@wjmaggos @deathpanels One thing I've come to realize watching the lotus eaters podcast is that the right has an extraordinary body of intellectual work.
As the left works to disavow the collective works of humanity because they think they know better than all of humanity's thinkers right until this moment, conservatives should work to conserve, protect, and utilize those same works as the unimaginable inheritance they are. Just as the Christians of the dark ages burned the heretical works of the greeks and romans but those same works were collected and commented upon by Arab scholars, and the dark age only ended when the works of ancient wisdom were able to return and progress was able to continue.
As the left works to disavow the collective works of humanity because they think they know better than all of humanity's thinkers right until this moment, conservatives should work to conserve, protect, and utilize those same works as the unimaginable inheritance they are. Just as the Christians of the dark ages burned the heretical works of the greeks and romans but those same works were collected and commented upon by Arab scholars, and the dark age only ended when the works of ancient wisdom were able to return and progress was able to continue.
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@wjmaggos @deathpanels in The Graysonian Ethic, I wrote about the oxygen catastrophe mass extinction event. It was the worst extinction event ever because the fundamental way to exist fundamentally changed. The atmosphere went from being primarily CO2 to being primarily N2 and O2. I use it as an example of how the dichotomy was false. Before the catastrophe, surviving primarily on O2 was going to be a method for extinction, but afterwards not being able to tolerate O2 is a recipe for extinction. The best solution was to find a way to either survive using carbon dioxide and tolerate oxygen or to tolerate carbon dioxide and survive using relatively small amounts of oxygen. Meanwhile, most of the things that life had to do didn't change at all. Life was still made up of DNA and amino acids. Life still gathered energy either from the Sun or from other life that had consumed energy from the Sun. All kinds of things stayed the same.
The point of the story is just what you're saying, to illustrate that we need a little bit of both. We need to keep the things that are already correct and just try to tweak the things that aren't quite correct. That doesn't mean taking bad ideas and making the disappear, it just means recognizing that those ideas are no longer relevant. If we forget the bad ideas completely then we will forget why they were bad ideas later on.
This last point is actually really important, I've seen it before. In the workplace, and idea might sound very good on paper and so they will go implement it. For reasons that they didn't see it will fail catastrophically. If nobody bothers to record the fact that they did try and they did fail and the reasons that they failed then they'll go back and revisit that same bad idea again and again and again and fail again and again and again.
The point of the story is just what you're saying, to illustrate that we need a little bit of both. We need to keep the things that are already correct and just try to tweak the things that aren't quite correct. That doesn't mean taking bad ideas and making the disappear, it just means recognizing that those ideas are no longer relevant. If we forget the bad ideas completely then we will forget why they were bad ideas later on.
This last point is actually really important, I've seen it before. In the workplace, and idea might sound very good on paper and so they will go implement it. For reasons that they didn't see it will fail catastrophically. If nobody bothers to record the fact that they did try and they did fail and the reasons that they failed then they'll go back and revisit that same bad idea again and again and again and fail again and again and again.