----- Original Message ----- From: Stephen Date stephend999@yahoo.co.uk
society to another. Unfortunately, not being a moral relativist, I think the values which are encouraged by the Open Societies to be preferable to pretty much any other values on offer and that there is a correlation between moral, scientific and political progress.
I'd never challenge your choice of moral system :), but I thought we'd pretty much done away with the notion of societies "progressing" in linear terms from an inferior state of being to a superior one? That strikes me as a very 18th-century-modernist way of thinking.
(This does not preclude finding a way of reconciling the way of life peoples you have mentioned about with the democratic states in which they now live).
Again, that's a bit Star Trek: "so long as you vote and pay your taxes and live in a house in a city, it's OK to dress up in feathers once in a while-- oh, and don't go chewing the peyote, that's a banned drug."
Unfortunately, though, Popper was a sociologist
He was a Philosopher.
< blushes> Sorry. I read him in an undergraduate sociology class.
To be quite fair to Popper he considered the conflict between Open and Closed societies to arise from internal tensions caused by attaining a certain degree of civilisation. (To follow up on Iain's comments he considers Plato, Hegel and Marx as the great enemies of the Open Society.
All of whom were staunchly modernist and advocates of linear progress, so that's kind of surprising.
Thanks for the tip. By the way, now I'm retiring from the "Is Deliverance Colonialist" stakes may I also salute you as a foeperson worthy of my e-mail.
<salutes back, raising laptop to forehead>
Fiona
The Posthumous Memoirs of Secretary Rontane Available for public perusal at http://nyder.r67.net
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