IRC-Galleria

The rationalism of Continental Europe has been based on the belief in the unlimited potential of individual human reason. In its conception, the essence of human consciousness consists in thinking and reasoning. It has promoted the design of social utopias. Its two principal tenets are not substantiated by biology. Human conscious deliberation appears to be just a ‘monomolecular layer’ on an immense ‘ocean’ of the adaptive unconscious. Science may favour an alternative doctrine, evolutionary rationalism: rationality in nature and in society is a phenomenon a posteriori, a product of selection from countless trials and failures. Democracy is one such evolutionary product. Yet, the spontaneous flexibility and adaptability of democracy may no longer keep pace with the high speed of growth of science and technology. Noocracy may become an evolutionary outgrowth of democracy, having the capacity to match the quickly changing states of knowledge. It would comprise conscious, systematic and institutionalised experimentation taking place in many decentralised autonomous subsystems. The European Union, which has reached a critical stage in its successive institutionalisation, has a unique opportunity to introduce this application of evolutionary rationalism.

http://www.fns.uniba.sk/~lkovac/105.doc