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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries

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To: arun gera who wrote (58654)	1/10/2005 6:59:25 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (3) of 74559

<I think you are purposely trying to avoid credit where it is due.> My point is that the achievements of long ago were not really a big deal. There's a tendency these days to think of people hacking flint into shape and figuring out some geometry as being the equivalent of today's brilliant people. Nutting out CDMA or E=mc2 and doing quantum tunnelling is obviously much more difficult. It's like me being able to repair a 1953 Hillman and BSA Bantam Major, but looking in bewilderment at a Y2K Lexus engine's intricacies. I don't accept that ye olde Euclid and co would foot it with Stephen Hawking. I think people today are qualitatively and quantitatively superior [motor neurone disease notwithstanding and we'll soon fix that too]. There might have been a minuscule number of people with comparable intellectual grunt as the best today, but they were few and far between and likely to be found wielding a sword or digging dirt to plant crops. Dining out for centuries on ancestors' past glories is pretty weak. It's what they do today that matters, not what somebody did centuries ago, who was only partly related to the current populations claiming "credit", as though they can claim credit. Similarly, the credit for horrors conducted ages ago ancestors should remain with the ancestors, and can't really be claimed by the now-living half-caste descendants. Germans today can't really claim credit for Auschwitz, or Beethoven. Neither was anything to do with them [though there might be a few still-living guilty parties in regard to Auschwitz who haven't been caught]. Being "proud" of what we haven't done seems silly to me. Similarly, feeling guilty for what we haven't done is daft. Mqurice

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