Food for thought

[k_a_nitz]

Should we be trying to:

• become better humans, or
• better at being human, or
• better at becoming human.

(This was inspired by Jack Donovan's distinction between being a better man and being better at being a man.)

This could also be adapted to other things. For example:
Should druids be trying to:

• become better druids, or
• better at being a druid, or
• better at becoming a druid.

(Or all three? Considering the distinctions is a good topic for meditation.)

Comments

[boccaderlupo]

At first, I read "droid"

;)

Axé!

[k_a_nitz]

lol

[white_bear_chronicles]

Great riddle.
I'll go with 1) become better humans. I'm not all that enamored with the current iteration. Maybe I'm just reading too much news.

[sdi]

Plotinos and Porphyry would argue that, after a certain point, you should be trying to "become better than human..."

[k_a_nitz]

Or more than human

[sdi]

That's how I always interpreted the corollary to Aristotle's "man is a political animal..."

I suppose that I shouldn't do this

[degringolade]

Your post stuck in my head an bugged me. I think that the reason is the value-laden word "better". I can live with the use of your phrase when used referencing Druidry, but I think using it in "Humans" or "men" or "women" open up cans of worms that shouldn't be opened.

Made me think of this passage from William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition":

______________________________________________________________________________

“They won’t think of us,” Cayce says, choosing straight into it. “Any more than we think of the Victorians. I don’t mean the icons, but the ordinary actual living souls.”

“I think they’ll hate us,” says Helena, only her gorgeous eyes visible now above her nightmares of BSE and a spongiform future. She looks, for just that instant, as though she’s still in character as the emotionally conflicted deprogrammer of abductees on Ark/Hive 7’s lone season, Cayce having once watched a single episode in order to see a friend’s actor boyfriend in a walk-on as a morgue attendant.

“Souls,” repeats Bigend, evidently not having heard Helena, his blue eyes widening for Cayce’s benefit. He has less accent of any kind than she can recall having heard before in any speaker of English. It’s unnerving. It makes him sound somehow directionless, like a loudspeaker in a departure lounge, though it has nothing to do with volume. “Souls?”

Cayce looks at him and carefully chews a mouthful of stuffed eggplant.

“Of course,” he says, “we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.” He smiles, a version of Tom Cruise with too many teeth, and longer, but still very white. “We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.”

Cayce blinks.

“Do we have a past, then?” Stonestreet asks.

“History is a best-guess narrative about what happened and when,” Bigend says, his eyes narrowing. “Who did what to whom. With what. Who won. Who lost. Who mutated. Who became extinct.”

“The future is there,” Cayce hears herself say, “looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”

“You sound oracular.” White teeth.

“I only know that the one constant in history is change: The past changes. Our version of the past will interest the future to about the extent we’re interested in whatever past the Victorians believed in. It simply won’t seem very relevant

Re: I suppose that I shouldn't do this

[sdi]

An astute point, I think.

Back when I ran a software company, when my employees said that they wanted to make their software "better," I always asked them, "better at what?" Everything is a tradeoff of some kind: if you make your code faster, it might be less maintainable; if you make it better tested, you make it harder to change; if you abstract several copies into one place, it might be harder to understand. "Better at X" always implies "worse at Y"—in computer science, we call this the "no free lunch theorem" and apply it in various domains; for example, in data compression, if you can make some things smaller, there always has to be other things you make larger.

Even in my case above of becoming "better than human," one is making (rather sharp) tradeoffs; I consider these desirable, but I think most people wouldn't, or else they would pursue spirituality...

Re: I suppose that I shouldn't do this

[k_a_nitz]

Yes, Brooks’ “There is no silver bullet”