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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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They all have the attributes Aristostle and Confuscius independently identified them as having.

Such as?


For the rest of this comment I feel like I need some clarification on "the human condition", biology, and the relation between them. It seems to me humans already manage our biology in ways great and small with mostly positive results. The person with cataracts who gets surgery, the deaf person who gets a cochlear implant, the diabetic who takes insulin, the person with a lethal allergy, are all managing their biology. Sometimes with life or death implications!

So what parts of our biology does "the human condition" consist of such that we are incompetent to manage these parts?

Such as?

The exact list is the object of philosophical debate of course, but generally it includes the ability to use reason and language, pair-bonding and the building of couples and households, the practice of politics and the development of societies, and the ability to practice mimesis and create art through imagination. ALl with the underlying issues that come with them, of course.

Of these both Chinese and Greeks independently derived similar forms of morality based on natural law, but I'm here drawing more from the underlying reality than these extrapolations.

So what parts of our biology does "the human condition" consist of such that we are incompetent to manage these parts?

All of them.

None of the examples you give, which are of course good restorative practices that can heal the sick, are equivalent to their natural counterparts and it is not even totally clear that their existence is a good thing in the absolute. I personally do not see our increasing reliance on industrial technology to survive as a good thing.