Spoken like a true 17-year-old. Do you even know what words like “epistemology” or “metaphysics” mean? For the latter, I recommend Heidegger’s “Introduction to Metaphysics” in which he deconstructs, in the Derridaian sense, the question “Warum ist é¼berhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?” or “why is there something, rather than nothing?”

I am also highly entertained by the juxtaposition of this thread, and its condemnation of increasing personal freedom, with the following thread, with its absolute defense of the right to gun ownership. Apparently, the right to own a gun = good; the right to choose what to do with your body = bad, unless it involves transfats, in which case then it’s good. You people are a riot.

What are you, an anarchist, Tom? I think it should be obvious why people bother living if their inevitable fate is death. If you don’t know why… that’s not my problem. It’s not, “if entropy occurs” all the time. It does, you just have to deal with it as every living creature has to deal with death through their choices. Trying to deny that the problem exists, doesn’t really make for good choices, Tom.

Who’s talked about going back in time, neo? Not what any one of us who disagree with you/Ymar wrote.

The general timeline is that Neo started talking about her point, not replying to anyone of ya’ll. Then when people kept talking as if Neo meant you can’t go forward and saying this means you can go back, Neo tried to clarify her point about what she meant. People kept playing semantic games combining nostalgia with what they wanted for the future, but talking about it in the past tense. As in, looking back and going back.

Neo’s original point was that you can’t go back in time, but because people are hardheaded, they kept reading what they wanted to see or feared, not what was actually there, Tom. Who exactly am I refering to, one might ask. Well, how about you, Tom, as one convenient example.

And your “We can’t go back” conclusion symbolizes our largest societal problem: accepting error and erroneous outcomes as fait accompli. Recall the classic Edmund Burke statement on the triumph of Evil. When we are manifestly and obviously wrong we must “Go back”.-Tom

Really, Neo’s we can’t go back in time conclusion symbolized a large societal problem about how to act towards the future… You need to pay attention to your problems, because they aren’t mine or Neo’s problems. Maybe if you recognize how problematic your arguments are, you can go back and fix them.

Tom Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 10:08 pm

I’m disappointed with Ymar’s and Neo’s misapplication of the Second Law of thermodynamics to our subject today.

You can start with your inability to accept that entropy increases and does not in aggregate decrease in this universe, Tom. You may not like it, but that doesn’t mean you can refuse to accept it.

In the end, you first have to get the metaphysics of reality more or less correct first, before you can start crafting up some kind of ethics system.

(Anyway, the 50’s weren’t as innocent as they’re portrayed. That’s actually something of a 60’s urban legend; they seem to be confusing the 50’s with the Victorian era.)

No, we can’t “go back” to the 50s, where some young girls panicked, thinking they were hemorrhaging to death when they hit puberty. Or to the idea that women ought to be pure while men can play around.

But I can see people turning toward a different type of caution. For example, my brother, who has two young daughters, makes sure that when their friends are over to play, there’s another adult present (his wife) so that he cannot be accused of inappropriate behavior with the neighbor kids. He would never be guilty of such a thing, but given how awful false allegations are, he’d rather practice propriety rather than risk the accusation.

Furthermore, women might realize that “friends with benefits” benefits only the guy, that the effects of oxytocin can’t be ignored, and that teen sex isn’t such a good idea. Or men might decide not to get into a compromising situation to prevent a false allegation, not because of what the neighbors might think.

There are too many young mothers having children with serial live-in “boyfriends” (always hoping the boyfriends will marry them, which never happens); too many broken homes, ex-thises and former whatevers, and all of them fighting over who gets the lion’s share of the money in the household, and which kids are going to the family’s “real” kids, and which ones can be considered “discards”; too many lonely singles who’ve simply given up, and are investing all their energies in weird hobbies, weirder religions and their cats; too many abusive males who see women as simply providers of sex and housework, and who feel no sense of responsibility towards anyone, and too many kids growing up without fathers.

Our society can’t continue this way. Either it will collapse, or it will find, or invent, some sort of morality it can follow. Certainly just letting things muddle on as they are now is no solution. The government really can’t be Dad/provider for generations of fatherless, rootless kids, and very few people seem to be really happy withe the current sexual anarchy.

What does that mean? That you can’t go back in time is a triviality, but that doesn’t mean that the accepted modes of moral behaviour can’t change drastically. What we have now is the result of popular psychology and left thinking, but it is not in any sense science or fact based, rather it is based on made up mythologies like Coming of Age in Samoa, a debunked work that is still in College syllabi. Because current ideas of morality are just intellectual fashions, I think that when the leftward swing finally dies, which looks pretty inevitable at this point, fashion may once again change drastically.

There are examples from the not so ancient past of such changes. In England there was the change from the Regency period to the Victorian era. In American history, there was second Great Awakening that produced the Abolitionists, and the third Great Awakening a generation after the Civil War. My grandfather was born in 1868 and was part of the third Awakening. He saw himself not only as a servant of God, but as combatting the coarsening of society that followed the war. The third Awakening was associated with civil rights, women’s suffrage, and the temperance movement, and lasted right up into the forties. Will there be another awakening? I know the future no better than the next man, but it is certainly possible.

I think you’re right that we won’t go back to where we were. Perhaps though there could be an awakening from an almost drunken pursuit of faux freedoms. Perhaps people will realize that you-can-have-it-all was a hoax and that true freedom comes from making considered choices and accepting the consequences.

(1) The analogy with fashion was not meant to be anything other than a metaphorical one. I’m well aware there’s a huge difference.

(2) I’m also aware that there’s a swing back and forth between licentiousness and openness in societies, as I think I tried to point out. The point I was trying to make is that each swing only resembles the other superficially. One doesn’t really go back to anything like a prior state, because the context is so different. And, with the changes in mass communication that our age represents, I’m not so sure such swings are likely to happen anymore, short of some very massive changes in the basic underpinnings and presumptions of our entire society.