--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> I don't remember celebrating the Amish. I do know
> that pre-industrial
> societies worked fewer hours than we do. And I do
> know that a lot of the
> stuff we deaden ourselves to produce in this society
> is entirely
> unnecessary.
>
> I do know that we can work a lot less without giving
> up the comfort some
> of us have grown used to.
>
> I really hate the way this list is so often black
> and white when most of
> us have the intelligence, the experience, and the
> knowledge to know that
> the answer is mostly gray. I expect to see the
> stupid binaries in the
> media, but not on this list.
[WS:] I am in agreement with you on this, Joanna. I think that we as society can do much better than we are doing now. But that is a very different cititique from denouncing modernity as the source of all evil and providing somoe romanticizing vision of primitive societies as counterexamples.
This whole discussion started with the argument that i posted some time to this list how to concptualize the effect of capitalism on society. I argued that we should conceptualize it as "inadequate or insufficient good" rather than a source of all evil. That is to say, capitalism achieved remarkable progress in impriving the living conditions of the humankind, but fell short of reachning standards that would be achievable under a different set of conditons (e.g. under socialism). As a result, a great number of people were "left behind" i.e. did not benefit as much as they could have under a different set of conditions.
This argument, which btw is akin to Thomas Aquinas' conceptualization of evil (as the absence of good rather than a substantive entity in itself) is very much different from a frequently made argument, including this list, that capitalismis the 'source' of all evil in modern society. While I would not deny that capitalist development actually caused some problems that were unknown in pre-modern societies, I would need to make a careful judgemt that separates the effects that are unique to capitalism from the mere "absence of good" i.e. capitalism's inability to alleviate pre-exiting problems (such as interpresonal violence, exploitation, inequality, of poverty).
This seems to me like a very rational approach. I do not think that too many people on this list would oppose it if i used it to analyze the effect of communism in Russia by analytically seprating the pre-esxiting conditions in that country from the effects introduced by socialism. In fact, i did propose such an argument on this list, and did not see many dissenting voices. So why is all this stink being raised when I am trying to apply the same reasoning to capitalism? What is good for the goose, should be good for the gander, no?
If i were to speculate, there are not that many negative effects uniquely introduced by capitalism. At least not yet, for the only such effect that comes to mind is global climate change. This could be a disaster of cosmic proportion or a manageable problem - but we have no way of knowing for sure at this time.
All other problems of the modern world - wars, violence, poverty, exploitation, inequality, authoritarianism, alienation etc. - have been inherited from the past. Capitalism might have taken advantage of some of them, made improvements in other - substantial improvements I may add - but it also fell short of making improvements that were or are possible. But this is a sin of omission rather than comission (pardon my catholic casuistry) which requires a different set of remedies than those proposesd by many criticis on the left. Specifically, instead of abolishing capitalism we need to improve on it - and this is what the Old Man claimed, as far as i can tell. However, that message was twised by nationalist regimes of third world countries (and Russia and China) to justfy their autarkic development projects.
So to sum it up, while I agree with you that there are many social problems persisting in modern socities, i also propose a diffrent causal argument for that persistence from that conventinally offered by the left. I believe that most of those problems result from capitalim's inability to do better in solving them, that its ovewhelming power to create evil.
Wojtek
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