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

Jason lists at moduszine.com
Sat Mar 31 04:59:49 PDT 2007


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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