[MD] Social Darwinism

[david buchanan]

Krimel said to dmb:
I believe I made mention of this post in our discussion of betterness. I 
said it is a relative term. Here in indicated as relative to its opposite. 
To first claim that Quality or DQ aims at "betterness" and then claim the 
term subsumes worseness as well is just horse hockey.

dmb replies:
Horse hockey? I imagine it's very difficult to find skates that fit a horse 
and it's hard to imagine how they could pull off a slap shot without falling 
down on their horse faces. (This is not a criticism of Mick White, by the 
way.)

But seriously, better and worse are "subsumed" under Quality in the same way 
that hot and cold are both subsumed under temperature. Better and worse are 
relational just like hot and cold are relative. In both case, the terms have 
meaning in relation to each other. Without "down", the idea of "up" means 
nothing. And so it is with all concepts. So I'd say that the notion of 
"betterness" in isolation, without its opposite, would be a steaming cow pie 
of an idea.

Krimel said:
By the way I went through a lot of pain reading that Wilber stuff for you 
and I have been dropping digs at Wilber for a month now. What's a guy gotta 
do to pick a fight around here?

dmb says:
Sorry about that. School kept me busy until recentlty. But I've only noticed 
a few vague digs. If memory serves you've been saying that he "abuses" this 
or that idea. I guess the idea there is that it is some kind of violation of 
the rules to do anything except accuarately and precisely duplicate what has 
already been concieved and written. This attitude can only stem from a 
pretty serious misunderstanding of the nature of his work. I mean, the whole 
idea is to alter and thereby improve the ideas he's gathered from elsewhere. 
Piaget springs to mind. Anyway, it seems to me that the LAST thing he wants 
to do is leave these ideas as they were. Instead of "abuse", I'd 
characterize his use of these ideas as a creative synthesis. He's using this 
material to build a new thing and sometimes that means there is going to be 
sanding, trimming, connecting previously unattached pieces and all sorts of 
alterations. Maybe you'll take your favorite example and explain the 
difference between the original idea and Wilber's version of it. This might 
give me a chance to see this so-called "abuse" much more specifically. Then 
we'll have a nice fight about that.

Also, I feel compelled to respond to your comments about my (lack of) 
reading comprehension skills. Despite the probability that it'll only make 
me look defensive and pathetic, I gotta tell you that my scores have been 
consistently very high. A million years ago when I was in college, none of 
the other history majors had a better score. (98%) And over the past year 
I've been writing papers for the very purpose of demonstrating comprehension 
of the assigned readings and I've earned an "A" every time, except once, 
which was nearly an "A" (89%). So what's my point? I'm not terribly 
concerned about that particular criticism. I'm sure you could think of a 
more plausible attack.

dmb

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