> Only a very few people possess the level of discernment needed to know how bad your local concert hall's piano is, and precisely how it is bad. If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this.
The problem with this line of thinking -- "If X happens then we'll all be cooked!" -- is that it ignores the fact that X already has been happening and yet life is just fine.
There's an infinite number of pursuits in which expert practitioners could theoretically possess a level of discernment so sublime that nobody else can understand it, let alone appreciate it.
A huge number of these arts will either never be practiced, or were practiced in the past but have already decline. And yet there's no mass ennui or clamoring to steer the Earth into the sun.
The pinnacle of human attention cannot be directed at everything, everywhere, all at once. We have to focus our attention on a limited subset of arts and pursuits, where discernment will always be high, and settle everywhere else.
The problem with this line of thinking -- "If X happens then we'll all be cooked!" -- is that it ignores the fact that X already has been happening and yet life is just fine.
There's an infinite number of pursuits in which expert practitioners could theoretically possess a level of discernment so sublime that nobody else can understand it, let alone appreciate it.
A huge number of these arts will either never be practiced, or were practiced in the past but have already decline. And yet there's no mass ennui or clamoring to steer the Earth into the sun.
The pinnacle of human attention cannot be directed at everything, everywhere, all at once. We have to focus our attention on a limited subset of arts and pursuits, where discernment will always be high, and settle everywhere else.