From: Reilly Jones (Reilly@compuserve.com)
Date: Mon Mar 16 1998 - 15:36:34 MST
Richard Thieme's piece was forwarded to the E-list 3/16/98: <We are
beginning to engineer our very selves, to see our subjective ways of
framing reality and being in the world as modular objects to be
manufactured and enhanced.>
Up to now, this has been called formation of character, expanding our
faculties. Nothing new. As long as it's our own selves we are
engineering, freedom is necessary. When it comes to engineering other
selves, a willingness to submit to political restraint is necessary.
<In the next century, it's going to be bootstrapping big time for the human
species as we see ourselves as an image in our own collective mind, an
image to be designed and executed.>
And the image makers, the creators of culture, will provide the ideals and
standards of our new faculties and physiognomies. They will lead, the rest
will follow in a hazy made-to-order liberty.
<Ethical reflection never anticipates the breakthroughs that make us sit up
straight, nor do legal niceties.>
Nonsense. If ethical reflection was useless, no one would do it. It isn't
useless, it is vital to all formation of culture.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reilly Jones | Philosophy of Technology:
Reilly@compuserve.com | The rational, moral and political relations
| between 'How we create' and 'Why we create'
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