Sunday, September 2, 2012

The Philosophy Of The Three

Having used my little boy to illustrate profoundly bad theology, I have to note that his philosophy is honestly not half bad.
Jehu:  What am I going to have to do to get you to stop turning on the lights in the back of the car?
Little Boy:  You have to get a Pius V that doesn't have lights on the inside where little boys can reach them.

I have to admit he made me laugh.  But moreso that that, he underscored an important point:

Whenever a technical solution to a problem is feasible and not unaffordable, it should nearly always be preferred.  Any solution beginning with ....If Everyone ... or ...If We All... is really low percentage.  If you genuinely had the kind of buy-in implied by your solution, you probably wouldn't have had the issue in the first place.

The problem with technical solutions is that continued success with them tends to create serious overconfidence in other, non-technical types of problems.  How many times have you heard something of this form...If we can put a man on the moon we can ...?

But in general, working with the laws of physics or chemistry through engineering is pretty easy.  Changing human behavior or hearts is hard. 

But this of course doesn't mean that little boy won't be bent to my will eventually on the car lights issue.  I'd be remiss in not demonstrating proper parental coercion.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Put differently you often here the argument that we've experienced progress because look at X technological advancement. However, this is only a certain kind of progress. Technological advances has allowed us to be worse people, worse societies, etc without feeling the pain. Lazy when 90% of people grow their own food: starve. Lazy when only 2% of people do: get food stamps.

When people talk about wanting to go back to the past culturally they mean that if we had current technology with a 1950s culture it would be superior to current culture with current technology. Not that the 1950s were actually better.

Jehu said...

Anonymous,
Technological advances have masked a great deal of the harm that the radical worsening of governance in the US since the 50s has caused. I've written, for instance, on how the homicide rate has been greatly reduced by improvements in trauma medicine. I'd argue that 50s culture with current technology would be an incredibly nice place to live. You see hints of such in a lot of the more rural very high trust areas in the US today. Even 70s or 80s culture with present technology would be really attractive. But hey, reaction is a direction moreso than a destination. Someone who wants to return to the lesser insanity of, say, the late 80s, is still an ally of ours.

Justthisguy said...

M'self, I always prefer an engineering solution over a social solution, but maybe that's just my inner Aspie manifesting himself.