Jeremy Price's Bookmarks

In fact, we have a word, a very old word, that precisely describes this impulse to band together into small groups, set collective criteria for excellence, and try to collect and disseminate the best, most useful, most edifying, most relevant bodies of knowledge as widely and as cheaply as possible, for the greatest possible benefit to the individual’s self-cultivation and to the preservation and enrichment of the culture as a whole.

And that word is humanism.

Gould also shared Engels’ enthusiasm for understanding the natural world dialectically–in other words, seeing it as made up of complex and dynamic interactive processes. "Dialectical thinking should be taken more seriously by Western scholars, not discarded because some nations of the second world [the former Soviet Bloc] have constructed a cardboard version as an official political doctrine," Gould wrote. "The issues that it raises are, in another form, the crucial questions of reductionism versus holism, now so much under discussion throughout biology (where reductionist accounts have reached their limits and further progress demands new approaches to process existing data, not only an accumulation of more information)."

In making any law, our chiefs must always consider three
things: the effect of their decision on peace; the effect
on the natural world; and the effect on seven generations
in the future. We believe that all lawmakers should be
required to think this way, that all constitutions
should contain these rules.

We call the future generations "the coming faces". We
are told that we can see the faces of our children to
come in the rain that is falling, and that we must
tread lightly on the earth, for we are walking on the
faces of our children yet to come. That attitude, too,
we want to have you learn and share.

COUNTERMEME:

Academic Freedom demands Professional Responsibility.

High School science classes are (almost always) not the place where science questions are sussed out and new info is added to the scientific consensus. Science class is about teaching the current scientific consensus to the students

There’s a new bill in Texas in which anything scientific is fair game for substitution of superstition and the supernatural. H.B. No. 4224 reads in part

Students may be evaluated based upon their understanding of course materials, but no student in any public school or institution shall be penalized in any way because he or she subscribes to a particular position on scientific theories or hypotheses…

Sound familiar?
It all may sound so reasonable, but the Discovery Institute’s “academic freedom” poison pills are deadly, as far as real science is concerned.

Disagreement is, in its nature, like the creation of the world.

For the creation of the world came about in essence by way of open space,

without which all would have been endless divinity,

and there would have been no place for the creation of the world.

Therefore, God withdrew light to the margins,

and the open space was formed,

and in that space God created the world,

through acts of speech.

And so it is, too, with disagreement—

for if all the sages were of one mind

there would be no place for the creation of the world.

It is only by way of the disagreement between them,

and their dividing one from another,

each one drawing to a particular side,

that open space comes into being between them—

which, in its nature, is like the withdrawing of primordial divine light to the margins—

in the midst of which creation can take place, through acts of speech.

—Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1772–1810)
Jonah Steinberg, translator