.

Dear Squeers,

.

Conscience has to do with awareness of what is at stake from a moral point of view, discerning right from wrong. It has a religious connotation. There is no right or wrong in nature. There is only what is most efficient for survival and development.

The faculty nature has endowed us with is not conscience in the moral or religious sense but in the sense of consciousness, the awareness of reality and of what is most efficient, not just for our own survival and development but for that of the whole species of which we are a member.

The degree of consciousness of some individuals appears to be particularly limited as illustrated by their behaviour: an irate mother who shakes her baby so violently that she inadvertently kills it; somebody who flicks a burning cigarette out the window of a car while driving on a forest road; nightclub proprietors who padlock fire-escape exists to prevent people entering without paying ... Many people live their lives dangerously without realizing it.

As you probably know, the last book published by Darwin just before he died was on earthworms. It seems he began studying them as a boy and continued to do so, off and on, over a period of forty years. He observed that they have a well developed sense of consciousness, capable of identifying and choosing various types of leaves, etc., etc.,.

He submitted them to various tests and concluded that worms, although standing low in the scale of organisation, possess “some degree of intelligence instead of a mere blind instinctive impulse”.

It was the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, who first suggested in 1893 that societies dispose of a common or collective conscience as a distinguishing factor similar to that of culture.

Carl Jung extended the concept in 1919 to what he called the collective unconscious.

I am tempted to extend it to include "collective free will" in order to designate the autonomy of societies to make their own collective decisions without any outside influence or interference.

.

Dear Squeers, in the 135 comments were some of mine.

Needless to say, I included myself in the failure to achieve any real conclusions or any semblance of an action plan.

What was important was not particular personal failures but the failure of the group as a whole to rise to the task presented by Nick.

Banjo Paterson,
you seem much more confident in your worldview and your grasp of complicated philosophical issues than I am--and how did we get on to "conscience"?
The idea of consciousness as conscience is interesting, though I don't see how we can infer one from the other. And Durkheim, being a sociologist, would tend to put the bad mother's, and bad behaviour generally down to social influences.
I read a lot of Jung when I was young and idealistic, but am having trouble with your segways from worms to the collective unconscious to collective free will. You haven't had one too many glasses off red?
Societies have no free will unless they choose to exercise it; and I've always been fond of the stricture that free will means acting "against" one's natural inclination. As it is, collective free will remains enthrall to the capitalist rubric. Once it was religious ritual; now it's ritual consumption.
But really, I'm not sure what point you're making--and I sympathise that it's hard to expound difficult subjects via this pithy medium.
What you're espousing are inductions and they may be astute, but there's a big difference between rationalising reality and resolving it. From my reading on the subject, consciousness so far refuses to yield to our rationalisations--which doesn't mean, however, that we all have to go back to sack-cloth and idol-worship.
Meanwhile, materialism requires more than a modicum of faith--both in our senses and in the sense we make of them. Do you really think either is felicitous or objective?
The one thing we can be sure of is that they're compromised from the outset.
For the materialist, why should our cogitations be any more abstract or sophisticated than Darwin's worms?

David G,
it is a frustrating business and I take no pleasure in being the spoiler. I would adopt Eisentein's lifestyle today. I'm looking for ways to defend idealism for my dissertation (and peace of mind), but it seems to me idealism is no more useful than Nero playing his fiddle.

Squeers, glasses of red, now that's the answer. All the rest is vain-glorious posturing by intellectually puny humans.

Only humans can turn that which is simple into something incredibly complex and unfathomable.

We are born, some of us procreate, we grow old, and most of us die miserable deaths. That is our story, same as every other life form. The story repeats endlessly.

Our ego and conceit and arrogance tries to trick us, tries to tell us that we are superior, almost gods.

We are not! We are little more than a swollen plague of brutal, violent, greedy beasts.

At least when Nero played the fiddle, he was engaging in something creative. And the burning of Rome brought cleansing!

The U.S. will burn one day. The smoke will be jet black!

Cheers.

.

Eisenstein's Sacred Economics

.

Despite Nick's kind invitation, I'm afraid I have no inclination to read the full text of "Sacred Economics". I shall satisfy myself with his book review. I am sure he has treated all major issues.

Eisenstein is what the French call a "doux rêveur" (a gentle dreamer), which speaks for itself.

The inconvenience, of course, is that dictators like Stalin, Hitler, Castro, Franco etc. are particularly avid of revolutionary ideas which may serve as a power base for imposing their authority.

As Eisenstein reminds us, Milton Friedman pointed out that economic crisis is a particularly fertile terrain for sowing the seeds of political change. He quotes Friedman as saying:

" Our basic function [as intellectuals] is to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable".

That does, indeed, sound familiar.

The list of dictators in modern times is long (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator#List_of_dictators_in_modern_times) though incomplete and awaiting future additions.

The tragic case of Salvador Allende, the president of Chile, also comes to mind. He was the first Marxist to become president of a Latin American country through open elections and by no means a dictator like Stalin or even Pinochet who succeeded him to the presidency.

Gentle dreamers certainly have an important role to play in opening our eyes to alternative concepts but the cure they prescribe for severe economic illness can prove quite lethal when it falls into the merciless hands of ruthless dictators.

Nick tells us that the author, himself, admits that many of his arguments and proposals will seem naïve, utopian and hopelessly idealistic.

Unfortunately, like all gentle dreamers, he is apparently completely oblivious to their possible tragic consequences for humanity.

.

Banjo,

Well summed up.