> watching the documentary itself would answer your questions, no?
I'm definitely feeling engaged, but not entirely enthusiastic... (EDIT: But I feel like I'm picking a fight with you, and I apologize for that. I'll definitely give this documentary a shot!)
Part 1 sounds like the fascist mode of thinking: "all our intractable emergent problems are due to an evil conspiracy of outsiders in our midst, with an inexplicable desire to destroy the world!" The whole problem with Ayn Rand is that she tried too hard to be anti-communist and accidentally turned fascist; seeing her followers pointed to as a fascist-style internal outgroup is as depressing as it is silly.
As for the other two parts -- tearing down the Gaia hypothesis and the Selfish Gene -- what does he think are the right things to think, if these are the wrong things? Are we going to just start pretending that the establishment Left was always anti-hippie, now that hippieness has turned out to have nasty emergent consequences?
I'm particularly annoyed that he blames the Congo situation on the Selfish Gene. The establishment likes to pretend that the Congo is too complicated to understand -- because the alternative is owning up to how the French backed the Hutus during and after the Rwandan genocide, and how the international community is still more sympathetic to the Hutus than the Tutsis. (See also the allegedly inexplicable causes of WWI.)
I'm definitely feeling engaged, but not entirely enthusiastic... (EDIT: But I feel like I'm picking a fight with you, and I apologize for that. I'll definitely give this documentary a shot!)
Part 1 sounds like the fascist mode of thinking: "all our intractable emergent problems are due to an evil conspiracy of outsiders in our midst, with an inexplicable desire to destroy the world!" The whole problem with Ayn Rand is that she tried too hard to be anti-communist and accidentally turned fascist; seeing her followers pointed to as a fascist-style internal outgroup is as depressing as it is silly.
As for the other two parts -- tearing down the Gaia hypothesis and the Selfish Gene -- what does he think are the right things to think, if these are the wrong things? Are we going to just start pretending that the establishment Left was always anti-hippie, now that hippieness has turned out to have nasty emergent consequences?
I'm particularly annoyed that he blames the Congo situation on the Selfish Gene. The establishment likes to pretend that the Congo is too complicated to understand -- because the alternative is owning up to how the French backed the Hutus during and after the Rwandan genocide, and how the international community is still more sympathetic to the Hutus than the Tutsis. (See also the allegedly inexplicable causes of WWI.)