Abundance and American Democracy: A Comment

Abstract

AINYONE CONCERNED to think clearly and well has to make at least two principle decisions. The first, and often most neglected, involves separating the from the trivial: making distinctions between things that we need to know now, from those that we might want to know at a later, less perilous time, from those that we really can do without now and forever. This is not necessarily easy as the advocates of pure science often remind us. Still, I suspect that the choice is not as difficult as it may seem, especially in a world of widening extremes between the winners and the losers, that is busily engaged in pulling the ecological rug out from under its own feet while developing more clever and more probable ways to incinerate itself. The second decision involves making distinctions within the category of important between the true, the less true, and the false, knowing all the while that reality is more complex than our ability to think about it. Moreover, the characteristics of relativity, randomness, indeterminacy, and incompleteness found in the physical/mathematical universe doubtless have analogs in the social world, which are compounded by problems of irony, values, ethics, and social choice. Moreover, disciplinary paradigms, research methods, and the institutional context of research and thought can seriously distort what we think to be true. The two decisions, of course, are related. The choice of what is depends to some extent on what is thought to be true and vice versa. In both decisions a healthy concern for good thought en-