration of the world, changed the lives of not only Americans, but just about everyone. And it's kept on changing ever since. And it's not going to be reset to 1957 or 1927 or 1867 or 447BCE.
All past empires fell, were conquered or dissolved. They have a natural life-span, just like mayflies, redwoods and humans.
See the bias? The Greeks also had an empire - a big one - that fell. And the Romans also left behind a sizeable cultural legacy. Plus some amazing roads. Why cherry-pick? They were both admirable and abominable.
We have come a long way. I speak against the 1958 National Defense Education Act, but the shift to a focus on technology did increase equality. Women gained rights that western culture never before gave them. People of color are more protected by the law than they ever have been and we have extended this protection to people who are homosexual or fall in different places in the gender spectrum. In Oregon, everyone is fed and we are going for providing medical care for everyone as well. Instead of arresting homeless people and driving them away, we are making serious efforts to shelter everyone. Before these efforts to be better human beings, we educated everyone, and with vocational training in 1917 that meant the masses had far more opportunities for upward economic mobility than ever before. These are the result of technology and also the result of democracy and the notion that education can improve the human and the improved humans can lead to an improved society, lifting the human potential.
Pointing to what you believe are faults, seems to blind you and those who have the same perspective, from seeing the good of our democracy and the hope of the future that democracy will continue to lift the human potential. I see huge improvement in how we live and this is the result of the characteristics of democracy being taught. At the same time, I see social chaos and mass murders, and the development of a police state, that is what we defended our democracy against. I say this unfortunate turn is also the result of education for a technological society with unknown values, and intensionally ending the transmission of our culture to our children through our education system. This is a conflict between Christians and secular people and a battle for a national future between those who have faith in humans and those who do not.
Fortunately, we have this forum and the opportunity to examine what is and what can be.
No, it's a result of all the history that went before, of the condition of the world today and of the general craziness of our race. Education has a little part in what happens in the big world; it's not pivotal.
Quoting Athena
A lot of people - millions - who call themselves Christian align with the darkest forces of history, from the persecution and eradication of heretics, through the Crusades and the devastation of the Americas and the wholesale kidnapping and importation of African people as if they were no more than bales of cotton or any other trade goods, to the current farce of Trumpery. There are no christian values. There are good values and bad ones. Any name - any name! - can be put in the service of either.
After you check out this link we can discuss why the Greek city-states were not an empire equal to the Roman empire. https://www.britannica.com/topic/city-state. Surely this difference and the history weighed heavily on Lincoln's mind when he determined to enter a war to save the union. Ever since the civil war, the federal government has become more and more powerful, diminishing the power of sovereign states. I am not sure this movement toward a military empire like Rome is desirable. Nor am I sure it is not desirable. But I think the glory of Rome is not exactly what the United States set out to manifest.
What the Greeks had was more like what the Iroquois had than an empire like Rome.
Quoting Wikipedia
I think what the colonist had in mind was a confederation of sovereign states. For darn sure not all states are pleased with the laws and influence the federal government is imposing on them.
You and I strongly disagree on this point. Throughout history, nothing has been more powerful than education. That education may be Homer or the Bible or the classics of Schalsticiam, or intentionally transmitting a secular culture for democracy and liberty coming out of the Age of Enlightenment, or the education can be focused on technology for military and industrial purposes as was so for Prussian-led Germany. Whatever the purpose of education that is what a nation will manifest.
Or to quote John Dewey "If we reflect upon the various ideals of education that are prevalent in the different countries, we see that what they all aim at is to organize capacities for conduct." This was so since the earliest civilization but back in the day, it was stories of the gods that manifested the various cultures. Greeks moved away from that and Christians brought us back to education for a culture.
Quoting mrdonn Homer and the stories of the gods were essential reading like the Bible is essential to Christians.
In Rome, Christians destroyed the pagan temples that were places of learning. That threw the West into the Dark Age, leaving only Christianity to provide an education and guilds that taught a trade. While in the East, ongoing learning gave Islam a golden age of growth and prosperity.
I want to point out the argument about education and the Greeks having city-states not an empire, are the same argument. This is about power and authority and liberty or the lack of all three.
I think this is a capitalism issue. I don't think people are fussed about jobs, they are fussed about having no work and bad pay. Stunting technology won't solve anything, so I voted no.
Speaking for myself, machines & humans can be symbiotically integrated (cyborgs) for, well, mutual benefit. It doesn't have to be a competitive, our relationship, it can be cooperative.
You choose to limit it to the city states, and exclude Alexander? Okay, then you have to restrict the Roman one to the first Republic. https://www.britannica.com/place/Roman-Republic
No prizes for cherries!
Quoting Athena
The red state legislatures would be the first to agree with you. The Republican-packed Supreme Court is second. I'll be among the last.
Quoting Athena
What it set out to do, what it has done and what it is doing are not necessarily all of a piece. But it is a fact: done and cannot be undone.
Quoting Athena
Except religion, nationalism, ambition, greed, paranoia and pride. The chiefest among these is greed, most especially greed for territory - more land! their land! and all the black and gold stuff stuff under it! It's all for us.
Quoting Athena
Just so. And where do these ideals of education originate? In the nation's self-image and aspiration. The horse goes first; the cart follows.
Quoting Athena
No, that got the christians thrown into Roman prisons. Much later, Constantine imposed Christianity - or some Romanized form thereof - onto Europe. That still didn't bring on the dark age. The dissolution of the Roman empire did.
Quoting Agent Smith
...Bannakaffalatta? Is that really you?
Yes. Alexander was not representative of Athens and the city-states around Athens.
Quoting Vera Mont
I count religion as education and I see all beliefs in the gods as religion. It is what Athens defended when they killed Socrates and what Rome defended when it persecuted Christians and later what Christians defended when they destroyed the pagan temples. Mythology is essential to large unites of humans and it is transmitted from generation to generation. That is education.
I don't know if nationalism was part of education. That just doesn't sit right with me. I believe people had a sense of us and them, but I would not call that learned nationalism. How do you think nationalism was taught? Ambition, greed, and paranoia are taught? How does that work? That sure was not being taught in the old-school books I have, however, I do see those problems as an unintended consequence of the 1958 change in education.
Quoting Vera Mont
Did you miss the explanation that education comes from philosophy? Maybe we should go back and cover that more carefully?
Quoting Vera Mont
I don't think you're chronology is correct. Christians did not attack anyone until after Constantine legitimaized their religion and then they started killing each other because Romans lacked a word to express the concept of a god having 3 aspects, so worshipping the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost was seen as worshipping 3 gods, not 1 god. This subject is so important perhaps we should tackle it separately. It looks like my thread about how the Greeks and Romans were different must be in a history forum, not this one. We have a couple of disagreements because of not recognize the important differences between Athens and Rome. I will gladly open a thread for examining the differences between the Greeks and the Romans.
Yes, the Roman Christians did bring on the Dark Age. This will become more obvious when examing the differences between Athens and Rome. Did you know Greek Jews wrote the first Bible and they had very different words and concepts than the Romans? Jesus is the word, or logos, is a Greek concept and it goes with seeking universal truth. Christianity is Hellenized Judaism. Rome's quest for power and glory was a different thing. Constantine was interested in winning wars and he saw Christianity as helpful to that goal. He also moved his empire east where gold was more accessible and trade routes were better. He needed military strength to do that. That had nothing to do with the Greek Jew's acceptance of Jesus as the word. Rome was not the intellectual leader that Athens was and Athens was not an empire.
Star Trek's Borg.
Quoting Wikipedia
Employers are now using their computers to monitor their employees. China uses cell phones to monitor their citizens. The technology is just as much bureaucratic technology as it is a mechanical technological advancement. The US adopted the German model of bureaucracy that shifts power away from individuals to the collective, our governmental bureaucracy. At present China is more authoritarian but if we stay on our present technology path, the US may be as controlled as the Chinese.
Star Trek also repeated the theme of computer-controlled societies and plenty of people today will gladly give up our liberty for the more perfect computer control of us imperfect humans. Our present bureaucratic order is very close to a computer-controlled society like the Borg. Just because it is humans working on computers, it does not mean what we are creating is not a mechanical control of our society.
Has anyone read "PowerShift" by Alvin Toffler, Today's technology gives a whole new meaning to knowledge is power.
In that case, I'm with Pink Floyd. Quoting Athena
Ipledgealliegiancetotheflagandtotherepublicforwhichitstandsonenationundergodindivisiblewithlibertyandjusticeforall (except the coloureds an wommin an Mexicuns an Jews an commies an them eyeties thadr all gangstas)
Quoting Athena
Of course they are. How it works is: from 2-6 years old, you tell a kid that if he's a good little boy and eats all his beef, Santa will bring him nice, expensive presents - and he can hear what his lawyer daddy thinks of the Black janitor whose kid doesn't get such nice presents from Santa. Evidently, Santa, who is a fat old white man, only likes the children of successful people. After age 6, you tell him that success depends on good grades. Get into a good college (all except twelve being not-so-good colleges) and that success is a corner office and a six-figure salary. And all around him, he can see that it's true. Then you tell him that all those people in the parentheses want to take away his nice stuff.
Quoting Athena
I didn't miss it. I ignored it. The 'philosophy' that a nation practices, and on which it bases its daily commercial transactions, political activities, law-enforcement, social organization, housing arrangements, employment practices, health-care delivery and child-raising is not the same philosophy it carves into the lintels of officious buildings and the plinths of statues.
Quoting Athena
Sure they did. They regularly desecrated Roman temples, destroyed religious symbols and disrupted services. That's what Paul and Luke spent so much time in jail for. No, I'm not interested in rehashing the history of christianity, here or anywhere. You seem to be ambivalent about it - good in one setting, bad in another - while I reject it in every form.
Quoting Athena
That's true. It was a city smaller than Eugene, Oregon, more that a quarter of its population was enslaved. But that's not "The Greeks", is it? Any more than picking a particular period out of the history of Italy is "The Romans", or a Saturday Evening cover is America.
If we can one day create general AI, we would for sure need to reconsider what it is to be human - a can of worms but you already knew that.
The ethical question there is whether the merging of human and machine is voluntary or forced. The Borg are one example of involuntary mechanization. In fact, in Star trek Voyager, there is a story where some "drones" form a human type virtual colony: in their collective dreams, they are individual again. The irony is a bit heavy-handed, but the story engages one's sympathies.
The issue is also covered, rather more bluntly, in the Doctor Who episodes about cybermen and Daleks.
:chin: I'll have to think about that (when I can).
For the moment I'd say we're pretty much in a reallydark spot despite the valiant efforts of many, misguided though they may be. There seems to be an issue we're not giving the required amount of attention. I suppose it really doesn't count in the long run but que sais-je? We're on a wonderful journey out in the open ocean. Will we find what we're looking for? Sabrà Mandrake!
I don't know what that means. I understand the words, and agree with the dark spot portion of it, but don't know who is making a valiant, misguided effort to accomplish what. I may have missed a few references along the way.
Quoting Agent Smith
I believe there are several, but the three big ones that concern computer technology are, IMO: Personal privacy, International espionage (which includes intelligence, surveillance, interference and disinformation) and commercial exploitation (which includes undue influence and invasive procedures, as well as replacement of workers with robots without first making alternate arrangement for the displaced people.) Both industry and consumers are forging blythely ahead, without very much consideration of long-term consequences, while government stands timidly by and workers have no recourse.
But then, factor in that nobody seems to be up to the task of serious long-term figuring.
Good points! However, apart from AI, which is still a fantasy, technology ain't the guy!
Again with the cryptics! What guy?
Apologies. Try reframing the topic (of discussion) temporally.
Can you show me?
I am sorry. I don't know enough about Pink Floyd to know what you mean. Quoting Vera Mont
That is not what happened in my home and I don't think it is what happens in many homes. You are also speaking of people's private lives, not public education. It sure does not come up in the school books I have collected.
Quoting Vera Mont
If you are intentionally ignoring all the philosophies behind our education and the foundation of democracy, there is no point in continuing this discussion because your reasoning is lacking too much information. When we intentionally ignore someone, isn't the ignore- ance?
That statement does not go well with democracy, rule by reason. I have complete faith that human beings can be well educated and refined and a pleasure to be with. I have worked with congnitively challenged people who can not learn as well as those who attend college, but can be socialized to be a pleaure to be with. They just lack the ability to make reasonable arguments, so they are not intellectually stimulating.
I think the biggest human failure is lack of caring about education and what is possible, and not being well informed about what makes a person pleasant or unpleasant. I don't think AI will ever have human motivations and I am totally shocked by the people who are willing to give up our liberty to be ruled by AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0bi7OfaKMY
Quoting Athena
In the home is where early imprinting, domestication, internalization of social roles, and world-view formation take place. All in the first 3-5 years. By the time children enter school, their attitudes and self-image are established.
Quoting Athena
"Behind" is the operative word. Education varies with the needs of the nation. When Athens was at war, it prized soldiers. When it was at peace (no more than 15-20 years at a time, just like the US), it valued scholars. At all times, it valued its self-image - just like every other city-state and nation-state in the world. At all times, it "believed in" something like democracy, but actually practiced domination, patriarchy, enslavement, and some degree of autocracy.
The industrial northern states didn't have slaves, so they put children and immigrants to work in similar condition to those of slavery. Once they had enough automation not to need so many unskilled hands, they suddenly discovered a 'philosophy' that required children to go to school longer and longer, which kept them out of competition for jobs and raised the literacy level of the clerical workers, engineers and technicians, of which the burgeoning capitalist economy needed more and more.
The North was determined not to let the institution of slavery spread to newly opened territories, so it fought a war, won it, freed the slaves.... and never for another century tried to give those freed Black people the same chance as their white counterparts in anything but name.
Do you really see liberty, equality and justice "for all" in the actual practices of US legislatures, judiciaries and social organizations through the nation's history? If you want to delve into the philosophy on which the United States was founded, do so. But do it honestly. Democracy?
Quoting Athena
I ignored some claim, not some-one. Yes. In order to ignore facts in favour of a special, pretty ideal, a certain degree of willful ignorance is required.
Quoting Athena
It is a limited and clearly articulated tropic. The question wasn't: What would Homer do about automation? it was "what ought we to do?
Youre a dbag if you think this an acceptable arrangement to cause for other people (imposition). So its not automation, its the very job itself that is unethical.
@Bret Bernhoft@Agent Smith@Joshs
I see where you're coming from. It's very simple, isn't it? After all, (our) liberty is at risk. What's needed is a good education for our children and we'll be ok. Democracy, by the way, is a wonderful system and I'm glad you're for it.
True and not the whole truth. Children's peers and media can have a very strong effect on shaping the child. Consider the millions of dollars spent on advertising products to children and millions of dollars made from movies for children. Schools are social institutions filled with peers and they are essential to transmitting culture.
If you want to discuss education, I would love to share the information in my books but if I go to the work of quoting them, I do not want my effort ignored.
There is truth in the rest of your paragraphs but not enough information. You made it a choice to ignore information and that means not being aware of how much information you know nothing about.
Quoting Vera Mont
I most definitely see women, people of color, and people who fit differently in the gender spectrum have a very different reality today than in the past and we wouldn't be here without the education to get here. And we wouldn't be here if military and industrial technology needs had not changed education. I know the federal government had very little to do with education before 1958 and that since WWII the federal government has had much more power to affect education. I know in the past few people stayed in school beyond the 8th grade. There is a lot to talk about but what is the point if one of us is going to ignore information?
Quoting Vera Mont
I will overlook that you inferred I am not being honest, and react to the possibility that there is some sincerity in your invitation to discuss the philosophy that made democracy different from despotic nations and made our education about manifesting individual power and authority. Which is it? Do you want to ignore the information or are you sincerely interested? I don't think many people know what Athens and philosophy had to do with education in the US before the National Defense demand for education for philosophy became the priority. I think a new thread might be in order.
By the way, before the war to save the union, the North attempted to bring about peace by using education to end slavery, but the South caught on and began producing its own textbooks to transmit a culture supportive of slavery. Our nation has had culture wars from the beginning and education was used by opposing sides to manifest opposing cultures. But we could also point out Athens was not perfect and had slavery and sexism and economic disparity. Reality is all yin and yang opposites. Our materialism is an evil from the beginning of dividing the world into this or that, good or evil, true of false, black or white. Not seeing the interactions of life.
Hey, are you interested in what philosophy had to do with democracy and education? Because of challenges to what I have said, I opened my books and got better information. and now I am eager to use it. For me, these forums are like going to college. We all have to find our own books, but then we come here and share what we have learned with our peers and develop our ideas. That is what makes democracy superior- all the individual growth that is made possible by communication using the past and present to become enlightened. :heart:
It looks like you got a lot of agreement but I am not sure Mother Nature would agree with you. All life has to work and compete for a living and especially humans need a challenge or they get bored. I know many people think heaven would be a great place, but I am not so sure of that. I think what we think about life is mostly a matter of attitude. What would be better than what we have?
A utopia specialized to your tastes and where boredom itself doesnt exist, cause its a utopia. However, utopia means nowhere. Meaning, this is not a possible thing. Therefore, dont cause a non utopian arrangement on behalf of someone else. One far from it in fact. Meaning this arrangement (of working or death) should never be imposed onto someone else.
Again, someone who thinks this is a good arrangement of comply or die is a dbag.
You were right schopenhauer1 about this world, you were always right.
What, you mean all the other kids who live in the same kind of house, eat the same food, play in the same park, watch the same entertainments, root for the same teams, are influenced by parents in the same neighbourhood and the same social media and the same advertising? Yes, they do transmit culture, and keep it compartmentalized.
Quoting Athena
Not all of education is relevant to the current topic. Not even Eisenhower is relevant to the topic - too far outdated.
Quoting Athena
I made it a choice to ignore one claim I considered inaccurate.
Quoting Athena
Post 1958 education. So, what's your problem with it again? Now, I am well and truly confused about your position.
Quoting Athena
I not only inferred, but very clearly discerned, that you were very selective in you references to both Greek and American culture; highlighting some small parts, while obfuscating or ignoring big swatches of what don't fit with that view. By "look honestly" I mean at the whole fabric, dropped stitches, stains and all.
Quoting Athena
Possibly. We've gone quite a long way off topic. You might have access to streaming this program (esp. episode 3 The Greek Thing) for a concise overview.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1777715/ AQuoting Athena
So... "the philosophy behind American education" was always secondary to political and economic agendas? Huh.
Quoting Athena
Coulda sworn I've done that very thing!
:up:
But working or death is imposed on all living things. You might get what I am saying if your survival depended totally on yourself.
There you go again making a statement about something you know nothing about. We can not go on like this. There is so much information you reject before learning anything about it, that it is futile to continue. Maybe in the morning I will read more carefully what you have said and possibly find something worth my time to think about.
The change in education is about military technology developed in WWII. The internet is the result of the 1958 National Defense Education Act and this applies directly to the subject of this thread. If you don't want to know anything stop replying to what I say with explanations of why you will ignore it. :roll:
Of course I get what you are saying, because that is what I am saying. Complying is not JUST one arrangement (the modern Western capitalist economic system). It can be any system related to survival (like a tribal or Robinson Crusoe economy). It doesn't matter what arrangement you are causing (imposing) on the new person born, you are still imposing an arrangement that cannot be gotten out of except through degradation or suicide. This is not right to do to someone.
:cheer: Oh goody, a real philosophical debate. Is the imposing structure evil? I think you have clarified the force that makes us as we are is external. Is that correct?
In a tribe where everyone knows everyone, there are no formal laws and law enforcers, but everything happens on a personal level, and that personal level includes our relationships, so if you hurt my child, that child's father will deal with you, and if care for me when I am sick, or save my child from drowning I will owe you. I don't think that is the structure you are talking about. I think you are talking about a formal structure with written laws and law enforcers. These are very different realities despite the effort to use the gods or the one god to make people conform to an informal, cultural structure and use education to transmit information about being a good person.
The Hebrews faced a social conflict when they shifted from herding and communally sharing the land to farming and owning private property. Now instead of sharing everything in common, there are some rich people and some poor people. Genghis Khan was 100% opposed to settling in one place and private ownership of land. He commanded his people to never settle down and begin accumulating things and never chose religion over another. Did Genghis Khan have a higher standard of morality?
And your source of information for my absolute abysmal ignorance - besides my failure to agree with you is....?
Quoting Athena
Okay. So all you need to fix the problems created by automation since the 1960's is to hop in your time machine and reset the US education system to 1957.
So you are unnecessarily taking my argument down rabbit holes. Let's start from the beginning.
Life itself is something where once a person is born, they need to survive in some way (usually by way of cultural learning).
The survival game (in whatever cultural setting, tribal, Western-industrial, pastoralism, farming, whatever), IS the "comply" part. If the person born into the survival-game doesn't like that game, they have no choice but to starve to death, free ride, etc. or kill themselves. It DOESN'T MATTER what the contingent social game the person is born into, imposing ANY game (arrangement of survival) is what is wrong. UNLESSS the game was LITERALLY someone's individualized idea of what a utopia is (one where even being bored doesn't exist), then forcing this arrangement of comply (with the game, any game) or die is wrong to do to someone else. That is what one is doing when procreating another person into the world... forcing them to comply with the game (of survival of ANY variety tribal, industrial, Robinson Crusoe, or otherwise) or die. That again, is wrong.
You do not have to agree with me, but throwing out information because it is old is a problem. In your defense, I had a professor who rejected all research that was not in the Abstracts and was more than 10 years old. Perhaps you have a college education that taught you to reject information more than 10 years old.
:rofl: For sure if education had not changed in 1958, we would not be where we are today. The logic for this is the same as saying if the couple did not have sex 9 months earlier they would not have a baby. Education is like a genii in a bottle. The defined purpose is the wish and the students are the genii. We changed the purpose, the wish in 1958.
We went from education for good moral judgment to leaving that to the church. We went from education for independent thinking to "group think". We went from using the Conceptual Method to using the Behaviorist Method which can also be used for training dogs.
The changes were made in part because those in power thought the change was an improvement, and in part to advance technology as rapidly as possible and prepare everyone for a technological society with unknown values. That is not all bad, but ignorance of what was done is a problem because our liberty and democracy are not being defended in the classroom and we are shifting to a police state, and worse, an uncontrolled information age where China's TikTok has raised serious national security concerns and we are not prepared to talk about our changing reality.
https://apnews.com/article/technology-china-united-states-national-security-government-and-politics-ac5c29cafaa1fc6bee990ed7e1fe5afc
A good question by all standards. Some have said yes, others have said no, but the poll figures show a general inclination for the former.
Actual numbers:
Yes (technology should be blah, blah, blah): 53%
No (technology should be blah, blah, blah): 47%
:up:
No, however many times to repeat the claim, you didn't. You went from a hodge-podge of state, municipal, private, religious and trades education to something more nearly coherent. Education was always aimed at producing whatever kind of work-force the economy required.
Quoting Athena
Keeping debunked and refuted data past their expiration date is also a problem.
Quoting Athena
Also if education had not changed in 1938, 1910, 1895, 1803, 1662, 1412, 976 and 535 BCE. Also, if there had not been two world wars, a Bolshevik revolution, a US civil war, the Seven Years' war, the war of the roses, the French Revolution, the Crusades and the Peloponnesian War... That's right; everything past produces the present. Not one event; all events.
Quoting Vera Mont
No, it didn't. The internet started before any of the students affected by that change could possibly have contributed to developing telecommunications. https://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/unit07/internet07_02.phtml No, it isn't. Automation is a present fact, not a past hypothetical proposition.
I don't know. The US seems to have a lot of freedom and I would rather live with the benefits of a good economic system than without them.
You are in a philosophy forum. What do you think education for good moral judgment is?
What is refutable about Russia having nuclear powers and proving it can deliver? Sputnik proved the USSR had the ability to deliver a nuclear bomb. That is what justified the change in education, and IQ testing so teachers could select out those best suited for hirer education. That was not only a drastic change in the purpose of education but also a change in how we value people. What makes that history debunked and refutable?
Is that information also debunked and refutable or do you think history and cause and effect have something to do with our reality today? In the history forum there is a part set aside to discuss alternative histories based on changing the events of history.
This thread is about the advancement of technology and employment changes, and hopefully social changes. Education for a technological society with unknown values is important to our present reality.
All children getting college prep educations instead of more art and music and literature and vocational training, impacts our reality. In the past people with 8th grade educations had no problem getting jobs and some of them even began their own businesses. Today children are marginalized at a very young age and excessive population has pushed the cost of living beyond many people's means. We are scrambling to deal with these problems and don't have grandparents on farms where the young can find refuge from the poverty of cities. Now, this is getting more on-topic. How can those who are not college educated have desirable lives?
Probably not what you think it is. I believe good and bad moral judgment are not products of formal schooling, but the example children are shown, and the values they absorbs from their family, peers and culture. You can teach them that honesty is best policy all you want, but if their life experience shows that cheaters do prosper and the honest man is considered a sucker, most of them will cheat.
That's what I keep telling you. It didn't. "People" as a concept may have been "valued" as a concept in the official documents, but on the ground, in the battlefields and cotton fields, mines, railroads and factories, the vast majority of people certainly never had been valued as anything but commodities. The "labor market" is not, and never has been, far removed from the stock market or the cattle market.
The purpose of education was always to turn out whatever kind of work-force the economy required. The requirements of the economy changed after the US dropped Fat Man and Little Boy, yes. It had to be directed more toward technology, more toward space race and world dominance, sure.
And education had to adjust. Again. Just as it had had to adjust in the early 20th century, when automation made a lot of illiterate unskilled labour unnecessary, and demanded more skilled and clerical workers. Just as it had in the west, when tractors and harvesters rendered many farm labourers redundant, and young people going to seek work in the city needed new skills. As it changed in the south, when white farmers became sharecroppers and needed all their kids to lend a hand, just so they could scrape out a living, but the landowners, bankers and war profiteers sent their kids to private schools in Europe. Education follows the economy.
Quoting Athena
Obviously.
As the economy needs fewer engineers and computer programmers, those salaries fall and the courses leading to those careers will not be worth the tuition. (That's already happened, I believe; not sure all people know it yet.) When the economy no longer requires so many money-changers, fact-spinner, facilitators and executives, the education machine will stop churning out MBA's.
Not the other way around. As people become surplus to employment requirements (That was happening before Covid; now, it's less clear; a shift in attitude is under way.), they will stop trying to earn useless college degrees. For a while, there will be a continuing up-trend in building and maintenance trades, design and the crafting of functional items; some kinds of personal services, as well, but as the income distribution changes, so will the dynamics of who can afford what service.
Philosophy, literature, art and music, as well as nursing, early childhood education, food-craft, etc. will be taught after the economy settles down to some form of human-machine co-operative arrangement, so that people don't have to compete for increasingly scarce well-paid jobs. Of course, the government will to figure out a new way to fund itself before it can fund a new sort of education.
Before one can have good moral judgment, one must learn the rules of logic. That requires education for learning logic and this begins with learning math and how to diagram a sentence. Scientific thinking improves logic.
Socrates was concerned with broadening our conscience, our knowledge, especially knowledge of virtues is important and the virtues must be learned before we can be aware of them. This is why classical literature is important. However, science is also very important to our conscience.
How do you teach the rules of logic to a three-year-old? By the time formal educators can teach him anything, he's already absorbed his society's values. They're not about logic; they're about what's cheered and what's booed.
Quoting Athena
No, he couldn't have cared less about us. He was concerned with the adolescents of his own time and place. His idea of virtue was probably a little different from the average American's, which is a little different from above and below average Americans'.
Quoting Athena
It isn't, you know, any more important than all the literature that's been written in the last 2000 years. You seem to make a direct link between the golden age of Athens (less than 20 years, and even in that short time, some questionable situations arose) and some kind of golden moment, or maybe distilled essence
of America. There is no such link: everything in between happened. All the awful and hopeful, shameful and triumphant stuff happened. The moving finger writes; it erases nothing, forgets nothing.
The definition of democracy is copied from the series of grade school textbooks call "Democracy in America".
"Democracy is a way of life and social organization which above all others is sensitive to the dignity and worth of the individual human personality, affirming the fundamental morel and political equality of all men and recognizing no barriers of race, religion, or circumstance." General Report of the Seminar on "What is Democracy?" Congress on Education for Democracy, August, 1939.
Here are the characteristics that define the ideals and procedures of democracy. You can argue against them, but the point is this is an example of what was taught and I am proving what was taught.
1 Respect for the dignity and worth of the individual human personality.
2 Open opportunity for the individual.
3 Economic and social security.
4 The search for truth. (this is science)
5 Free discussion; freedom of speech, freedom of the press.
6 Universal education.
7 The rule of the majority; the rights of the minority, the honest ballot.
8 Justice for the common man, trial by jury, arbitration of disputes, orderly legal processes, freedom from search and seizure, right to petition.
9 Freedom of religion.
10 Respect for the rights of private property.
11 The practice of the fundamental social values.
12 The responsibility of the individual to participate in the duties of democracy.
The original purpose of free public education in the US was to Americanize the flood of immigrates and prepare everyone for democracy as this was understood in Athens. We really need literacy in Greek and Roman classics to understand what democracy is about but even teachers today are illiterate of the necessary literature. That technological adjustment made in education is devastating for our democracy which is no longer understood and this very much is about good moral judgment because people with the power of voting or even becoming a member of our government devastate democracy and liberty and right now we are in fight to defend our democracy with zero understanding this needs to begin with education. This is a crisis and Trump made us aware of it as he and his followers actually thought they use violence to take control of our government.
We did not have vocational training until 1917 when we mobilized for the first world war against an enemy that had far better military technology than the US. No one knew what the new vocational training would do to our lives and economy but for the first time, the new technology and vocational training made dirt poor people interested in having their children educated instead of keeping them home to help with the farm. This education was the best thing that could have happened to our nation.
If you want to argue this, fine, just do so instead of thinking you can avoid an argument by saying this history does not matter because it is old information.
While vocational education was added to education, preparing our young to be good citizens remained the priority until 1958, because before the military technology of the second world war, our defense depended mostly on patriotism. Citizens had to make big sacrifices to fight those wars. Not like today when we can engage in war without disturbing our morning routine and carrying on our lives as though there was no war.
Yes, as I have been saying that is the problem with education for technology. The children are educated but left ignorant of what everyone good citizen should know. Seriously we did not depend on immigrant parents to prepare their children for democracy. We knew the parents would learn from their children.
"You" must have been very wise to realize that all non-English speakers are too stupid to understand about democracy before they decide to make the huge sacrifice of leaving their kith, kin, worldly goods and homeland and take a chance on the new World.
If you think you know enough about Socrates to tell me about him, let us start a thread for that purpose.
What I am saying is it requires education to understand and defend democracy. The issue is not a person's native tongue, but in the past immigrants did not have experience with democracy and they did not understand our institutions. Today that is true of most Americans thanks to education for technology replacing the education for citizens that we had. I also think Socrates is miss represented when people say he hated democracy. He hated ignorance, not democracy, and so do I.
Quoting Athena
You keep talking about this wonderful education you used to have. I find no historical trace of it, and no resemblance to the Athens that also didn't live up to your ideal representation. And I still can't see any relevance of either to the thread topic.
Yes, it is more important than the large volumes of books printed since 2000 if the subject is democracy. Some good books about democracy have been written in modern times, but how popular are they? Which of them have you read?
Quoting Vera Mont
Yes I am linking ancient Athens with the democracy of the US, before 1958.
Why do you keep arguing about something you know nothing about? What do you think separates the East from the West? Athens was the Mother of western culture and the Father of science and the parent of democracy. Athena taught men how to govern themselves. You know them not.
Come to my home and I will show gladly show you the evidence. Or you can start your own search for the American values every child was taught. That is how I came to the information I have. I wanted to prove a commentator wrong when he said teachers should not have to waste their time on poor students. Back in my grandmother's day, teachers thought it was their purpose to teach good citizenship and prepare the young for adulthood, and also to help each child discover his/her own talents and interest. Let me be very clear about this, the education was for the individual child's benefit and the dream is those so benefited will be enabled to give the country their very best. Democracy through education lifts the human potential.
My grandmother felt so strongly about her purpose in life that she continue teaching long after she was forced to retire because of her age. She did this with love for our democracy which liberates the individual and aims at justice for all. Athena is represented as the Statue of Liberty, The Lady of Justice, and the Spirit of America as she is portrayed in the mural of gods at the Capital Building. All of them have the Sword of Justice. Liberty holds a book representing knowledge that sets us free. The Lady of Justice holds a scale as justice is a balance. As the Spirit of America, she brandishes a sword that defends liberty and justice and she stands for morale, that good feeling we have when we believe we are doing the right thing. In the past, we associated virtues with strength, and our honor or reputation was very important along with our dignity.
Think thread begins with a moral question of right and wrong. Giving up the education that made us great to focus on education for technology was a huge mistake. Only when democracy is defended in the classroom is it defended and we are not doing that. Our present amoral society does not reflect the values that made us great. That same thing happened to Athens, leading to Socrates finding fault with democracy.
So, where did all of those properly educated citizens - which should be ever American who went to school - go? What happened in 1958 to disappear any effect they might have had? Why didn't they stop the steal?
Quoting Athena
I don't know which past or which "we" that refers to, but it doesn't leave much trace in the history books. Maybe it's just in the elementary school readers and the inscription of statues. Symbolic.
Why didn't they stop the steal? Number one all those people knew no more about education than you do. Nor do Americans know any more about philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment and what both have to do with democracy and education than you do. OR if they did know about education for democracy and good citizenship as my grandmother did, they were powerless because unlike you all the people who do not know what it is so important to know, they just don't care and they don't argue or ask questions, they just ignore the subject. Do you see many people engaging in the argument?
Quoting Vera Mont
My grandmother walked away from the schools that made the change because the school interfered with classroom discipline. She went on to a private school that did not interfere with her classroom. And then she became a Vista Volunteer and worked with immigrant children and taught their mothers how to play the piano in the evening. When she could no longer reenlist in Vista she went home and volunteered at another school. And our local newspaper was staffed with people of her generation and they were as well-mannered and virtuous as she was I am sorry younger people can never experience the reality we had because now all these older people are dead and every generation we get further from them, the worse things get. If you knew those old people, we would not be arguing.
Have you seen Eisenhower's explanation of the change? Can you try this? Think about this thread and the question about technology when you watch the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWiIYW_fBfY
That warning goes with Billy Graham working with Eisenhower to create fear of those godless people of the USSR, and bonded our pledge of allegiance with the Christian God. And it goes with schoolchildren being drilled to duck under their desks and cover their heads with their hands, and selling those who could afford them, private bomb shelters. Following WWII was a period of paranoia made all the worse by a behind the scene grab of our country, and industry increasing their contracts with government during a time of peace. Before this, the Roosevelt administration, with the help of Hoover designed the bureaucratic structure that is essential to increasing the power of government bureaucratically. Eisenhower added to it, a new relationship between government and research for military purposes and a new relationship with media.
If you find what I said unbelievable, please ask questions that require more information or validation. I am well impressed by your tenacity in continuing your arguments and asking questions. I wish our arguing would catch the attention of others who may remember the people who are now dead. It is a challenge to find a find a written record of their existence but I can think of one more video that may help you see for yourself we have a different past. And I kind of like the challenge you have given me. :grin:
:coffee:
If they didn't know, your grandmother had wasted her effort on them.
Quoting Athena
What's the point of a democracy where the properly educated citizens are powerless against an elected government's decision to change their good education system for a bad one?
Quoting Athena
Yes, quite a lot, now, present company included. But I didn't hear any arguments in 1958 (granted, I was 11 and wouldn't have understood much), when Americans were, according to you, educated in good and democratic citizenship. What I should have asked, more literally was: Why didn't they stop Eisenhower??"
You seem to think they were gulled into compliance by paranoia (The threat of nuclear war was pretty damn real; I understood that!) and a large civil service. If they all had the superior democratic education you claim for them, why was it so easy to hoodwink them? And if they were powerless, what do you expect from Americans now, with their inferior education?
Quoting Agent Smith
Two things about that: NONA and There is no such animals as an average person.
The average person, how would you define him/her?
I wouldn't. I don't believe in them.
How about if I ask "what would most Americans/Iranians do?" Does that make sense?
It might, if you provided a context. What would most Americans do, if... when... with... about... what?
In any case, I don't know most Americans. I know some things about some Americans. If you asked "What would Heather Pilsik do if she suspected her son of taking drugs?" I could hazard a guess.
"What would Stewart Rhodes do if his fearsome leader accused his vice president of disloyalty?" I would be able to say definitively.
But most Americans or any Iranians? No frickin idea.
Wow who is the better person and why? I am afraid I can not give a good answer. You caused me to doubt my firm position on education because you made me aware it is very culturally biased. If we live with each other, education for democracy is essential but that is not so everywhere. There are areas of the earth that provide adequate diets and resources for small groups of people who are very happy people. They live in Eden and maybe we should not destroy that. I am hesitant to say our more technologically dependent society is better. But for a large society, we may be doing better than in China and for sure we are doing better than Aghanistan or Hatti.
Why? Climate is one reason, the environment is another, and knowledge of science is important. The size of the population is very important. We become impersonal and instinctively more dependent on discrimination and formal laws when we live in large populations.
Culture is another serious matter. Culture is taught and used for social control. Now I think we get into climate and environmental factors. People are more liberal and less fearful in mild climates and their culture would build on the climate and environment they experience. Life in Siberia is going to be different than on a tropical island. I would not be so pompous to run around the world and say everyone should have the education that the US needs.
Ok. The issue was whether education makes a difference/not. How would you go about answering this question?
You're of course correct, but we were discussing education.
Of course it makes a difference. It turns people who don't know something into people who do know something. What they are taught varies by time, place and culture, as well as economic, political and military considerations.
In the context of the OP, changing education - in any country - would have no effect on automation or the advancement of technology or the ownership of the means of production, or the government's power to regulate business, industry and the movement of capital. So, if it made a difference, it would be on the individual level.
One kind of change could make some employees more compatible with emerging technology, and thus employable longer, while having no effect on the redundancy of most. Another kind of change in education might render the surplus population better adapted to their unemployable status, while still having no effect on their ability to make a living. Yet a third kind of change might prepare students for occupations outside industrial production, packaging, transport and distribution - all of which are in the process of automation - again, bearing in mind that this can apply only to a minority of workers.
If we had in place the political and economic mechanism to guarantee all the redundant employees a decent standard of living, they would then be free to choose whatever kind of education they personally considered most useful to themselves and/or their children. Only then would education be changed to meet those demands.
My grandmother wasted no time but opened opportunities to thousands of young people and successfully defended the US democracy in the classroom. The success of teachers includes winning two world wars and also preparing our young to advance our nation in every way, and those who continued their education and got college degrees were almost guaranteed upward economic opportunity. Nothing has done more for individuals and our nation than education.
Who knew the change would lead to serious problems? In 1917 and again in1958 there was a lot of fear and immediate action seemed necessary. At the same time, we were flying high on our successes in technology and medical advancements and had what some may say was an unrealistic faith in technology. And a very big determiner of events was, and is, the influence of Christianity.
From the beginning of the US, secular people were pitted against the religious people. The majority believe humans are born in sin and bound to do wrong unless they are saved by a spiritual force. Only a small handful of people were literate in the classics and understood what education, other than reading the Bible, has to do with democracy and lifting the human potential. Only the Age of Enlightenment, secular people, believed science and democracy would manifest a New Age, a time of high tech, peace, and the end of tranny. While religious people wait for a God and the last days. Everyone's intentions were good. What was lacking is a good understanding of what culture has to do with high human potential, liberty, and justice, and what education has to do with culture.
Let me make this clear, religious people expect a God to take care of us, and they are not enlightened. Science tells us masks, distancing, washing our hands, and vaccinations are essential to stopping the spread of disease, and ministers were telling their flocks to ignore science and they stirred paranoid fear of our government being evil, setting the stage for a violent attempt to take control of the National Capitol Building and overturn the election. This is what is wrong with education for technology and leaving moral training to the church and you can bet Christians and their ministers do not see themselves as part of the problem. They oppose public education for good moral judgment and do not understand their fight to be the authority of what is moral, and for what they believe, is part of the problem.
Our relationship with Christianity is kind of like our relationship with slavery. We have kept both for the benefits while denying the problems.
Always! You won't change that.
You're right of course - education would need to be overhauled in order to meet the challenges & capitalize on the opportunities of emerging realities, among which is (some say) rapid technological advancement. How do you suppose we should do this?
I have my own little theory of how the young should be socialized and trained, as Athena has hers, and we each seem to have little comprehension of what the other is advocating. No doubt many, many other people all have their different theories. "We" can't do anything. If "we" existed as a coherent unit with a single vision of how things should be done, "we" would already have a plan in place. In fact, all that the US and Canada have done in this regard has been done by regional (state and provincial) governments, with loosely enforced standards tied to the federal purse-strings, and subject to policy and administrative change at four-year intervals, plus the aforementioned hodge-podge of private, religious, trade, military, specialty and reform schools. IOW, spotty and full of cracks.
The Finns and the Japanese and the Israelis apparently made quite good education systems for their children... But. On one hand, they have the advantage of being unicultural societies concentrated in small territories, and on the other, the systems that are competitive in the present state of affairs may turn out to be utter failures when the global economy implodes. They'll figure something out...
I don't think we need to worry about education. It will follow from what's perceived as needful.
What "we" have to create is a political structure built on the needs of the polity, not the requirements of big money. That is quite challenge enough for a "we" that's divided into at least five age denominations and five diverse world-views.
That would have been the educated people who learned the culture promoted by educated people.
Quoting Wikipedia
What? You believe the priority of education should be transmitting a culture based on what was best of the Greeks and Romans? Then we do not have a disagreement.
I am confused about who is arguing what. Education was overhauled by the 1958 National Defense Education Act that ended education for citizenship and the transmission of a culture based on Greek and Roman classics and put in its place education for a technological society with unknown values and left moral training to the church. It was the beginning of a federal takeover of education and judging children with IQ tests and gradually the federal government increased its control of education. Everyone here might remember the No Child Left Behind Act put through by Bush Jr. and hated by teachers. The joke of that Act is that it required schools to give military recruiters children's names and addresses. A play on the meaning of no child left behind.
I said nothing about priorities or 'should's'. I agreed that what was lacking was lacking and will continue to be lacking, because nobody has a good enough understanding of culture to fix indelibly into a whole federally mandated curriculum. Especially as culture keeps changing.
Every generation prepares its young for the world they themselves inhabit - not the world in which in the children will live when they grow up. Every generation, every faction, every denomination and nationality tries to impart its own beliefs, mores and values to its children - and the children invariably disappoint their parents: they change. The best that can be done is to let 'em at knowledge and let 'em go.
Greek and Roman cultures are interesting to study. So are plankton and whales. So are solar flares and meteor showers. So are poetry and music, math and pottery.
Average people are mathematical reality. That does not negate the reality of variety.
Show me one! Mathematical realities are average income, average intelligence, average height, average vocal range, average running speed. What number is "average personhood"?
Can we imagine we are native Iroquois and talk about what is important about being one of them? Do we want our children to know what is important about being Iroquois?
How about being Jew? What is important about being a Jew? Do Jews and Christians and Muslims and Hindus teach their children what is important about being one of them?
Now what about being an American and what it means to be a good citizen in the US? Does this mean following Trump and attempting to take over the Capital Building with force and threatening people like election workers and members of congress? Our Capital Building was open to tourist and we could visit it whenever we wanted. Trump supporters ruined our liberty to do so. Some of these changes came with 9/11. Some of us believe our democracy is going in the wrong direction. Do we want to continue ignoring our lack of culture that did give us a lot of liberty?
Absolutely yes. That play yard is constructed with knowledge of averages. The school policies and class planning is built on knowledge of averages. But this does not mean a fourth grader from Peru is not struggling with the language used in his new US school. The boy from Peru may not score high on the IQ test because of language and cultural barriers.
That would have to include: Quoting Athena
Quoting Athena
Quoting Athena
and a lot more besides. People do try to teach their American children all of those things, and they more or less fail.Quoting Athena
I'm afraid it does include that, too. That very large, noisy disaffected minority is not an accidental byproduct of education-for-technology: it's the product of crappy political and economic organization.
Quoting Athena
Don't the drain? Yes, I would agree that's the wrong direction.
Quoting Athena
I don't know what you-all, collectively, want. I only know you can't seem to agree.
Awe technology! We live in an information reality different from anything in the past. Thanks to computers and the internet we can gather and store huge volumes of information. We can pick any factor of being human and use information in the Cloud to know where the average person falls in a spectrum of differences.
We can learn about average people with surveys. We can know how many people in our area identify with being Christian and assume some things about them. Then we need to do social research, a test of some kind to know if the assumption is true. Can you think of something that would define an average that we can not figure out an average for? Keeping in mind an average does not negate differences.
Why do they fail? Who is the child following if not the parents?
It is not culture unless it is what a society holds as valuable and this is why I keep hammering away at the importance of education transmitting a culture. Here is a definition of culture... the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group. Cultures around the world vary and they are learned.
Because "the old country" is immediate and real to the grandparents; a nebulous memory to the parents, irrelevant to the children. Because their children's world is different from their own. Because the future is different from the past. Because things change. You can't bring back your grandmother's kind of teaching. It belongs in the past. You can't reconstitute an ideal America that never was. It is what it is and will become what it will become.
Your reply is the problem we have today! That is the result of education no longer transmitting the culture that was transmitted before the 1958 National Defense Education Act ended that education. The very reason we have free public education was to prevent those problems. Teachers were proud of their efforts to support unions, granges, fraternities, in general the need to work together to achieve a shared goal. There is so much to talk about!
That's your version and you're sticking to it. I disagree, but admire your tenacity.
In the 1970's we announced a national youth crisis. My son and daughter were part of that and I take the change in education very seriously. I was in school when the 1958 National Defense Education was enacted and I remember my teachers walking around in a state of shock. It was frightening because at that time when were also very afraid of a nuclear attack from Russia and doing drills of ducking under our desk. :rofl: As though that would do any good in a nuclear war. Finally in the afternoon a male teacher explained the purpose of education had been changed and it was now about preparing the young for a technological society with unknown values. We could not get any further from the value-laden education we had.
That change in education lead to women's liberation and increased the strength of people of color gaining equality and finally to the Lesbian, bisexual and gay movement. It has also weakened family values. That is the meaning of unknown values, anything goes. Problem is like civilizations before us we ripping apart. We have a technological society with unknown values and we are not prepared to get a consensus on what our values should be. I do not mean the change in education is the only thing that lead to change, and I want to clarify some of that change is a good thing.
What I mean is those in power did not understand the importance of culture and what education has to do with it in a secular society. We still do not get, that culture does not have to be a Christian culture or a Muslim Culture to have social order and liberty. That culture can be based on Greek and Roman classics and a liberal education. For me, the ignorance of what I am saying is our national crisis. We do not have the knowledge that is essential to having social order without authority over the people.
Education for technology ripped our children from us. In the past education contributed to respecting our elders, and wanting to be adults with responsibility, human dignity, and liberty.
You missed something that is vitally important about our identity.
Our identity is tied to feelings of belonging or feelings of alienation. Our identity can also be tied to feelings of pride or feelings of shame. This is a very important factor when considering a child's education. We now see it as wrong to educate native American children in such a way as to intentionally break all ties to their tribe. The well-intended missionary schools that tore children from their families and punished them for speaking their native language are seen as a terrible thing today. On the other hand, the Scandinavians who settled in the area where I live, have an annual festival celebrating the heritage. Asian Americans who live here have two annual celebrations educating us about their culture.
Am I making my point clear? When it comes to education, one size does not fit all. However, American citizens should share a set of American values (national values) and know our history. Immigrants must prove they know our values and history before they can be citizens. However, today the average high school student may not be able to pass the test for citizenship.
Your blindness to cultural differences is as disrespectful of all people as the missionaries and is as dangerous as driving blind. However, our education for a technological society seems to put universal knowledge first and ignore our differences as though they don't matter. I think I have given examples of why our differences do matter. It is painful to be anonymous in the crowd and possibly disenfranchised.
Those who stormed our Capital Building most likely suffer from feeling anonymous and disenfranchised.
Quoting Vera Mont
That is a problem. You seem to lack an understanding of what culture is and why it is important.
Did you learn that in school? I believe you did and it is why I keep hammering away at what is wrong with education for technology and blaming those who gave us this education for ripping children away from their families.
Our ideal democracy has always been in the making and we are realizing successes that were not possible in the past. In the past, our education system was very limited and many students dropped out by grade 8. That is too young to learn more complex thoughts such as the thinking skills needed for philosophy and science. Jobs did not require a lot of education and we needed all the working hands we could get. Hopefully, they learned to be good citizens and hopefully, they continued learning for the rest of their lives as this is essential to democracy.
Not in the least. In fact, you seem to have thrown a lot of ideas into a big pot, but, like America, they refused to melt into an alloy.
Quoting Athena
Really? I'm sorry you think that. Frankly, a bit surprised, as well; I thought better of you. Quoting Athena
No, I learned it in my immigrant family.
If we can bring back my grandmother's way of teaching, our democracy is doomed. Thomas Jefferson and teachers understood that. Since you do not like my efforts to explain what the Age of Enlightenment has to do with education and democracy, I will quote Kucinich and Thomas Jefferson. Right now most voters seem to lack the principles that are important to democracy and that is a problem.
Unless were motivated by principle in our voting, we walk into a mirrored echo chamber, where theres no coherence, Kucinich
"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion."
Thomas Jefferson
"There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people." Thomas Jefferson
"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day." Thomas Jefferson
"Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both."
Thomas Jefferson
"To all of which is added a selection from the elementary schools of subjects of the most promising genius, whose parents are too poor to give them further education, to be carried at the public expense through the college and university. The object is to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country, for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind, which, in proportion to our population, shall be double or treble of what it is in most countries."
Thomas Jefferson
"If the children are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us much dearer in their consequences than it would have done in their correction by a good education."
Thomas Jefferson
"To instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests and duties, as men and citizens...this brings us to the point at which are to commence the higher branches of education . . . . To develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order."
Thomas Jefferson
"The objects of this primary education . . . would be . . . to form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend." Thomas Jefferson
The good and the bad of our education does not stop with individuals doing well in life. How well individuals do depends greatly on how well their family has done. A nation not united with culture is not united. Few disadvantaged children are doing well because they do not know of life outside of the tiny experience of it. Education centered on those who will go to college cheats all those who will not go to college out of the education that serves them best. But more important is why education is important to democracy and liberty.
"If the children are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us much dearer in their consequences than it would have done in their correction by a good education."
Thomas Jefferson
That is what we need to understand about the trouble we are having today. Automatic weapons are selling much better than the classics or books about philosophy. We think we defend our democracy with weapons of war and are clueless of the importance of the classics and philosophy. That is not how to manifest a democracy and liberty.
If the citizens of the US wanted lifelong education as much as they want weapons to defend themselves, the state of our union would be much better. Voting ignorance destroys democracy. I refer you to Socrates and Plato. I will repeat the quote from Kucinich.
Unless were motivated by principle in our voting, we walk into a mirrored echo chamber, where theres no coherence, Kucinich
If the purpose of education is about preparing the young for a technological society with unknown values, what happens to the nation?
to comment any further than I already have which, as you would've noticed, is an example of someone talking out his/her bung hole, er, I mean hat!
God points though. You seem to be aware of the flaws in our system, but as I reported in the climate change thread, something really weird is going on.
I have had a super great morning so far. I unexpectedly found something in my files about the WWII war crime trials that is perfect for my arguments. Now I just need to figure out how to do a new thread that will attract more people who can help me think things through.
The 1958 change in education in the US has produced people who can not reason independently, leading to reactionary politics and other problems. Education for technology is not education for independent thinking and is intentionally education for "group think". One would think education for "group think" would be ideal for democracy but- group thinkers are dependent followers, not independent thinkers. And there are social, economic, and political ramifications to this change.
The US adaptation of the German model of bureaucracy seems a logical improvement over the extremely efficient bureaucracy we had. Seriously we could not be a world power without that adjustment. Please ask questions. I am dying here trying to figure out how to say things so they are understood. This is a control issue. How has authority and power? Let me try this...
The Nazi were not evil people but people controlled by bureaucracy and educated to be like parts that serve the Borg.
I must leave the man I am trying to help on the streets in freezing weather, or I could lose my housing and he would not be able to get the help he needs to get the appropriate independent housing. That is bureaucratic control of our lives. It is immoral because there is no human connection with people on the streets like in Germany there was no connection with the Jews. People are just doing what they have to do for their own benefit. Failure to submit to the bureaucrat control can mean serious sacrifices such as losing housing or a job. Excuse my pagan aphorism but damnit why is it so hard for everyone to see what has happened and what increasing technology is going to do to our liberty and freedom? Technology will give some people excellent jobs with excellent pay and benefits, while it will marginalize all those who are not absorbed into the system. The masses will get public assistance and they will also be very controlled by fear of losing these benefits if they do not submit to the bureaucracy.
While Christians like to believe they get the credit for our liberty and democracy, the belief that we are born into sin can lead to a very controlling bureaucracy over the people. The US left moral training to the church and the church is not the best for liberty. Believing we are born in sin and need to be saved is very different from believing education can bring out the best in humanity.
I'd say we need ta dig a little deeper and try some role swapping along the way. "Are we worthy to be saved, o lord?" muttered the kneeling priest.
Bureaucratic order is everything.
It is really important to understand what bureaucratic form has to do with the power of government to control or influence our lives. I have repeatedly said the US adopted the German model of bureaucracy and with the German model of education this gets what we defended our democracy against. Unfortunately I am not understanding why my words are meaningless to everyone and what I can do about that. If people got what I am saying, the discussion would be very interesting to me.
Of course I want people to ask questions and think about what I am saying. As for they US being #1 in tertiary education, that has nothing to do with democracy and not much to do with culture even though universities teach art and music, because what the elite learn is not important to the masses. In a democracy citizens must be well educated to be good voters and that is not happening.
God's law is 'right reason.' When perfectly understood it is called 'wisdom.' When applied by government in regulating human relations it is called 'justice. Cicero
Unless were motivated by principle in our voting, we walk into a mirrored echo chamber, where theres no coherence, Kucinich
Cicero was a Roman Statesmen educated in Athens before Christianity. To have "right reasoning" is be knowledgeable of the philosophy that put us on the path to science. It is to know logos, reason, the controlling force of the universe. By eighth grade a student better know virtues and principles and be prepared for life long learning and taking responsibility for the whole country. If this does not happen the democracy will self destruct.
The Prussian model for bureaucracy is a handful of people set policy and even if all the generals are killed things move forward as the policy dictates. The identify every job that needs to be done and define exactly how it will be done. This produces a mechanical society where individuals know their job and nothing more. They are to do exactly what they are told to do and nothing more. They are specialized and are glueless about what everyone else is doing.
But our forefathers were generalists and didn't have a concept of merit hiring and IQ testing and controlling all the details. Their focus was on a person's character. The character was everything. Reasonably intelligent people can learn anything but a person with a bad character is not likely to change and becomes like a rotten apple in the barrel. We learned an American mythology and we learned about our national heroes, because we are supposed to become like them. We are supposed to be virtuous and act on principles, and we are supposed to give service to our country. We do not have one book for teaching us this, like the Christians have the Bible, but the education is essential to our liberty and not fearing we could be shot down if we go to a mall for Christmas shopping.
In the old stupid days, people did a job based on their interest and talents and when someone died and had to be replaced, the new person would do the job differently and everyone would have to adjust. That could throw a large organization into total chaos! When Lincoln was killed the nation went into chaos. I know you are thinking we change presidents regularly and this thought needs to be followed by how everyone following policy means the train of events keeps moving and turning things around takes time.
It is the difference between these bureaucratic models that makes the change in education dramatically different. We are no longer generalizing and repairing everyone to be civic and industrial leaders so where are leaders coming from? Look at Trump and his family. The leaders are coming from those in power. Or the children of immigrants who were inspired by the American ideals much more so than those who take our democracy for granted and now expect the government to take care of them. Our focus on merit and is not giving us the leadership and supporters of that leadership that a democracy must have. With the present bureaucratic model, people just need to follow policy and it is best if that is all they think about. That is the opposite of the ideal citizen in our past.
I replied to you 4 days ago, but didn't quote you so I have copied and pasted my reply with the hope you will reply.
Yes, a lot of ideas in a big pot is a complex concept. Democracy is a complex concept.
If we can not bring back my grandmother's way of teaching, our democracy is doomed. Thomas Jefferson and teachers understood that. Since you do not like my efforts to explain what the Age of Enlightenment has to do with education and democracy, I will quote Kucinich and Thomas Jefferson. Right now most voters seem to lack the principles that are important to democracy and that is a problem.
Unless were motivated by principle in our voting, we walk into a mirrored echo chamber, where theres no coherence, Kucinich
"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion."
Thomas Jefferson
"There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people." Thomas Jefferson
"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day." Thomas Jefferson
"Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both."
Thomas Jefferson
"To all of which is added a selection from the elementary schools of subjects of the most promising genius, whose parents are too poor to give them further education, to be carried at the public expense through the college and university. The object is to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country, for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind, which, in proportion to our population, shall be double or treble of what it is in most countries."
Thomas Jefferson
"If the children are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us much dearer in their consequences than it would have done in their correction by a good education."
Thomas Jefferson
"To instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests and duties, as men and citizens...this brings us to the point at which are to commence the higher branches of education . . . . To develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order."
Thomas Jefferson
"The objects of this primary education . . . would be . . . to form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend." Thomas Jefferson
When it coalesces, yes. I don't think yours did.
Quoting Athena
Not really. Every citizen has a right to choose leaders and influence policy.
Quoting Athena
Bullshit, Tom! You wanted to keep your slaves, including your own bastard children.
Hypocrisy we have always with us - past and present.
Also corruption, will to power and dominance, deception, avarice, aggression, resentment, jealousy, arrogance and rage, mental illness, religious delusion, addiction, bigotry and plain old everyday disagreement.
America has never closely resembled its own image of itself or the image it presents to the world. But then, neither does any other country. Some are just more opaque than others; some have been luckier; some are more demographically diverse. Some nations, like individual persons, have a self-image that's less distorted than others'.
Ouch, democracy is far more than choosing leaders. It is also about being one of them. Democracy is o about producing leaders and those leaders must have willing followers or they can not lead. Democracy is rule by reason, not authority over the people.
What is important is the wisdom to keep things in harmony with the universe and education is essential to that task. Democracy is about the whole not separate and divided individuals. Of course this is not understood without literacy in Greek and Roman classics. The importance of morals to democracy is no longer understood and our amoral democracy seems on the verge of self destruction.
Thomas Jefferson wrote a law to free the slaves. https://www.monticello.org/slavery/paradox-of-liberty/thomas-jefferson-liberty-slavery/ The slavery issue was a complex one and judging people and what happened without understanding the complexity is not wisdom. Not everyone in Jefferson's day was well educated and therefore not everyone was influenced by the reasoning of the Enlightenment. Jefferson was influenced by the reasoning the enlightenment and I think it is important to hold a better understanding of his struggle and what the enlightenment has to do with opposition to slavery. We can not directly experience the enlightenment but we can learn about it in books.
As in influencing policy? Seriously, which farm-hand, miner or railway porter ever got within sniffing distance of active leadership? Quoting Athena
As an idea, that sounds simple. In practice... not so much, and that's as true in ancient Athens as modern USA.
Quoting Athena
Sounds nice. What does it mean in daily life?
Quoting Athena
What's complex about it? Kidnapping people is wrong. Torture is wrong. Rape is wrong. Human trafficking is wrong. Keeping people in captivity is wrong. Selling children is wrong. Forcing people to live wretched lives of labour in order to enrich other people is wrong.
But it makes money.... lots of lovely money to endow libraries and carry out extensive horticultural experiments and donate art collections and all those other fine civic contributions to the betterment of one's own kind for which grateful towns erect statues to dead rich guys.
Quoting Athena
Nothing. No European nation in the 15th to 17th century had any qualms about subjugating peoples who were less well armed than they were.
It's not about Reason. It's about profit vs. conscience.
The Quakers saw this quite clearly... I wonder why all those sophisticated, educated, bewigged and worldly gentlemen did not.
I took action that resulted in changing a city law and another period of action created a law that gives Grandparents rights totally changed the department of children's services policy. I was also an advocate for the homeless and a lot has happened since I got that ball rolling. That is very much what our democracy is about. Anyone one of us can write letters to the editor, write letters to a representative, and might even meet with them. We can take action on the city, county, and state levels. We can organize groups for different things and public support. We can even run for the presidency.
And, as to the complexity of the slave issue....?
First, it means maturing and being okay with knowing individuals do not know that much. It is being old enough and experienced enough to begin to understand the meaning of all the facts. Knowing facts is not equal to knowing their meaning. This also goes with learning to ask questions. Part of learning good reasoning is learning logic (math) but logic alone does not equal wisdom.
Education is essential to developing wisdom. That can be informal life lessons. Traveling and experiencing other cultures is very helpful. Reading with the goal of expanding one's conscience is important. Studying philosophy and debating it with others is very helpful.
Keeping in harmony with the universe means observing nature and how it works. It means knowing logos, reason, the controlling force of the universe, and good manners. In the past gods represented the forces of nature and today our sciences help us understand the universal laws.
Good question. In ancient times slavery did not have the same moral characteristics it has today. In the past, a slave was simply someone who lost a war. Slavery was an improvement over killing everyone. Also the conditions of slavery make an important difference. Unfortunately, light-skinned people did not see dark-skinned people as humans just like themselves, and this led to different rules of slavery than they had when they were enslaving their own kind.
The Bible was used to justify slavery and the Bible was used to argue against slavery. I am blown away by the fact that Christians in the West do not know the passages regarding slavery. I don't know if you want to get into this but in the US we might want to know more about the Bible and slavery. Darwinism also played a role in justifying slavery. I have a modern (less the 20 years old) book about education that says people with dark skin are biologically different from people with light skin. :gasp: The author of that book needs to learn more about genetics. I was shocked that today someone could publish such a racist book. When someone takes a position of authority, such as an author, that person needs to be held to a higher standard.
Bottom line the right or wrong of slavery is a matter of conscience. Ignorant people are blind to their errors in thinking. We have evolved our higher conscience thanks to having a constitution that was formed with thinking from the age of Enlightenment and the notion that individuals have rights. That was not exactly so in the time of Athens. Athens did not have the concept of individuality that we have today. Ancient Greeks were still more like tribes with a tribal identity, not an individual identity.
In Athens, people could argue just about anything in a court, but as they fought for their rights, it wasn't exactly their individual rights, but a matter of justice. Socrates argued what is justice and that is, how, do we as a people, survive and avoid the punishment of the gods? We still live with the remnants of this thinking. We may fear God will punish us if the people in the town are sinful, and tolerating homosexuality will bring on the wrath of God. We like to believe we survive hurricanes because God favors us and protected us. Whatever, I am trying to say, slavery is not wrong when you have a different set of beliefs than what those who believe in human rights hold as true and important. And some slaves had better lives than industrial workers in the north who were exploited and then dumbed when they were no longer useful. Today it is hard to comprehend such thinking.
The Age of Enlightenment is about very different reasoning. How good is your knowledge of history? The Age of Enlightenment follows Scholasticism. The change happened very slowly and you need this information for your arguments. If you can, imagine yourself as a serf with no education except maybe to learn a trade and of course learn some of what the Bible says about demons and angels and obeying God and then think through what is to follow. All you know about the world is what you have seen in your lifetime and it is unlikely you got more than ten miles from where you began life. You as a serf are not part of this change but it is beginning to happen.
Now OMG!:gasp: The whole world is turned upside down! No longer is the church the only authority! No longer is everything controlled by a God! And those Quakers you mentioned were led by men who read the classics and communicate with each other across national boundaries. This is not so for all Protestant denominations but thanks to the Muslim trade routes Europe has paper and Gutenberg's printing press makes Bibles and Greek and Roman classics accessible. Now the individual can read and determine for one's self what to believe. This is a completely different life than serfs had before the Age of Discovery opened the world.
Bacon, born in 1561 really heats up the debates with inductive reasoning and there is a backlash against the church, scholasticism, and Aristotle (deductive reasoning).
Individuality and individual self-will, and deductive and inductive reasoning, and empiricism, are a whole different world. You flee to the city where you may gain your freedom if you are there long enough, and this is not God's will but your own will. :up:
Good enough to have a pretty firm grasp on the sequence of events. Not good enough to follow your line of deduction from 4th c BCE Athens to 20th c America.
Quoting Vera Mont
Where is the break in my explanation that is a problem? I did not mention how Plato and Aristotle and Greek dualism, in general, influenced the church. Should I start back there or is it okay to start with Scholasticism which was built on Plato and Aristotle? Do you think Europe getting access to the Chinese technology of making paper and printing affected the general consciousness of who has authority and what makes authority legitimate? I don't know how to respond because I don't know where you see a problem in the sequence of events.
You don't need to respond. I have a different perspective on the cause-effect chain, that's all.