Doug:
>
> that I've come across in some time. Do you think we all live our
> lives according to what Keynes called the Benthamite contraption,
> busily rank-ordering our tastes and preferences and self-interests
> and hang the rest?
I think it is much simpler than that. You cannot rank-order things you do not know, so if your knowledge is confinded to the small bubble in which you live, you will be concerned only about things going on in your bubble. That is what anthroplogists call ethnocentrism. It prevailed in most human societies, so it can be considered a general human condition of a sort. But with advances of ctravel and communication, people started adopting a more wordly perspective. My only beef is that one might expect that a society that has most advanced means of travel and communication at its disposal would adopt a less insular attitude that can prevail in this society.
Doug:
Is there no room for human sympathy or solidarity
> in your world?
Solidarity is socially constructed and requires stable social relations as its building blocks. You cannot expect solidarity to thrive in a society of monadic nomads - people who move from suburb to suburb in search of material comfort and fail to establish meaninful social realtions in the places they temprorarili leave. No, I would not expect much solidarity in this country, but that does not mean it s not more abundant elsewhere.
Doug:
If I thought life was this irredeemably dark, I'd jump
> off the Brooklyn Bridge.
>
Not necessarily. That reminds me of story of one Warsaw Jew who went
into hiding to avoid capture after the nazis invaded Poland in 1939. He
hoped that the French and the British would soon defet the Nazis and his
ordeal would be over. However, in the summer of 1940 he heard a radio
broadcast that the Nazis took Paris. The fall of Paris was the end of
the world as he knew it. The man lost all hopes and committed suicide.
And that was his mistake, for he failed to foresee that after Paris
would come Stalingrad. I am not making that mistake and hope that
Washington will meet Stalingrad one day, perhaps even during my life
time.
Wojtek