Am I totally corrupted that I find a lot to recommend this "good life"?
*************************
I’ve asked myself this question many times. It comes up most often during debates about protecting indigenous cultures and traditional ways of life. It seems to me, if I’m not over-interpreting van der Pijl’s point or inserting notions that are not supported by the essay, that the conflict comes from Westerner’s unwillingness to accept as legitimate other forms of social organization that do not place a premium on leisure, mobility and other things we call ‘the good life.’
I’m thinking now of Chalmers Johnson’s descriptions of American financial sector elite’s confusion over and hatred of Japanese style capitalism, and Chomsky’s often repeated point that American political elites find Western European social welfare states off-putting. In both cases, the point being made is that the fact that an alternative, any alternative, exists to the way things are done here is disturbing to the mindset of the American ruling class (and many ordinary folks). I believe that Jacques Ellul was making a similar argument in “The Technological Society” about our entire world of “technique”.
There’s another way of putting this; we can imagine, many years from now, a successful, modern and prosperous Afghanistan. But if we were to visit and tune into a domestically produced television program about network arranged copulation like Fox’s “Paradise Island” - which, from a certain point of view, can be seen as an indication of our laudable permissiveness - should this be considered progress over Afghanistan’s present backwardness? And if, as is the case in so much of America, this good life of pleasant diversion came at the near total cost of community, what would we say then?
Perhaps van der Pilj is asserting that other social arrangements, not all of which would be our choice but which might be legitimate to the people living within them, are dismissed by us as illegitimate by reflex. Poverty and social ills in the ‘third world’ give us an excuse to look down upon people and cultures but that may be only the surface effect of a deeper disdain that would persist even if poor nations grew rich yet retained their differences.
By all means I think the whole world should be able to enjoy the things that are available to me; but, they should be able to do it on their own terms.
Perhaps it is the resistance to this idea that is being criticized.
DRM
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com