Saturday, June 21, 2008

The case against ...

... (among other things) unchaperoned change: Sausages, enlightenment, and “critical thinking”. ( I notice that Dave Lull also sent me a link to this.)

The amazing thing about the success of the Columbus argument is that it depends on premises that are so obviously faulty. Indeed, a moment’s reflection reveals that the Columbus argument is undermined by a downright glaring weakness. Granted that every change for the better has depended on someone embarking on a new departure: well, so too has every change for the worse. And surely, Stove writes, there have been at least as many proposed innovations which “were or would have been for the worse as ones which were or would have been for the better.” Which means that we have at least as much reason to discourage innovators as to encourage them, especially when their innovations bear on things as immensely complex as the organization of society. As Lord Falkland admonished, “when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not change.”

Lord Falkland's pronouncement is a favorite of mine.

This quote from Roger Scruton makes much the same point as I was trying to here:

The scientific attempt to explore the “depth” of human things is accompanied by a singular danger. For it threatens to destroy our response to the surface. Yet it is on the surface that we live and act: it is there that we are created, as complex appearances sustained by the social interaction which we, as appearances, also create. It is in this thin top-soil that the seeds of human happiness are sown, and the reckless desire to scrape it away —a desire which has inspired all those “sciences of man,” from Marx and Freud to sociobiology—deprives us of our consolation.

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