From: "John Michael Greer" <Mezla@hotmail.com>

I'm afraid I find your response very poetic but also very irrelevant. It still adds up to an attempt to justify greed and brutality by claiming that it's necessary to the Great God Progress -- essentially the same argument that was used to justify the extermination of many Native American nations. (You're using the word "evolution" instead of "progress," but it adds up to the same thing.) With all due respect (and with apologies to the list if this is out of line), the only response I can make is a quote from one of my favorite SF novels, Roger Zelazny's _Lord of Light_: "If someone asks you why you're oppressing a world and you reply with a lot of poetic crap, no. I guess there can't be a meeting of minds."

I thank you for your honesty and persistence. It has helped me to further that signature brieflet, in the line:

Thus, it has been justifiable if some individuals must endure wretched want while others are prodigious in their vanities, as long as the progress is gained, otherwise unobtainable.

which is indeed the facile, implicit justification of our society for the suffering so ignored, as it worships the economic machine. Part of this writer's dilemma is the fact that evolution is commonly seen as but the result of some cosmic throwing of the dice, and not with the awe and admiration which perceives a Desire within unfolding, as expressed by Teilhard de Chardin in the "Phenomenon of Man", or Aurobindo in "Life Divine".

One of my favorite science fiction stories, "The Whininings" or something titled close to that as I vaguely recollect, is about a race of unicorn like telepathic mental beings who waged war simply by the projection of their mind's energy, each individual joining with another in deliberate contemplation against the Others. But they unleash such suffering that the last few victors agree to a mental self-mutilation to forever contain in bondage that power they had unleashed, to be symbolized by the loss of their horns. The first dangerous temptation to power in the Evolution of intelligent being would thus be successfully traversed, even if they must sacrifice what their selves had become. They who knew immeasurable mentalness, soon to be bound unto a fixity of relative mental stupor, looked upon the simple creatures learning to delight in what could be done with their fingers and opposing thumb, and they foresaw that in the darkness of a cave lay the second dangerous temptation to power which would someday come before the Evolution that these promising tool makers would thenceforward be: a rock which gleamed with a greenish, cold radiation from within.

--
To nuke the earth,
Men hidden in land and sea.
Crazéd my spirit.

Steve Morningthunder

tech_spirit5: Next