Last night, I watched a history of the late days of World War I. It reminded me: this was a war among dynastic cousins, Nicky, Willy and George. The war machine was set in motion by the most primitive and thoroughly refuted idea in the history of human intellection, "ruling blood." Brilliant scientists and educators and organizers produced an immense capacity. The will to use it, the direction of its use, came from the dumbest subsection of the human reptilian hindbrain.
It seems to be unquestioned practical wisdom to spend lots of energy building capacity, so that whatever one wants to do, one will be able to do. For middle class folks, that means building equity, making money. For nations, it means building industrial infrastructure. Somehow philosophy has never made the case that figuring out what you want, or what you ought to want -- giving some direction to the will -- is an actual job, actual work, in legitimate competition with the work of building capacity for whatever the hell it might occur to you to do tomorrow.
The problem is that ethics has often misunderstood its job. Ethicists at their most relevant have tried to articulate general answers to the big questions about human life -- "What are its proper goals?" "What are its appropriate limits?" They have not taken it upon themselves, by and large, to describe or to model the work that everyone blessed with a decent lifespan must do to become a human being. And so all that work is off-stage, ignorable -- and the first book anybody bright picks up is likely to be a technical book.
Posted by shea0017 at October 30, 2004 2:12 PM