On Mon, 18 Jul 2005 at 12:00:02 in message
, Peter Duniho
wrote:
What's insane is thinking that it's for some reason important to preserve
these planes. As I already pointed out, if they were so important to
preserve, we shouldn't have been building them to be destroyed in the first
place.

Peter,

That last sentence above does not make sense to me. We did not build
them to be destroyed, we hoped they would not be, but correctly realised
that many would be destroyed. It is obviously not important to you to
preserve them but it is to many people. So what? Both points of view are
valid.

The Mustang was designed and built to fight and help win the war for us.
That does not stop it being a thing of beauty and something that people
wish to enjoy for whatever internal reason they may have. 'Irrational'
admiration for a thing of beauty satisfies some curious internal
mechanism of the human being..

Part of being human is to be irrational in the way you describe.
However it is important to recognise you are being irrational and then
get on and enjoy what you want to do.

Mind you, in the words Professor Joad, 'it all depends what you mean by
irrational'. Rational thought to me follows strict logic from initial
premises and assumptions through to a conclusion.

Perhaps the starting point should be to ask what are your objectives?
Why do people listen to opera? Why do they watch sport? Why do they read
novels? What are legitimate activities for human beings?

If you never do anything except what is strictly rational in your terms
then any activities that give people pleasure without any obvious
purpose are presumably insane? That defines the majority of humans as
being insane! Well perhaps they are and you are the only sane one.

Remember that man is not a rational animal but a rationalising animal.
That means he is adept at finding reasons for what he wants to do. That
applies equally to those who wish to preserve and to those who don't.

More importantly, it's irrational to be concerned about not being able to
replace the airplanes. They aren't useful objects anymore (except, perhaps,
for the entertainment value they provide at air races and other airshows).
It is a fundamental truth that every last P-51 will eventually be destroyed,
just as every other thing that humanity has ever created will eventually be
destroyed. Even if P-51s were important to our survival as a species (and
they clearly are not), it would be futile to expect any to not eventually be
destroyed.

I presume you feel exactly the same about works of art: that it is
irrational to wish to protect and preserve them? No doubt the world and
the human race will change, if either or both of them survive. In the
long run all may be destroyed but it sure helps to pass the time before
doomsday in an activity that you get pleasure from.

I find this irrationality even more amusing in the context of a newsgroup
where there were a handful of folks talking about how "irrational" people
with religious faith are. I suppose folks here don't mind being irrational
as long as it's their own preferential brand of irrationality. If it's
someone else's, that's apparently cause for derision.

That's life and the human condition. To me tolerance of other people
foibles is something good. But that is probably irrational as well.

--
David CL Francis