On Wed, 7 Feb 2001, Fiona Moore wrote:
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.
And we've progressed beyond that?
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.
The open/closed distinction, in Popper, is piecemeal, provisional progress on the one hand (which is the way science works) and grand, eternal schemes on the other.
Iain