--- Fiona Moore nydersdyner@yahoo.co.uk 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.
Depends I s'pose. If you accept that one sort of society is preferable to another, then to move from one state of society to another could legitimately called progress. I agree that it is more complicated than the linear view of progress that was current in C18/19.
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."
... and we'll tolerate you because we can use you as a tourist attraction. I agree it's not pretty. You can't undo the past, but I'd like to see a more intelligent and imaginative attitude to the future.
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.
Well Plato argued for a totalitarian state in the Republic, Hegel argued that God had ordained Prussian militarism as the highest form of polity and Marx's vicar on earth, at the time he wrote, was Stalin. For Popper, a naive view of linear progress was what he called historicism and was the justification for Auschwitz and the Gulag - hence his concern.
Stephen.
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