I find myself avoiding participating in more and more of the threads that pop up in P & N. I find the endless doom and gloom and bitching about Donald Trump to be repetitively boring. I don't need more evidence that he is a total disaster and simply needs to be impeached and won't be so long as the investigation into the Russia election interference thingi isn't finished and maybe not even them. I am bored by hearing about what assholes conservatives are, what hypocrites they are, etc. I am also concerned that the constant drumbeat of negative attacks on Trump no matter how deserved, can slowly transform into an addictive pattern, a wall of mental rage and anger that makes people deaf to anything positive. I believe that the way our of the mess we are in today requires a conscious effort at integrating the best of what all sides offer. I recently saw traditional thinking as an evolutionary advance over our original human condition where pretty much might makes right, the notion there is a higher purpose order we need to strive for. The value of that is that it prevents social chaos and disorder. The disadvantage is that it can cause slavish adherence to easily distorted moral principles.
Science and reason come in here in the enlightenment to counteract this mindless obedience. But that has led to the notion that everything is simply matter and that there is no built in truth that adheres to the evolved structure of our brains, another big intellectual mistake, in my opinion. I think it is time to take another step in our conscious evolution, on that accounts for the fact that our moral understanding of our place in the universe is evolving and will continue to do so, and that the task of today is to tease out what is best of these three stages of evolution that went before us too form a more up to date understanding. I think that is a discussion that isn't boring. To seek a more positive synthesis by understanding what is best and what function the traditional, the rational, and a more recent search for inner meaning leading to an appreciation of the strengths and functional necessity of each seems to me to be where we should be going.
Your thoughts?
Science and reason come in here in the enlightenment to counteract this mindless obedience. But that has led to the notion that everything is simply matter and that there is no built in truth that adheres to the evolved structure of our brains, another big intellectual mistake, in my opinion. I think it is time to take another step in our conscious evolution, on that accounts for the fact that our moral understanding of our place in the universe is evolving and will continue to do so, and that the task of today is to tease out what is best of these three stages of evolution that went before us too form a more up to date understanding. I think that is a discussion that isn't boring. To seek a more positive synthesis by understanding what is best and what function the traditional, the rational, and a more recent search for inner meaning leading to an appreciation of the strengths and functional necessity of each seems to me to be where we should be going.
Your thoughts?