[lbo-talk] Narmada Dam (was Arundhati Roy etc.)

[Jason]

On 2007-03-31 04:51:51 +0100 Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> "Proven to work"?  Human beings have been around on this planet for 
> many 
> millenia; all the hunting and gathering societies that existed over 
> the past 
> 100,000 years "worked" just fine (otherwise we'd never be here!).  
> Woj can 
> only make the claim that nothing but industrial society "works" by 
> smuggling 
> in the standards of the Good Life from--industrial societies!  Judged 
> by the 
> standards of the typical hunting and gathering society, our 
> industrial 
> society doesn't work well at all: massive economic and political 
> inequalities, large scale wars, the weakening of family functions by 
> independent social institutions like medicine, religion, and 
> education.  --So 
> given the lack of universal consensus about the Good Society, it's a 
> political question: who gets to decide which standards we use to 
> determine 
> which societies "work"?

Is the above just some kind of rhetorical argument or are you 
seriously advocating returing to a hunter-gatherer society? If it's 
the latter then you're welcome to toddle off and do so, but not to 
drag the rest of us down into your nightmare.

It's amazing that you consider medicine to have weakened family 
functions? Do you mean that the role of funerals in social bonding has 
been diminsihed because people live so damn long?

"Smuggling in the standards of the Good Life from industrial 
socities"? If you can't even agree that medicine and education are a 
universal good then I do have to wonder... Would you rather be some 
kind of subsistance farmer or peasant or a well-educated modern person 
who subscribes to e-mail lists about economics? Who has the easier - 
and better - life? The answer is pretty obvious.

Jason.

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