Tuesday, May 22, 2012

the LIBERTARIANS versus the LIMITERS

     I find the term 'denier' just a tad oblique: what these people deny, most fundamentally,is the idea of any limits on their freedom, aka humanity's potential, all bow down.
     (This is the latest variation of the age old war over the limits, if any, to the physical manifestations of humanity's rational and imaginative mental powers.)
    I prefer a variety of terms, some of them my neologisms, others are commonplace and readily understood.
    For example, Libertarians versus Limiters (rather than Deniers versus Doomers).
     Libertarians are fully comfortable with - only comfortable with - the familiar 'old shoe' of 19th Century Science of  Newton and Dalton and Darwin and Euclid that is still the only science being taught in most 21st century schools.
     By contrast, Limiters being those who ignore their high school teachers and who accept the latest findings of the science that there are definite biological and material limits (restraints upon) to humanity's potential.  
    Or Cartesians (dualists who see Man above Nature) versus Commensalists (Humanity entangled within Nature.)
    Why not Pie-in-the-Sky Utopians/Idealists versus Down-to-Earth Realists?
   Lab scientists versus Field scientists, aka Natural Philosophy versus Natural History?
    Plato versus Aristotle.
    Small "l" liberals versus small "c" conservatives.
    And finally - and obviously - Cartesian Sky Gods versus down-to-earth Earthlings.
    While it is an age old battle, this century is different.
    Because it is no longer simply a case of one philosopher debating another philosopher.
     Rather it is the fact that one side is, at last, fully able to try out its theory upon the world and the other side is busy crying out " Please God - dont ! - your experiment will go deadly wrong and destroy the only lab - the only world - that Humanity has."
   I will report this battle fully, fairly, but always from the general side of the commensalists, limiters and earthlings, making no bones that I am hoping ,above all else, to alter the course of that battle in my side's favour....

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