God, if there is one, will strike me dead one day for repeating quotations from works I have not read, but this one is so delicious that I am doing it anyway. It is from Sir William Osler, and the book that I am reading credits him with being “the father of modern medicine.” Here it is:
“The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism.”
The first to come to mind are the Teabaggers, who are painfully ignorant in all of their public displays. Then come the free market set – the Freidmanites and Randians and their fellow travelers who live in a theoretical world where the worst aspects of human nature are overcome by simply letting that nature go on full display. I suppose there is something to that in the same sense that forest fires self-regulate. They do stop burning when they run out of fuel.
The book that cites Osler is “Why Evolution Works (And Creationism Fails)”, which I just picked up last night. The clerk at the book store said that he had been taught by one of the authors, Paul K. Strode, a local high school teacher here in Boulder.
Amazon.com, where I used to buy books, recently pulled out of Colorado, ditching local distributors, for our state’s attempt to impose sales tax on purchases through them. At that point I realized that I was doing local book sellers a great disservice by using Amazon, and opted to forgo any further purchases via that legal person. Our choices here in Boulder are many – Boulder Book Store, where I shopped last night, is always busy, so I hope they can survive Internet competition. But then, this is Boulder, a college town, a liberal town, so it is natural that books would be a popular commodity.
In Colorado Springs, our conservative mirror image, the most widely read medium is the billboard. They recently, and I am not making this up, censored bus stop posters that had a picture of a female puppet showing cleavage. A puppet! The sexual repression in that town is palpable. It may someday spontaneously combust.
Piece of Mindful 
As Hayek said in his Nobel Prize speech,
Yet the danger of which I want to warn is precisely the belief that in order to have a claim to be accepted as scientific it is necessary to achieve more.
This way lies charlatanism and worse.
To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.
In the physical sciences there may be little objection to trying to do the impossible; one might even feel that one ought not to discourage the over-confident because their experiments may after all produce some new insights.
But in the social field the erroneous belief that the exercise of some power would have beneficial consequences is likely to lead to a new power to coerce other men being conferred on some authority. …..
We are only beginning to understand on how subtle a communication system the functioning of an advanced industrial society is based – a communications system which we call the market and which turns out to be a more efficient mechanism for digesting dispersed information than any that man has deliberately designed.
If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible.
The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.
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This reminds me of something … years ago we used to be pestered day and night by telemarketers. They had no shame. Enough people finally became enraged to asked the government to do something. They came up with the “Do Not Call” list, and the calls stopped.
Power. Violence, you might call it, but those people calling us day in and out were doing some kind of violence to us, using your terminology.
Here’s what happens, generally: We impose regulations on market behavior, and the markets adapt and behave. They are very adaptable, can and should be controlled for our all our good.
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“…advanced industrial society.” Teabaggers. Hmmm!
So, don’t apply knowledge we do know because it is never enough to act in a way that does not risk destroying civilization? Pretzel-logic defending the status quo, I think. I ain’t buyin’ it. The more knowledge the better. Use what you’ve got, go for more, and respond when the “old ” knowledge fails.
I think of Greenspan. He recanted, finally, now wants to take it all back, touting the same old failed rhetoric. Kissinger suffers from the same malady. Where are those government-run death commitees when you need them most? Outsourced to Iraq and Afghanistan, I suppose.
Happy Easter.
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Ladybug,
No, that is not what he says – he says “designing society”, an existence that exists without design – is dangerous. To design society, you need to use force, and it is the application of force that destroys.
Use knowledge on yourself to flourish.
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