Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2000 13:02:38 -0500
From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Brian McAndrews <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Brian McAndrews wrote:
>
> A friend sent me this articleFrom Monthly Review, New York, May, 1949;
he felt that Time <didn't provide a thorough overview of their 'man of the
century'.
SNIP
Brad Wrote:
Monthly Review is (or at least, when I followed it in the late
1960s, was) a fine periodical, and the Monthly Review Press
published solid books. I hope Monthly Review is still
alive and well!
In remembering great socialist academicians of the
20th Century, let us also remember Joseph Needham,
who devoted most of his life to the study of what
he titled his great series of books: _Science
and Civilization in China_.
Needham's orienting
question was: Why, when China was in many ways more
advanced than Europe even in the 1500s, did Europe "take
off" but China remained in feudalism? His answer,
which he did not like, was that Capitalism seems
to have been the engine which drove not just
the West's economic exploitation of the whole world,
but also the great flowering of genuine
Enlightenment in the West. (Of course, this
conclusion does not imply that, today, we
need to keep cranking the starter motor which
got us going, and -- to follow out this analogy which
just came into my head -- may now be serving
primarily to strip our starter system gears.)
Ed replied:
At the risk of being repetatively boreing, The 'western economic
exploitation' is the result of a monetary system that "drives" the economy
exactly as does Ayn Rand's majic "John Galt's Motor."
It is not capitalism's "reward (or gain) for effort" that is it's engine,
it is the deperate struggle for economic survival, the fear of bankruptcy.
Ask any worker/businessman/manufacturer and you'll learn that his
motivation is the load of bank debt and the hidden debt (that is carried by
the shareholder's debt) that hangs over him/her like a democles sword.
The rhetorical question needs to be asked, did the language of technology
provide the fuel that ignited and 'lighted' the enlightenment?
Ed Goertzen
