Judy, we disagree on who owns the arrogance. Appeals to historicism always disregard that there are a multitude of trajectories from past initial conditions that could have led to the present condition. To choose one as the 'true' cause is the pinnacle of arrogance, in my opinion.
Were self determination guaranteed, we would know -- as Ajay implied -- that history need not be written by the victors; rather, that the free and aware population is victorious over history.
We don't need hierarchies, whether they are the hierarchies of historical determinism, or of intelligence, religious superiority, genetics ... the only improving that we need is the freedom to improve each others' capacity to appreciate each others' contributions. In that framework, one would find no more reason to discuss the ethics of eugenics than to discuss the ethics of torture. The ethical thing is not to value those things at all.
My reply to Vladimir emphasized one trajectory of history -- that Jews have continuously lived in Palestine (Judea, Samaria, Galillee) under oppressive religious and political rule, for thousands of years. Vladimir emphasized another trajectory of history -- the recent dispossession of Palestinian Arabs by Jewish immigrants escaping European oppression. Neither initial condition is false; one can write one's own history of the outcome from each initial condition, and both versions would be true.
The challenge is to make the history we want, not that which has programmed us. We are bigger than our history, bigger than our genetic makeup, bigger than our politics and our superstitions. We will never know it, however, until we dare to dissolve the hierarchical thinking that protects and reinforces those beliefs.
If science has an answer, I am persuaded that the key is in Bar-Yam's result: "In considering the requirements of multi-scale variety more generally, we can state that for a system to be effective, it must be able to coordinate the right number of components to serve each task, while allowing the independence of other sets of components to perform their respective tasks without binding the actions of one such set to another."
Best,
Tom
