Is that an actual question
Yes.
or an oblique way of suggesting that the thesis of "Well tended gardens die by pacifism" is promoting a form of Truth-Guardianism, and therefore contradicts the thesis of "Guardians of the Truth", and therefore perhaps both theses are flawed?
Apparent contradictions are often interesting areas of inquiry. Since I had to join my girlfriend for Phở, I only had time to post the one sentence.
It doesn't mean that both theses are flawed. They could be opposing forces. The apparent contradiction might indicate a point where optimization is challenging. This could explain why groups seem doomed to fall to one pathology or another. There's probably positive feedback in either direction, making groups dynamically unstable on this "axis" -- whatever that might be. Maybe this is to be explained by our group cohesion mechanisms being designed to help us survive when the next tribe over decides to attack, and why things too easily devolve into might makes right?
Combining the two suggests that when I choose to defend my local community norms against corruption by outside norms, I also have a moral responsibility to be right about the superiority of my community's norms.
The last phrase makes me cautious. I think one has a moral responsibility to respect the truth by seeking the truth. If we look at ideologies, how well do they deal with the notion of superiority? How many past notions of superiority seem barbaric? Is there a way of transcending or sidestepping this notion of superiority altogether?
Agreed that apparent contradictions are often interesting areas of inquiry.
The only ways I know of to sidestep having to decide which norms best align with my values is to adopt values such that either no community's norms are superior to any others', or such that whatever norms happen to emerge victorious from the interaction of social groups are superior to all the norms they displace. Neither of those tempt me at all, though I know people who endorse both.
If I reject both of those options, I'm left with the possibility that two communities C1 and C2 mig...
Like any educated denizen of the 21st century, you may have heard of World War II. You may remember that Hitler and the Nazis planned to carry forward a romanticized process of evolution, to breed a new master race, supermen, stronger and smarter than anything that had existed before.
Actually this is a common misconception. Hitler believed that the Aryan superman had previously existed—the Nordic stereotype, the blond blue-eyed beast of prey—but had been polluted by mingling with impure races. There had been a racial Fall from Grace.
It says something about the degree to which the concept of progress permeates Western civilization, that the one is told about Nazi eugenics and hears "They tried to breed a superhuman." You, dear reader—if you failed hard enough to endorse coercive eugenics, you would try to create a superhuman. Because you locate your ideals in your future, not in your past. Because you are creative. The thought of breeding back to some Nordic archetype from a thousand years earlier would not even occur to you as a possibility—what, just the Vikings? That's all? If you failed hard enough to kill, you would damn well try to reach heights never before reached, or what a waste it would all be, eh? Well, that's one reason you're not a Nazi, dear reader.
It says something about how difficult it is for the relatively healthy to envision themselves in the shoes of the relatively sick, that we are told of the Nazis, and distort the tale to make them defective transhumanists.
It's the Communists who were the defective transhumanists. "New Soviet Man" and all that. The Nazis were quite definitely the bioconservatives of the tale.