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Elaboration 37
Often, I have maintained that in our universities, the
required so-called handbooks for social science could well
be done away with. They teach only nonsense, trivialities,
at the most some insight in physics or biologic physics. I
would propagate for social scientists, the study of, first
of all, the old ones like Xenophon, Aristotle, Plato.
Herodotus, Tacitus, Polybius, Plutarch, etc., etc. but also
the 'good' science fictions that are written by clever
thinkers in social affairs. John Wyndham e.g. is such a one
(and Hoyle, Forester, Wells) (64.1). He
shows us society in ruins, and the normal nature of man coping with it.
This is far more effective for learning social
science, the core of man-typical mental science than biology. But the
Reader beware of trash writers. This is why we
should not merely advise students to take to sc. fic. , but
we mention specific books and authors. I myself have some
of the pulp writers. They cannot paint reality, except by
means of military (low grade, lower deck) expressions,
always sexual. No such expressions are found in e.g. Wyndham or Forester, Wells, Hoyle. They need no vulgarity in
order to sham capability, to promote sales. Naturally there
are ideation experts, the 'real' social scientific eminents,
like Locke, etc. very much worth studying, but these are
decidedly not vital in contemporary social science (but
Seneca, Epictetus, Cicero, etc. are). Coué, Baudouin, Satow,
Tietjens and the like, remain basic material for ideation.
Then, of course, there is the 'Utopia' form as method of
teaching how a 'socio' might be run. There are plenty of
them (from Plato onwards), most sc. fic. are such. I have
encountered only one, who seriously stated the scientific
truth, that a 'good' Utopia cannot but be a mondial one
(Wells' 'A Modern Utopia'). One is not in a very good
Utopiatic island when a hundred kilometers to windward,
people explode atomic bombs. Nor is one's Utopia very gratifying
when it uses to pollute the sea and air, damages the
Ozone layer, for us all.
Subsections
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Ven
2007-09-11