Sorry guys, too good not to post. Go ahead and skip over this one if youre not feeling particularly brave. My friends solely interested in science: this is a big part of why Im such a hardliner with feminism. Of contemporary thought-systems, it alone has the potential to radically upend the moral and legal ethics that have failed our species for so long, resulting in catastrophic violence, endless wars, incalculable human misery, and the great brain-drains that have robbed our species of so many great minds--among them one of my favorite scientsts, AlanTuring, inventor of what would become the computer, and one of the worlds most brilliant futurists, who was lost to the homophobia of his time and, more directly, to the chemical castration that pushed him to suicide. My friends solely interested in feminism: this is also a big reason why Im interested in science. Today, we experience as a species the incredible abundance possible only because of the advent of the natural sciences--not only in terms of ending the scarcity model on which all former civilizations were built upon (applied biology and chemistry), but also in terms of giving us a more intimate understanding of ourselves (sociology, psychology, anthropology), our place in the world (biology) and the universe (astronomy) and what that universe is actually made of (physics, chemistry). However, in spite of this, and in spite of the fact that the current configuration of scientific and medical ethics are the most advanced ever created, they have nearly failed multiple times in the last century to protect the planet from our own advances. I am constantly in awe of what we know and of the gulf between what we know and what we are ignorant even to question. My feminism is enormously educated by the concessions of the scientific method and by the scope of things that seem to be. I fail completely to understand how one can be interested in one and not the other. These are the two greatest human endeavors our species has so far proven itself capable of. It is past time to acknowledge them as peers in the great challenge to survive with as much happiness, health, longevity, knowledge, and autonomy and as little suffering as possible. This world is possible; I see it cresting. But we must be vigilant. We must have better ethics. We must end global conflicts, whether conventional or tariff wars. We must connect to our common humanity, and in finding it, discover who we really are, as individuals and as a species. If we do not, there is a good chance all will be lost. Only when poverty and disease have been eliminated from the world and the bellies of hungry nations have been filled and their voices lifted into prominence, only when women are treated as equals to men in deed as well as word and the genders of the world are treated with dignity, only when queer rights have been established as inalienable human rights, only when enthusiastic consent has been married to personal autonomy, only when the ethnic groups of the world are respected and not denigrated, only when the planet is protected and healed from the destructive tendencies of capitalism, only when the plight of humanity overwhelms the importance of spreading doctrines, only when the modern slave trade has been abolished and the captors brought to justice, only when the people of the world have no fear of their governments and the hegemonies of the world are remembered only by the cultural consciousness as a bad dream from which we will have, finally, awoken, Only then can we call ourselves humanists.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 08:05:07 +0000
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