It is from this ambivalent conception of humanitas that humanism was born. It is not so much a movement as an attitude which can be defined as the conviction of the dignity of
man, based on both the insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the acceptance of human limitations (fallibility and frailty); from this two postulates result responsibility and tolerance.
…The humanist, then, rejects authority. But he respects
tradition.”
Irwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline”—-
“Humanism- Most generally any philosophy concerned to emphasize human welfare and dignity, and optimistic about the powers of unaided human understanding.”
Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.

Blackburn goes on to discuss the Renaissance, but not well.
He’s wrong on the history. But then history isn’t really his concern. Panofsky knew his history, and he was a secularist. But he was a cosmopolitan, and Blackburn is not.

“Maybe you think this can change. Great! Build the institutions to do it … Here’s the thing: you have to do it before you dismantle the old system. Not after.”

She says she wants more ‘proof of concept’. But she is setting the bar impossibly high. There is plenty of proof of concept of government-provided healthcare/insurance schemes working tolerably well. There is plenty of proof of concept of government funding research. What McArdle is worried about – she says this many times – is that government will crowd out private actors in a global sense. And that after that happens, bad stuff will happen (allegedly). “I think that any program enacted now is likely to be the tipping point – once the government controls more than 50% of the health care system (it’s over 45% now), it crowds out private health insurance for most people.” But, for proof of concept purposes, we are now in a Catch-22. We are obliged to keep the private system completely up and running, for safety purposes, while completely shutting it down, for test purposes. McArdle expressly demands both. That is, how can we possibly have to systems up and running together, both actually handling more than 50% of the populations health care needs?

Of course, if there really were some reason to suspect strongly that the results of reform will be irreparably awful, it might be best to respond to this Catch-22 by standing pat. But McArdle hasn’t produced any reasons of this sort. The sorts of things she is most worried about – namely, long-term marginal costs associated with decline in r&d – don’t really sound like the sorts of problems that would be unfixable, in the event,. In any case, she presents this Catch-22, not as a Catch-22, but as if it were sober counsel of incrementalism. Why not take safe, small steps? Testing as we go? But, to repeat, this impossibly high bar she is setting could never be advice to take little safe steps.

So that’s it for McArdle, as far as I am concerned. Back to cosmopolitanism.

Mcardle responded to your claim about the fungibility of government R&D and private R&D. I want to hear what you have to say.

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/09/the_governments_role_in_rd.php

p.s. For some reason, she acts like you just made this claim, rather than admitting that you’ve been making this claim from the beginning and she’s just been dropping the point.

So if we work our less than original ideas out without the overlay of unconscious ideas of the past (even if we import our own prejudices) we may be getting somewhere.

The Internet, of course, is where the ideologies of cosmpolitanism, world citizenship, utopianism, and the shirking of immediate responsibilities with the excuse of abstract ones all meet.

I suppose it makes one rather sleepy, wouldn’t you say?

The only love Diogenes needed to have was for a good order of things. That doesn’t imply there to be a need of one type of order, nor one care-taker of that order. In fact – the current common sense use of “cosmopolitan” can only with a stretch-that-tears-the-fabric be interpreted into the best-world-order category (or into utopianism) for instance. It’s the modesty of Humean moral thinking (& it’s absoluteness of rule) in early poetry & in common sense.

I would doubt that truely cosmopolitan people would have a place for the idea that all people, in a literal sense, should be governed in the same way.