America was founded as a nation where private pieties, in the plural, could be shared openly. It was founded as a place where thousands of churches could form congregations and masses of the faithful which worshipped God as they saw fit, and where they pursued their own understanding of virtue. It was to be a place of countless small communities which tamed the wild beast without caging him.
This notion of the bourgeois keeps coming up over and over in his treatment of European thought, and I am going to need to put some thought to it. Since I am listening to this, I also may need to read some of the passages several times, since his summations are extraordinarily useful, but warrant close reading and likely rereading.
But I would stipulate that from my own perspective I have not seen Chaos/Complexity Theory incorporated into the fields of morality and philosophy, and that this addition in my view helps solve many of the tensions and polarities. With concepts like Emergent Properties, one can speak of things both existing and not existing, and not solely as a feature of language. In my perhaps overly limited understanding, it seems to enable the solution of important problems, a project which seems, again in my view, to have been abandoned much too prematurely.
It would perhaps be more true to say not so much that the project was abandoned, as the incompetents operating the system painted themselves into a corner, and have been justifying their folly theoretically since.
And I would stipulate as a general rule as well that reason can help us get what we want, but cannot tell us what we DO want.
Axiom: If it has to do with machines, consult science; if it has to do with humans, your heart.
Definition: machine: any fixed or definable complex system which exhibits regularities in nature such that general principles can be stipulated, as well as the creations of the human mind expressed within the field of matter intended to be of practical use.
Not sure if I agree with all that, but I am tired so it will have to do.