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Discussion Membership
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Turning point
In every age there is a turning point, a new way of seeing and asserting the coherence of the world.1 -- Jacob BronowskiThe turning point is now. The idea that someone can claim control over the life of another by virtue of magic is bankrupt. Believers have pushed the world to the brink. No longer is it safe to put faith in the idea that the Magus, the initiate, the elect, can run the world for you while you lazily live life according to the luxury of an incoherent set of clichés and past beliefs.2 3 People tolerate ineffective answers to serious problems when they are insulated from their effects, when they have no sense of history, or when they haven't the skill to care. But those old ways aren't good enough now that barriers to travel and communication have crumbled. Isolation is no longer a defense now that science has put so much power into the hands of anyone who cares to learn that an iron box will no longer protect your wealth or bolted door protect your family. Believers trying to push their faith on the unwilling have brought the world to this cusp. As unlikely as it is that I will embrace your religion as the operating standard for society, it is equally unlikely you will embrace mine. That's as it should be -- It is absurd to believe that one religion shall be chosen above all others simply because you are a member.4 Faced with competing claims of special privilege by virtue of sacred texts, to deny one is to deny them all. The rude awakening is that if one religion cannot govern, neither can another. That's okay, because society is too important to leave to religion. But then religion's real strength has rested with the internal ordering of an individual mind rather than the external ordering of competing cultures. The turning point has three consequences:
Until this turning point, many people have been unwilling to look beyond religion to order society. No longer an alternative, the problem is to skirt the absence of Platonic universal beliefs, the instability of Machiavellian power politics, the tyranny of Mills' utilitarianism, or the slipperiness of Sartre's relativism to find an accceptable alternative. Fortunately, tools are better now than they ever have been to help people of differing cultures recognize what would make a sound common foundation for shared society. There is opportunity to build alternative frameworks for society from scratch, justify them, and weigh their advantages, but enough for now is that people accept we are at the turning point. Only then can we make something of it.5 History is not events, but people. And it is not just people just remembering, it is people acting and living their past in the present. History is the pilot's instant act of decision, which crystalizes all the knowledge, all the science, all that has been learned since man began.6And from that... to make a future.
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