h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Stone Art could have given a better one anyway.

In five parts.

But what do Socialists think about the Tour de France?

Something about having nothing to lose but your bike chains?

Or possibly your sense of taste, if you're Mark Cavendish.

B

>> Nothing. Because you're confusing them with the sports pages of the newspapers. <<

A pigeon has a small brain because it need not navigate between holes.

>> "AND WHAT DID THE VATICAN SAY ABOUT THE MONACO GRAND PRIX, EH?" <<

There lies the rub, strange bedfellows and all that. Strange you should justify your moral position by claiming they are the same as the Vatican (moral relativism). Yet I thought your moral position would have do away with the Vatican. Seems a bit inconsistent

Now I can't tell if you are trying to be funny or not.

That last post was a JOKE right? Right?

FB

Quotation from the Apostle John in the New Testament:

"So long as people are good to one another, God is with them."

So long as its contingent on that fundamental humanist principle, I'll endorse deism.

Favorite quote, Katherine Hepburn to Humphrey Bogart in the film, "African Queen", "...nature is what we are put into this world to rise above...", an essentially Anglican (or Congregationalist) perspective.

The equivalent Hindu percept, from "The Bhagavad Gita", "...the pursuit of artificiality and cultivation is the very purpose of a human existence...".

Personally, I like to think of Humanist as the opposite of Scholastic: the former being an empirical way of knowing and the latter relying on knowledge passed down from the Authorities. It was the major change in European learning during the renaissance and allowed Boyle to make his own Law rather than relying on Aristotle (et al) to have made it for him.

Anyway, you can be a humanist and religious (Newton and any follower of natural theology from Basil the Great) or not. There are some religious experts who prefer the scholastic tradition via revealed theology (such as Karl Barth and friends).

The split between Humanism and Scholasticism is functional as more than religious. Empirical learning will only get you so far. In the end schools with teachers are exceedingly useful and I am prepared to trust the authority of Boyle without ever repeating his discoveries. However, while creating dichotomies is always fun and sometimes useful, like analogies, they are not to be trusted.

I suppose I should have said: I think Humanism, as a way of thinking and being, is going brilliantly and will take us to the stars. However, if you define it as a system of moral philosophy then it is probably just doing alright - it is just another variety of bean in the tin.

I'm reminded of one of C.G. Jung's studies, in which he demonstrated that the symbology of Alchemy was evolved from that of primitive Gnosticism.

Then, of course, with the Rennaisance, and the secularization of the universities, Alchemy became science, with a shift in outlook from one dependent on tradition and authority to one dependent on reason and empirical study.

People tend to forget that at the beginning of Sir Isaac Newton's career, alchemy was still cutting edge technology.

His own interest in was apparently stimulated initially by his need for quality glass for his optics experiments.

Hollywood to the contrary notwithstanding, traditional alchemy had much more to do with glass making than frauds pretending transmutation of base metals to gold.

That he was well equipped educationally to deal with such frauds had a lot to do with his appointment as treasury judge during the closing years of his career.

Humanism and anthropology are certainly not one and the same thing, but they are not unrelated either.

I imagine there are plenty of people with anthropology degrees that might take issue with that statement.

In fact, I imagine there are a lot of people who are even vaguely aware of what anthropology actually is, who would take issue with that statement.

B

Actually this thread got me to take out Tom Paine's "Age of Reason" which confirmed that Paine was the first person to propose a "Religion of Humanity"- in other words that human life should be organised rationally and universally, ignoring all established religions and received ideas about God. As the "Age of Reason" explains he had come to France to join in the "New Dawn" in the "Old World" having helped to bring about a rationalist revolution in the New World: but was appalled to find the French masses just inventing vile new superstitions and irrational ways of operating like "The Reign of Terror", with revolutionary leaders whipping up the credulous masses in order to serve their own purposes- which is what he believed happened in conventional religion, as in conventional monarchical government.

Mention has been made of the "Humanism" of the "Renaissance", but it is not clear that the term "The Renaissance" was actually in use until Burckhardt's all important work on Italian Art of the fifteenth century that was written in the 1860s. It seems likely to me that just as "Feudalism" and "the Feudal system" were inventions of Nineteenth Century rationalism so were "Humanism" and the Renaissance: and like "Feudalism" we have become so accustomed to using 'isms' and 'systems' and 'mechanisms' in our understanding of the more distant past that we anachronistically project back into the Past our modern modes of thinking, when such things were no more than a gleam in the eye of those who were going to set those trends in motion.

Paine, however, was a Deist and his "Religion of Humanity" was based on his conviction that Creation is God's revelation to Humankind, ever-present, and ever-living, to be examined scientofically and rationally in order that people should live in accordance with God's laws as revealed by Science. In fact Paine a largely self-taught individual and one limited by the knowledge of his time assumed that all religions everywhere in the World had an idea of Almighty God, which does not seem to apply to Buddhism, Taoism or Confucianism, but his insistence on rejecting all other Gods but his , and bitterly rejecting those who were Atheists, left him rather a "one man band"- and an example of the Prophet in his own Country syndrome. William Cobbett discovered in one of his later stays in the USA that his body had just been shoved in a grave in a corner of a farm field, and decided that one of the great English-born thinkers should have a proper tomb in England. Cobbett had the body exhumed: but Paine never got his tomb or even a proper grave, his bones seeming to have been distributed as 'curios'.

Cass

As usual Cass, that was several paragraphs of enlightened discourse which advanced us precisely nowhere in the debate of this topic.

B

The Question "Has Humanism failed?" sent me back to a Fifties biography of Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, who, because of some articles that he had written about the desperate condition of millions of people in Britain and Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, was asked to go as a delegate to the Movement for a United Europe Conference at the Hague c1946.

By this time Science, Technology and Rationalism were being regarded as very much the way ahead. After all it had been the basis of the cooperation of the Axis Powers with their very different traditions, cultures and civilizations. From the first years of the Twentieth Century the Japanese had shown that Western Science and Technology was all about the "How" of things, and said next to nothing about the "Why". It could be made to work for a Japanese society that was still rooted in Japanese culture in all that really mattered in life, just as it could be made to work for the insane Gothic/Teutonic mysticism ariotheology of the Nazis. So the spirit of the conference listened to Winston Churchill's great plea that Europe should work out some way in which it could break out of its grim history of wars of nationalism and religion. And the answer seemed to be that wisdom of Bismarck updated to the modern era. Bismarck (who after all was not a politician but a minister of the Crown chosen by Royal Appointment) had said that the masses were only interested in full bellies. So the real challenge for Europe would be to organise the Economic Rebuilding of Europe so that Europe would be able to keep the masses happy and immune to the extremism of Left and Right that led to the Second World War when the World Economy descended into Chaos in 1932-33.

To a very large degree this is what the European movement and the European Union was able to do up to 2008 when the 'wheels really came off' of the managed Europe and, all of a sudden politicians were remembering the World Economic Chaos, and the masses started flooding to the great cities of Europe in a way that possibly had not happened since the great Year of Revolution in 1848.

As above, plus with overtones of racism.

But that's no less than we expect from you, is it?

B

Back at the start of the European Project Cheshire was disgusted especially by the secularist tone of the resolution put forward by the Cultural Committee. As very much a man of action who had just created his Very Important Persons Project to take the unemployed and "unwanted" who wanted to work and to live in his new colonies creating mini-commonwealths, he could not see that rationalism and agnosticism would produce the energetic commitment needed to win this struggle to build a better New World this time. In Committee he followed up a comment from the ex-Anglican Bishop of Truro who criticised the resolution for not recognizing the need for "Christian Humanism", and he said: "The primary tasks of man on earth are to love and serve God. These admit of no compromise with humanists or politicians or anyone else. Humanism isn't Christianity, whatever else it may be. The whole movement towards European unity as defined in the resolution of this committee is to my mind anti-Christian".

But the rational and humanistic managed reality of the rebuilding after the Second World War was also part of the Welfare State, and in the 1949 edition of his Economic History of Great Britain C.R. Fay updated his work to include the Welfare State and especially the Old Age pensions, saying "How long and how far will the young and fit be willing to work for the old and unfit? Perhaps only so long as the young and fit believe that they can do it intermediately by squeezing the erstwhile rich."

But, of course, as "Call the Midwife" (which I am just off to watch) showed just how crucial religious faith was in bringing the benefits of the Welfare State to those in desperate need.. Time was that public service was not regarded as needing the same material rewards as compatible jobs that did not and do not have the same life transforming potential.

Cheshire found his own calling in turning the shell of his VIP colony into a hospice where he cared for a dying old man with not a friend or relative in the world, and went on to create with Sue Ryder his second wife one of the largest chains of Care Homes for such people in the world.

Cass

Mu Beta

Where is the racism? The point about Western Civilization being very much a question of how and not why, so that it can be mastered by other cultures/civilizations just as easily as by "The West" is one that was made back in the Fifties by a favourite author Han Suyin (a fascinating bridge'- being half Belgian and half-Chinese) , and I think that she put it in the mouth of a venerable Nepalese gentleman in her novel "The Mountain is Young". And there is no better example than "The West" to show that it is not necessary to be "Civilized" in order to be able to build a way of life around the latest Science and Technology.

Cass