Tragic tales are, by definition, funny. Resulting in right wing nuts quoting commie type chicks. Then, there comes along a Bernardine Evaristo who writes a funny tale that is tragic.
On that note, I realized, when one belongs to the Utopian school, one cannot not be partisan. By definition. But isn’t a post-partisan or bi-partisan order an essential idea of the Utopian agenda?
Life isn’t a strange loop Douglas, Utopia is.
I don’t know what Soros or Taleb had to say about equilibrium of financial systems in the 21st Century. Suggestions in this blog and elsewhere indicate, they are intuitive Utopians.
In that context, I am now fascinated by another Utopian whose idea of it was more Dystopian if social equilibrium were understood in the modern context. Francis Galton as most students of basic courses in Probability, Statistics & Random Variables know, was the first person to have come up with correlation[1], standard deviation and the concept of regression to the mean. He also made serious contributions to Eugenics, Forensic Study and is generally credited with bringing a scientific outlook to social sciences. Being rich, jobless and possibly gay must have helped. Galton though makes one long for being been born in an era when specialization did not make any and every field in which one is not an expert in, inaccessible[2].
The world would have been much more interesting had the Nazis won and their Eugenics taken forward. Maybe that would have meant, this post would not have been written[3]. Anyway, the point about randomness, especially that Leonard Mlodinow puts forward is, his premise is its own dismissal. That barely worked for this blog three years ago and thus refuses to for a book today. Otherwise, The Drunkard’s Walk is still worth a read for its sometimes funny and sometimes interesting portrayal of the history of chance. The let down in terms of promising mathematics and not delivering it must be a genre thing.
[1] — Aristotle did not.
[2] - For example, here is a status report for one.
[3] — Hence the proof.
Musing on a few posts, like this and the other:
The philosopher John Gray has thought through these issues as well as others.
Since the 1960s, the future of the world has tended towards dystopia, rather than utopia. Philosophers and politicians have been the last to notice this, as they have been too busy constructing their own utopias. When the communists failed to construct their utopia by central planning in the early 90s, the capitalists took over, and tried to construct their utopia based on the free market. Both have failed. The neo-cons invaded Iraq hoping to construct a democratic utopia, but found dystopia.
Writers of fiction have captured this better. JG Ballard comes to mind, as well as Will Self. Also filmmakers like David Lynch or David Cronenberg or Fatih Akin. But no philosopher has come close, till John Gray.
These dystopian authors love John Gray. Here is Will Self, writing admiringly of anyone for the first time. John Gray writes on utopias and the iraq war here. Here, he criticizes both the religious and the new atheists for constructing different utopias. In this one, he says Bush and Gore are simply constructing different utopias on the environmental issue and that the solution lies elsewhere.
It may just help remembering that the man who coined the word utopia was executed.
Most blogs are utopian. This one, tries to be dystopian.