Of Our Chances - SCIENCE FICTION IS BUILT TO SHOWCASE THE FUTURE. BUT PHILOSOPHY TEACHES US SO MUCH MORE ABOUT THE WAY THE WORLD GOES–AND HOW IT MIGHT END by Ken Baumann is undoubtely one of the of the best pieces I have read this year:
Gray, Taleb, and Land run the intellectual gamut, but lodged in their central message is the shared idea that humans are incompetent prophets. That our actions—of building edifices to reconstruct or reconstrue the world we’re born into—are more destructive than we’ll ever acknowledge. It seems to me that the three are sort of stuck; that any thinker moored in inquiry this lifelong and intense must find a spot on the wide band of philosophical comfort, or else exit the gene pool…While Taleb wants us to take advantage of fate, staying small and humble, Land wants to embrace our virulent enthusiasms and channel them toward the terminus of our metaphysical futures, no matter the carnage. Gray, like Montaigne, seems to hover in the middle, dedicated to dispelling illusions and encouraging a tempered, intractably irrational—and pleasurable—life.
It’s as if human desire is the malignant fate in Pandora’s box, and certain technological breakthroughs— large-scale agriculture, machinistic computation, high-dollar entertainment—stab holes in the box, each generation wanting more of its hidden air.
We are born into this ceaseless beige cosmos with one promise: entropy. Our bodies dissolve, our self snips out. Scifi imagines alternatives beyond all likely measure. Its fantasy is hopeful, even if its criticism is correct. Eventually, though, we must stop reading.
Our days are numbered, so let’s go one more from Montaigne for the hell of it:
Gray, Taleb, and Land run the intellectual gamut, but lodged in their central message is the shared idea that humans are incompetent prophets. That our actions—of building edifices to reconstruct or reconstrue the world we’re born into—are more destructive than we’ll ever acknowledge. It seems to me that the three are sort of stuck; that any thinker moored in inquiry this lifelong and intense must find a spot on the wide band of philosophical comfort, or else exit the gene pool…While Taleb wants us to take advantage of fate, staying small and humble, Land wants to embrace our virulent enthusiasms and channel them toward the terminus of our metaphysical futures, no matter the carnage. Gray, like Montaigne, seems to hover in the middle, dedicated to dispelling illusions and encouraging a tempered, intractably irrational—and pleasurable—life.
It’s as if human desire is the malignant fate in Pandora’s box, and certain technological breakthroughs— large-scale agriculture, machinistic computation, high-dollar entertainment—stab holes in the box, each generation wanting more of its hidden air.
We are born into this ceaseless beige cosmos with one promise: entropy. Our bodies dissolve, our self snips out. Scifi imagines alternatives beyond all likely measure. Its fantasy is hopeful, even if its criticism is correct. Eventually, though, we must stop reading.
It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over pure great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her.
—Montaigne
Our days are numbered, so let’s go one more from Montaigne for the hell of it:
I am afraid we have eyes bigger than our stomachs, and more curiosity than capacity. We embrace everything, but we clasp only wind.
—Montaigne
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