I'm pretty sad to see Steven Den Beste cash it in, because I think the kind of analysis he presents comes closest to what I'd consider "Demosophia." To me if a problem has been around for longer than a century it's probably too complex to be captured adequately by a popular ideological construct. Since civilization has been around for about 5,000 years most of the easy problems have been solved. It really isn't possible for a single individual to grasp every aspect of the complexity of these outstanding problems, since "expertise" is local and constrained by personal experience.
Bucky Fuller, one of the true founders of Design Science as a cross-disciplinary enterprise, used to call the universe "a non-unitarily conceptual and partially overlapping event scenario." In other words, it's not a "thing," so in a true sense it can't be "fixed." Sometimes I think people like Den Beste, who attempts to grab as big a chunk of the these BIG problems as possible, by expressing "pure patterns" rather than "answers" are inevitably hounded by "fixers" who simply don't see that their experience only partially overlaps that of anyone elses.
It is true that recognizing broad patterns doesn't solve problems by itself, but the capacity or aptitude of grasping larger patterns in greater dimensionalty tends to create a more effective problem-resolving effort. And I look at what Den Beste does as a contribution to the development of that human capacity that has been under-developed in this impatient and self-promotional civilization. It's the big "what's next," that has been misidentified by the left as 'socialism.' It's as though, lacking the self esteem to pursue wisdom, we chose instead to simply pursue agreement and cooperation. One can see this reflected in the nearly universal accession to the notion of "multilateralism," which is really just a writ-large version of the "hermeneutic circle." As Victor Davis Hanson observed recently, Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union was the most "multilateral" invasion force in history, arrayed against a unilateral defender. But Winnie and FDR had no trouble determining which side we ought to be on.
Someday I'd like to continue the discusson with Den Beste over the "three-way war" notion, but it's probably not necessary to work out all the details and trim all the edges in order for it to be a valuable concept.
Well, here's a little advice to Steven, that's probably only minimally helpful. If he chooses to set his words in ink rather than the more unstable medium of electron flows he might receive fewer demands for revision. People tend to recognize that once the metal presses ink to paper such demands are futile. Anyway, it was always fun to read his stuff... and the archive is still there to spark new thoughts, and inspire more breadth and dimensionality as we grope slowly toward wisdom.
Posted by Demosophist at August 30, 2004 03:50 PM | TrackBack