From: Steele, Kirk A (SteeleKA@nafm.misawa.af.mil)
Date: Sat Feb 02 2002 - 23:22:08 MST
Mermaid,
In 1906, not 2001 the world and corespondent paradigms were much smaller
things then. Minds could be subsequently narrow and still get "the big
picture of the time".
Ask the folks on the Memetics List. (JoeDees) How has metaknowledge evolved
in the past 95 years.
Ask a Cultural Anthropologist specialising in the cultural CONTEXT of a
language, it's society and subsequent information artifacts, this:
"Given that the awareness of the metaconcept of critical self review has
existed in literature for over 2 thousand years, why does humanity, by and
large fail to incorporate it into the substrate of education. Why do we
teach our children to first differentiate the other, vis a vis people
outside of their own culture, and predispose them towards belief systems
that imbue intolerance vice teaching them how to learn and question and
think for themselves, think critically?"
Kirk Steele
All,
Mermaid did not respond in a critical manner by merely requoting my post and
adding an apparent attempt at effacement through the use of a tacit
affirmative invection. She did not even embrace the primitive tenets of the
now antiquated ideals set forth by M. Sumner.
This pre-mass-media sound bite that I quoted was culled from a society that
was solely bound up in Cartesian Mechanism. And H. Sumner blended his
concepts as does the person to whom I direct it. Epistemology of the day was
an art striving to express itself as a science. It was in it's infancy as an
emergent formal structure. Today, we have the benefit of a multidisciplinary
science, replete with many reviewed and accepted formal structures.
Unfortunately, many domains of society would drag the science of the study
of knowledge back into the esoterisms of holistic expressionism and artistic
effluvium.
Charles Darwin is the progenitor of Genetics. The HMS Beagle was his dais.
But we no longer quote him directly when we discourse critically over the
forwarding of our knowledge base. We refer to him as a historical reference.
In the conversations of a low context culture, we bind our assertions to
some reference point in historical context. We seek to provide a starting
point that others can start from so that we do not have to repeat all of
history in the formulation of our arguments. We start somewhere in the
middle, or more recently, of the timeline with a few "references". We
establish a STARTING (read not sticking) point and we go FORWARD. It is our
responsibility to carry the conversation forward.
This inability to PROGRESS in thought, in reference, is a key failing in the
domain of contemporary human communication. Critical reason, or more
explicitly, it's complete lacking in the majority of our contemporaries is
one of the diagnostic features of the great personality disorder of our
societies today. People learn from their parents how to behave in society.
Children learn to adopt the tendencies in behavior that are acceptable to
the culture in which they are being socialised. Children learn to mimic the
personality of their referent society, via their parents. Societies have
personalities. And societies have personality disorders. People mimic these
disorders and invest their contingencies of self in these dysfunctional
tendencies in behavior just as much as they do the rest of the personality
of the society. If their society values a lack of critical reason, a lack of
questioning of the status quo, then it's members will likewise devalue
critical reason, logic, knowledge. There are entire societies that have
cultural biases against knowledge, they devalue reason and logic because to
embrace cognitions would take away resources from their personal investment
in the emotional contingencies that they have been ensocialized with. They
have emotional baggage they would have to disallow in order to accept
knowledge. They remain arrested in THOUGHT, in reference. They do not
progress. This is the price of BELIEF.
Kirkasaurus Wrecks
Progress comes from the forefront of knowledge. If you're not thinking on
the edge, you're taking up space. Get out the way!
[Kirk Quoted]
... Education in the critical faculty is the only education of which
it can be truly said that it makes good citizens
(Sumner, pp632, 633 Folkways, 1906)
[Mermaid]Yes?
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