— Heck, even the act of destruction is important, nay, vital to progress.
O- Alright. Why don’t you destroy your pinky finger so that you might make some vital progress.
X-- Is my pinky holding me back? If my pinky had melanoma, I see no reason why I wouldn’t cut it off. Alternatively: Have you ever seen the dreaded line of a blood infection crawling towards your heart? Is it not better to amputate than let the infection destroy the body.
But there is a better way of thinking of the cycle of destruction and creation: Shiva. Shiva works as a wonderful metaphor for the process. Many cultures have that representation.
— People don’t like being told they are wrong and one of the best ways for new ideas to gain acceptance is for the generation whose values it opposes to die.
O- All that progress made so far in the realm of science has not lead to the necessary death of christians, has it? “best ways”? And you don’t find something wrong with that statement and what it by consequence invites? Now here is a little metaphor. A muscle, in a vacum, in space, deteriorates. Why? Because it lacks resistance to exert itself against. If one grows strong it is in part due to the vigor of his opposition, the severity of his exercises.
The generation of ideas comes as well from the interaction of competing ideas. When Catholicism became dominant, we had dark ages. Protestanism invigorated the mind of europe in it’s contraposition to Catholicism, not in it’s replacement of it as the new universal.
It is not the death of X by which Y emerges strong, but by it’s continued existense. What occurs is not gain acceptance or that this acceptance is dependent on the genocide of the opponents to the idea but in the ascendancy of the idea and the decendency of it’s competing idea…not people. People adapt to the cultural mileu, the enviroment to which they are exposed, and create constantly by the mix-match interposition of various ideas rather than developing from scratch. New philosophies do not need to repudiate Plato and every other philosopher ever since. Science depends on the conservation of ideas, not in their destruction.
Thus, my position is that violence, destruction, debilitates rather than strenghten a being.
X-- I never said that violence was the only way. Also, I’m one to think that cooperation, rather than competition, is what wins the day. But take things like the Periodic table, right? Something that we all hold as pretty much a given today. Well, during its day, it was fairly controversial. The people who held onto the mistaken belief that the periodic table was hoey did us the favour of dying and now we pretty much only periodic table-believing people. The heresy of LaMarck continued for a long time after the theory of genes had been proven, especially in the USSR. Those who held onto that flawed idea where both shown to be wrong and (many of them) died because of that folly.
Incidentally, I disagree with your interpretation of European history, but that is a different thread.
— Also, change is difficult, change is expensive. Why change when you don’t have to? Violence forces change.
O- But is this change for the better? More desirable? Change can be expensive, but it does not follow that we must pursue change at all cost, or that change, in-itself is desirable. When a movement for change resorts to violence it is not so that further change might follow it, but to end all change.
X-- I never said that we should follow change at all cost. Nor did I say that change is better. Merely that change allows for the better. An object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by another force. Societies, people, ideas – all these things suffer from inertia from time-to-time. If the foundation is sound, that is all well and good, but occasionally something better is, indeed, a good thing.
— Look at the Economic miracle in post WWII-Germany. The violence of the war had completely destroyed all their aging industrial infrastructure so that hyper-modern replacements could be built.
O- You’re are using the prosperity that came after the war to justify the complete destruction of germany’s economy during the war? You’re right! Let’s us raze Rome to the ground and build Wal-marts where St Peter’s now stands. The Colisseum too is highly unscientific and could be improved with a hyper-modern replacement, like Canseco Field.
Germany did not need a war to update it’s industrial infra-structure, in my opinion, given that they produced the Nazi warmachine that could only be defeated by an impressive line-up of industrial giants.
X-- I’m not justifying anything, merely observing. Observation is moral-neutral. Now, if we want to talk purely about industrial productivity (which is what I was discussing) then building factories using post-WWII technology is indeed more productive than building factories using circa 1870-90 technology. As for the comparison between St. Peter’s and Wal-Mart, I am fairly certain that St. Peter’s generates more income per square meter than any wal-mart. Also, wal-mart style stores tend not to fair well in the European market.
— Other countries lagged behind because, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. To enact change, sometimes ya gotta break it.
O- I don’t know if violence against infra-structure means the same to Croce as violence to people, as in WW1. It’s like saying that in order to produce William Shakespeare, you must first gas his trech and kill him. People are not like buildings. Buildings, for one, have clear intended uses. Not people. The measurement of humanity is not done in battlefields littered with corpses or in Aushwitz.
X-- How can you seperate the two? The German people needed rebuilding and restructuring post-WWII more than their industry did! Britain’s factory infrastructure lagged behind Germany’s, even as early as the Great War, but as the post-war years showed, Britain’s cultural infrastructure was clearly superior. What else would have shaken the Germans, or the Japanese for that matter, out of their cultural-funk? It takes a certain kind of cultural, as well as economic, rot to allow fascistic depotism to creep in. While I appreciate your eloquent rhetoric, I think your idealism is sorely misplaced.
And I’m incredibly idealistic.
Under your model, how is the issue of inertia dealt with?