"stuff like ensuring the scut work gets done and is shared, and
ensuring we get more efficient in providing for needs in order to have
time for better collective life. I think this area is 'religious'."
This is going back to social animal work organization. Whereas I insist on my freedom to choose to live a worse individual life. Sorry, today I have no solution to how you will be able to set the ground for your substantial change.
On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 5:43 PM, archytas <nwterry@gmail.com> wrote:
There's a video called "Four Horsemen" from the Renegade Economist
that makes a lot of the points fairly well. Towards the end they
suggest a lot of the answer lies in self-education and developing a
critical mentality. I don't think this is a solution. My mature
students nearly all want to explore their own experience critically
and almost all see this as impossible in the work context. The extent
to which religion has been involved in trying to restrict
disproportionate wealth interests me because education fails almost
entirely in that area.
Focusing into this, we don't seem collectively to realise accumulating
wealth in a few hands destroys democratic politics and genuine
globalisation (in its good sense of making war obsolete and in
developing mutual aid and insurance). One needs to be able to say
this and address what will motivate and enforce the 'keeping of us
honest' in terms of entitlement, responsibility and collective goals -
stuff like ensuring the scut work gets done and is shared, and
ensuring we get more efficient in providing for needs in order to have
time for better collective life. I think this area is 'religious'.
Education can't work as we have it because standards are dismally low
and educators are now controlled through crude performance
management. I think we have to be honest and accept the education we
provide is a poor fit for 95% of recipients. People are so innumerate
they think profits are fairly derived in a system that is actually
crackpot. We both accept the need for competitive pressures on
workers and wages, and the notion that money can make money through
accounting practices. This is contradiction in extreme. Financial
services are a cost, so if we see banks making vast profits and paying
out huge bonuses we should not rejoice - this is the very sort of
"work" that is parasitic, wasteful and should be cut out. Banking
could be reduced to a few firms operating as competing utilities.
Retailing could be reduced by 90% - people should not be working hard
in factories or essential services to support banking evil and the
fripperies of consumption. The key to substantial change in this is
to develop new ways to organise work projects without the profit
motive but with proper regulation to make sure the work is done
effectively.
> I suspect that much of the emphasis on s nealryex in traditional
> religious/cultural morality has more to do with questions of possessions> religio-philosophical views of "the human person" as offered *a
> and inheritance in patriarchal societies than the high-falutin
> posteriori *today,
> for example, by such institutions as the Catholic Church. For a man to
> bequeath his property he had to know who his sons were and that they were
> his. The position of women as housekeeping breeding machines flows from
> this, as do such questions as societally enforced marital fidelity and the
> prohibition of sex before marriage and promiscuity generally.
>
> I think one of your key insights is that we are social beings. The
> consequence of this basic fact would be a morality based on concepts such
> as solidarity and responsibility and not on the primacy of possessions,
> above all property, which is still the lodestone of most of our moral and
> legal systems - and the root of the idolising of economics which is the
> cause of most of the problems or modern world society is facing.
>
> You and I are not alone in having these kinds of ideas - but the real
> question, in my view, is how to effect a paradigm shift. Those with the
> wealth and the power have no interest in change, quite the opposite.
> History unfortunately shows that fundamental change usually takes place
> only after system collapse, massive chaos and conflict, with the
> concomitant suffering and death of millions. In our interconnected
> networked world, such a process might well lead to a complete crash.
>
> There are no easy answers, but if substantial change does not come in the
> next two decades or so then the crash may be unavoidable anyway.
>
> *francishunt.blogspot.com*> On 18 May 2012 06:13, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > My stance towards most moralising is one of incredulity, yet I'm a
> > moraliser and believe most of our problems lie in our lack of personal
> > and collective morality. Economics as our political and business
> > class practice it is fundamentally immoral against a scientific world-
> > view, My view of science is that it is full of values and the notion
> > of it as value-free is a total and totalising dud. Only lay people
> > with no experience of doing science hold the "value-free" notion of
> > science.
>
> > You can explore some of the moral issues arising in modern science in
> > a lengthy book review at London Review of Books -
> >http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n10/malcolm-bull/what-is-the-rational-response.
> > The book's topic is climate change.
>
> > Coming up to 60 I regard the world as a abject failure against the
> > promises I thought were being made in politics. I'm a world-weary old
> > fart now, tending to see the generations coming up as narcissist
> > wastrels who don't know what hard work is (etc.) though I think the
> > blame is ours, not theirs. I think the problem is our attitude
> > towards morality. The tendency in history is to focus on religion for
> > moral advice - this is utterly corrupt and we have forgotten that much
> > religious morality is actually a reaction against unfairness and the
> > wicked control of our lives by the rich. It is this latter factor
> > that is repeating itself.
>
> > Much moralising concerns sex. This all largely based in old fables
> > for population control we can still find in primitive societies such
> > as 'sperm control by fellatio' (Sambians) and non-penetrative youth
> > sex (Kikuyu) etc. - and stuff like 'the silver ring thing'. The
> > modern issue is population control and that we can achieve this
> > without sexual moralising - the moral issues are about quality of
> > life, women as other than child-bearing vessels and so on. We have
> > failed almost entirely except in developed countries - to such an
> > extent the world population has trebled in my lifetime despite
> > economic factors driving down birth-rates in developed countries
> > without the kind of restrictions such as China enforced.
>
> > We are still at war.
>
> > Our economics is still based in "growth" and "consumption" and notions
> > human beings should work hard - when in fact the amount of work we
> > need to do probably equates to 3 days a week for 6 months of a year.
> > 75% of GDP is in services and only 6% in really hard work like
> > agriculture. We could have a great deal more through doing less and
> > doing what we do with more regard for conservation and very different
> > scientific advance. My view is it's immoral that we won't take
> > responsibility for this and review our failures. I believe this
> > failure inhibits our spiritual growth and renders us simply animal.
>
> > Human life may be much less than I value it at and just a purposeless
> > farce. The first step in a new attitude towards morality is to
> > consider living with a scientific world-view. The implications of
> > this are complex and probably entail shaking ourselves from a false-
> > consciousness to be able to see what is being done in our name. We
> > need a modern morality not based in the creation of fear and demons to
> > enforce it, or the feeble existential view of the individual. We are
> > social animals and need to get back to some basics developed with
> > modern knowledge, not in past religious and empire disasters.
>
> > Religion has a role in this in my view - religion we might recapture
> > from sensible history - I'd recommend David Graeber's 'Debt: the first
> > 5000 years' as a read here.
>
> --
> Francis Hunt
>
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