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July 15 - July 16, 2017
that the capitalist system forces everyone to put economic interests at the heart of their lives, so that they can no longer know deep, honest relationships. He called this psychological tendency Warenfetischismus (commodity fetishism) because it makes us value things that have no objective value and encourages us to see our relationships with others primarily in economic terms.
Marx
for example: that a person who doesn’t work is practically worthless, that if we simply work hard enough we will get ahead, that more belongings will make us happier and that worthwhile things (and people) will invariably make money. In short, one of the biggest evils of capitalism is not that there are corrupt people at the top – this is true in any human hierarchy – but that capitalist ideas teach all of us to be anxious, competitive, conformist, and politically complacent.
The Communist Manifesto describes a world without private property, without any inherited wealth, with a steeply graduated income tax, centralised control of the banking, communication, and transport industries, and free public education for all children. Marx also expected that communist society would allow people to develop lots of different sides of their natures.
ourselves. We don’t need a dictatorship of the proletariat, but we do need to reconsider why we value work and what we want to get out of it. We shouldn’t get rid of private property, but we do need a more thoughtful, authentic relationship to money and consumption.
contrasted the general beauty of nature with the ugliness of the man-made world.
We should use the emotion we feel at the beauty of nature to energise us to equal its works. The goal of human society is to honour the dignity and grandeur of the natural world.
nature provides the meaning that money and technology and other people’s opinions cannot, by teaching us to be humble and more aware, by fostering introspection and self-discovery.
Martin Luther King famously used Thoreau’s ideas in his fight for equality for African-Americans. King’s first exposure to nonviolent methods of protest came when he read Thoreau’s work in 1944; it convinced him that ‘noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.’
By ‘anarchy’, he didn’t mean people in black balaclavas breaking shop windows. Rather he meant something much more familiar and closer to home: a toxic kind of freedom. He meant a society where market forces dominate the nation; where the commercial media sets the agenda and coarsens and simplifies everything it touches; where corporations are barely restrained from despoiling the environment; where human beings are treated as tools to be picked up and put down at will; where there is no more pastoral care and precious little sense of community; where hospitals treat the body but no one treats
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Arnold
the rags-to-riches tales were overall so negligible as not to warrant serious attention by political theorists. Indeed, to keep mentioning them was merely a clever political sleight of hand designed to prevent the powerful from undertaking the necessary task of reforming society.
us, in the modern United States, and many parts of Europe too, if you are born poor, the chances of you remaining poor (and dying young) are simply overwhelming and incontestable.
This experiment is called ‘the veil of ignorance’, and through it Rawls asks us to imagine ourselves in a conscious, intelligent state before our own birth, but without any knowledge of what circumstances we were going to be born into; our futures shrouded by a veil of ignorance. Standing high above the planet, we wouldn’t know what sort of parents we’d have, what our neighbourhoods would be like, how the schools would perform, what the local hospital could do for us, how the police and judicial systems might treat us and so on … The question that Rawls asks us all to contemplate is: if we
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In the West, philosophers write long non-fiction books, often using incomprehensible words, and limit their involvement with the world to lectures and committee meetings. In the East, and especially in the Zen tradition, philosophers write poems, rake gravel, go on pilgrimages, practise archery, write aphorisms on scrolls, chant and, in the case of one of the very greatest Zen thinkers, Sen no Riky, involve themselves in teaching people how
Monasticism puts forward the bold thesis that people can actually lead the most fruitful, productive and happy lives when they get together into controlled, organised groups of friends, have some clear rules, and direct themselves towards a few big ambitions.
1. The pleasures of rules
Communal life
1. Democracy breeds materialism
de Tocqueville
no suspicion whatever of the rich, a certain moral judgement against the poor, and an immense respect for the capacity to make money.
Democracy breeds envy and shame
betrayal of their expectations.
3. The tyranny of the majority
an aggressively levelling instinct in which it is regarded as a civic virtue to cut down to size anyone
4. Democracy turns us against authority
fatally biased towards mediocrity.
Democracy undermines freedom of mind
gave up their independence of mind and put their faith in newspapers and so-called ‘common sense’.
and frustrating. He is teaching the Stoic lesson that certain pains need to be the expected; they are the likely accompaniments of political progress. He’s
Capitalism was created by Protestantism, specifically Calvinism, as developed by John Calvin in Geneva and by his followers in England, the Puritans.
Weber
Marx had proposed a materialist view of capitalism (where technology was said to have created a new capitalist social system), whereas Weber now advanced an idealist one (suggesting that it was in fact a set of ideas that had created capitalism and given the impetus for its newfound technological and financial arrangements).
The only way to overcome the power lodged within bureaucracy is through knowledge and systematic organisation.
psychological costs of capitalism.
Durkheim
suicide rates seem to shoot up once a nation becomes industrialised and consumer capitalism takes hold.
‘individualism’ forces us to be the authors of our own destinies.
disinclination to admit to any sort of role for luck or chance in life.
Failure becomes a terrible judgement upon oneself.
Envy grows rife.
religion had become implausible just as its communal side would have been most necessary to repair the fraying social fabric.
taken with elaborate religious rituals that demand participation and create a strong sense of belonging.
Our looser, more individual sense of family isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It just means that it’s not well placed to take up the task of giving us a larger sense of belonging –
modern economies put tremendous pressures on individuals but leave us dangerously bereft of authoritative guidance and communal solace. He didn’t
She saw life for Americans of her time as one in which people are brought up ‘denied all first-hand knowledge of birth and love and death, harried by a society which will not let adolescents grow up at their own pace, imprisoned in the small, fragile, nuclear family from which there is no escape and in which there is little security.’
Mead
none of these traits were ‘human nature’: they were all instead simply possibilities, which were either taught, encouraged, or shunned by native culture.
Mead strongly believed that it was important to consider cultural norms because people needed their culture to help guide them towards healthier emotional lives. She imagined that each culture, like a tribe cast out from the Tower of Babel and given a unique language, had something unique to contribute culturally as well:
free time – and the cultural activities we might pursue in it – was our prime opportunity to expand and develop ourselves, to reach after our own better nature, and to acquire the tools with which to change society.
Adorno
a new and catastrophically dangerous opium for the masses.
perceptively described Walt Disney as the most dangerous man in America.
what we really require to thrive – tenderness, understanding, calm, insight – is in painfully short supply and utterly disconnected from the economy.
Psychology precedes politics.
Long before someone is racist, homophobic or authoritarian, they are – Adorno skilfully suggested – likely to be suffering from psychological fragilities and immaturities which it is the task of society as a whole to get better at spotting and responding to.
heart, good stewardship of the earth requires us to understand both our scientific strength and our distinctive moral stupidity and imaginative blindness.
Carson
