Me, I was hoping we'd actually continue with the Gould/biology thread... the list seems to head off into these long discussions of spirituality at the drop of a hat.
What flabbergasted me was the assertion that the determinate account of the global history of evolution... particularly as it pertains to the history of social change. There were no meaningful contingent events or actions that might have tweaked any level of global ecological and species development to the point that a different set of initial conditions for a subsequent development could be set in such a fashion as to alter the metadirectional outcome of biogeophysical development? Really?
Capitalism was inevitable? Which capitalism is that? Smith's moral economy? Weber's rationalized markets? Marx's wage labor-based industrialization? Oh-so-many-others' prepolitical technophilic celebrationism? If capitalism was inevitable, has anything not been inevitable? Is tragedy inevitably followed by farce? If so, then there's no reason for critical political economy, much less social movements?
If the argument is that the metadimensions of environmental and social change are predetermined but not the lives of individual ecological, species, or people, then I need an argument that tells me at what level - and why there and not somewhere else - the determinism weakens and anything like people making their own lives not under conditions of their own choosing kicks in.
********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Visiting Associate Professor Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319