Hacker News Reader

Comment by eevilspock | Hacker News Reader

I love both your comments and am saving them as references to be used in a book or essays that I am working on that discusses the lack of non-selfist values in modern culture and how this is far more consequential than whether we choose a socialist or capitalist laws and economic system.

Also, if you've never read Ursula K LeGuin, you should give one of her sci-fi books a go. In Left Hand of Darkness a non-human character feels a deep sadness when they abandon a sleigh that has carried them across a frozen polar region, saving their lives. The human doesn't understand this, as the sleigh is just an inanimate object, a tool, and they had known all along they'd have to abandon it once it served its purpose.

View on HN

I think that modernity had shifted the mainstream view away from that, but it need not that way. When I look at Christopher Alexander’s life’s work and what the various people tried to do during the Renaissance, you can still be in relation to all around you. Alexander’s talks on centers and unfolding brings you to designing in this way.

I appreciate that! I'll have to keep an eye out for it. I definitely agree with that perspective - I don't think it matters much how we organize the bits and pieces of the system if we don't have a shared value for life beyond our own. I do think it's harder to be intentional about our value systems when we pass everything off to the optimizing machinery of capitalism and the free market - in my mind, it's too easy for that machinery to optimize for pleasures that skirt our values. But I'm also not sure if it's tractable or "good" for a worldwide population to develop shared values - I think "valuing life" is something we should all practice, but who's to say how that actually renders out in the minds of 7bn people? Tricky stuff, and I have no answers haha. I was a CS major, and I'm sure freshmen philosophy majors could do circles around me on this.

Hoo - I remember that scene and the mix of feelings it brought up for me. It reminded me of an attachment to physical objects that I attribute to watching Toy Story growing up. I love the way she wrote, and I still have a long list of her books to dive into. Another scene that left its mark on me is from The Dispossessed when Shevek shares a moment with the pet otter at a dinner party:

  The otter sat up on its haunches and looked at him. Its eyes were dark, shot with gold, intelligent, curious, innocent. "Ammar," Shevek whispered, caught by that gaze across the gulf of being – "brother."

From Shevek's perspective, he had never seen or known this kind of creature to exist, and he was staring at something alien to him and still finding a connection. I think in a way thanking the herbs was a lesson in looking across the "gulf of being", though the herbs didn't return the attention with a gold, intelligent gaze. Maybe it was something more like what Werner Herzog sees in chickens haha [1]. To me, when he calls a chicken's gaze "stupid", I don't think he's saying that in a negative sense but instead in a way that's recognizing their being as it is in human terms. The connotation that we put into the word "stupid" is what makes his perspective sound like a harsh judgement, but I think he's just being "brutally honest".

I can't help but mention the song "Spud Infinity" by Big Thief as well [2]! Definitely a song (and album) to get lost in:

  From way up there it looks so small
  From way down here it looks so small
  One peculiar organism aren't we all together?
  Everybody steps on ants
  Everybody eats the plants

...

  When I took another look
  The past was not a history book
  That was just some linear perception

...

  When I say celestial
  I mean extra-terrestrial
  I mean accepting the alien you've rejected in your own heart

...

  Kiss your body up and down other than your elbows
  'Cause as for your elbows, they're on their own
  Wandering like a rolling stone
  Rubbing up against the edges of experience

I think the motif underlying each of these that matters to me is embracing "radical alterity" or "the other". "Accepting the alien you've rejected in your own heart" and recognizing the "edges of [your] experience" and where you can and can't know yourself. Adrienne Lenker frequently talks about how LeGuin is one of her favorite authors, and I think this song is definitely in conversation with LeGuin. There's so much in there! The whole album is worth a listen (and several more) if you haven't heard it already.

Thanks for reading!

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhMo4WlBmGM [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYFBNA7uaJQ

(Edited for formatting)

> I do think it's harder to be intentional about our value systems when we pass everything off to the optimizing machinery of capitalism and the free market - in my mind, it's too easy for that machinery to optimize for pleasures that skirt our values.

Agreed, but I think that will fall out naturally from having a non-selfist value system, which would dispense with the current world's elevation of selfishness from vice to virtue. As long as we continue to worship at the alter of selfishness, no alternative to capitalism is going to do much better. To your point about some monolithic value system: we wouldn't want that. Just as for physical evolution diversity of the values "gene pool" is healthy. But the selfish gene (intentional play off Dawkins' idea) needs to become recessive at most. It's both fine and healthy if people disagree with how to create a better community and how to share the world empathetically and morally as long as we share the same intention: sharing the world empathetically and morally. Selfism by definition is immoral as morality by definition by my reckoning is all about choosing the common/greater good over one's personal gain. Moral conscience is that voice that tells you "Yeah, I know you want that so much, but you have to resist because it hurts other people."

I haven't read the The Dispossessed yet. I'll move it up my list. I was introduced to LeGuin in a class at Berkeley titled Women in Religion offered by the Berkeley School of Theology / Graduate Theological Union (separate from UC Berkeley but they have a collaborative relationship, and students of each can take classes in the other) and taught by a feminist theologian woman... I'm an atheist leaning agnostic and it was one of my favorite classes I ever took at Berkeley.

I never heard of Big Thief and will give their music a listen, definitely!

It might be years before my writing sees the light of day, but if you would be so kind, shoot me an email so we can keep in touch. I'll send you one as well, given all the spam filters that hinder such first time comms.

Thanks for writing!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com