Jeremy Price's Library tagged politics →  View Popular

And the answer to that question, "Is science progress?"?

Yes, you'll have to read the book. But in brief, I can say that Americans began to equate the two once they built scientific practices that benefited their deeper goals of cultural progress. Put another way, science did not equal agricultural progress until scientific practices fit a dual improvement ethic that sought moral and material improvement together.

The Kennedy message was always to aim higher, and they always — or almost always — appealed to our best instincts. So there was Bobby speaking to a group of women at a breakfast in Terre Haute, Ind., during the 1968 campaign. As David Halberstam recalled, Bobby told the audience: “The poor are hidden in our society. No one sees them anymore. They are a small minority in a rich country. Yet I am stunned by a lack of awareness of the rest of us toward them.”

Bobby cared about the poor and ordinary working people in a way that can seem peculiar in post-Reagan America. And his insights into the problems of urban ghettos in the 1960s seemed to point to some of the debilitating factors at work in much of the nation today. Bobby believed, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has noted, that the crisis of the cities ultimately came from “the destruction of the sense, and often the fact, of community, of human dialogue, the thousand invisible strands of common experience and purpose, affection and respect which tie men to their fellows.”

Kennedy worried about the dissolution of community in a world growing ever more “impersonal and abstract.” He wanted the American community to flourish, and he knew that could not be accomplished in an environment of increasing polarization, racial and otherwise.

“Ultimately,” he said, “America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.”

Like his brothers and sisters (don’t forget Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the Special Olympics), Bobby believed deeply in public service and felt that the whole point of government was to widen the doors of access to those who were being left out.

In thinking, the old view comes originally from Descartes’ 17th
Century rationalism. A view of thought as symbolic logic was
formalized by Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege around the turn of the
20th Century, and a rationalist interpretation was revived by Chomsky
in the 1950’s. In that view, thought is a matter of (as Pinker puts it)
“old-fashioned … universal disembodied reason.” Here reason is seen as
the manipulation of meaningless symbols, as in symbolic logic.

The new view is that reason is embodied in a nontrivial way. The
brain gives rise to thought in the form of conceptual frames,
image-schemas, prototypes, conceptual metaphors, and conceptual blends.
The process of thinking is not algorithmic symbol manipulation, but
rather neural computation, using brain mechanisms. Jerome Feldman’s
recent MIT Press book, From Molecules to Metaphors, discusses such mechanisms.

Contrary
to Descartes, reason uses these mechanisms, not formal logic. Reason
is mostly unconscious, and as Antonio Damasio has written in Descartes’
Error, rationality requires emotion.