--- Dennis Perrin <dperrin at comcast.net> wrote:
> Burroughs, from what I understand, was someone you
> could talk to quite
> seriously.
Yes, that's true Dennis, but there is a difference between Burroughs and your average holier-than-thou extremist. One, he was intelligent enough to know that any metaphysical speculations needed to be tempered by a dose of rationality. Nietzche called it the "bicameral system of culture":
"Illusions, partialities, and passions must provide the heat, while the deleterious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be averted with the aid of scientific knowledge" ("Human All Too Human")
The other extreme is scientific dogmatism which "knows" what is and has trouble breaking out of its bubble. I am not attacking science per se, just science that gets fixated on the current truth (as described by Kuhn).
Both extremes religious fundamentalism and scientific dogmatism try to cling for dear life to an illusory rock.
Thomas
<<We are at such a point in mankind's evolution where changed conditions invalidate all our policies that have been so successful even in the recent past, and that presumably have constituted the ideal response to a presumably unchanging and unchangeable human condition. No wonder we are stupefied and confused-but our mistake is the same which many cultures have made before us, namely to force a rigid model upon a fluid reality.
Erich Jantsch - "Design for Evolution: Self-Organization and Planning in the Life of Human Systems"
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