Epeus' epigone

Edifying exquisite equine entrapments

Friday, 28 February 2003

Utopias and Tragedies

I'm reading the Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, and have just got to the section on Politics. Pinker distinguishes between the Utopian Vision, which assumes man is perfectible on earth, if his environment can be improved, and the Tragic Vision, which assumes that Human Nature is complex, and you need to arrange society with this in mind.

This reminds me of a discussion David W and I had last year on the non-zero blog, where I said 'there are those who see in the seedier side of the web the darkness of their own souls, for we are all fallen creatures, and the line between good and evil runs through all our hearts.'

I see from Theodore Dalrymple's essay on Macbeth, which expresses the Tragic Vision clearly, that I was unconsciously quoting Solzhenitsyn, before I quoted Nietzsche & Wilde too.

If we are to construct new public selves online, and move to an Emergent Democracy, we need to keep both these visions in mind, and ensure that the frameworks we work within are suffused with the checks and balances that the Tragic Visionaries brought to the design of the US Constitution, tempering the Utopian view.
Posted by Kevin Marks at 04:53

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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