At 12:46 AM -0400 04/11/2000, Kristin A. Ruhle wrote:
>I wonder. Gut-level I don't like socialism, and experiments with it so far
>haven't worked very well.
Yeah, well, and globally, capitalism is doing SO much better?
>But I wonder if mankind will ever be put on the
>spot in having to choose between freedom and saving the environment,
>because capitalism could turn out to be fundamentally incompatible with
>the drastic measures that will be needed if things get too bad.
Yeah, but you're ignoring the degree to which capitalism, in attuning
people to think of themselves primarily as consumers, helps contribute to
this very problem. How do you think we got so many greenhouse gases, toxic
wastes, and so on? Wanting our MTV and our SUVs and our cheap oil and so on
is not without environmental repercussions.
>It is
>human nature that individuals pursue self interest and greed often at the
>expense of the greateer good, and cannot think pas one generation
>apparently.
What evidence do we have that this is a deep-seated universal truth and not
just the version of reality we're seeing through our modern Western
capitalism-informed perspective? There is ample evidence of cultures in the
past and elsewhere having different perspectives than us. One example I
mentioned elsewhere was in that Medieval building -- a widely used
metaphor for poetry in France -- implied generations of cooperative,
cumulative work. Many tribal societies subsisted by hunting as a group and
divvying up the spoils. Chinese rhetoric has long been about generations
upon generations (the long view) and about unity as a society. I could
produce more examples but it's late. I'd be very careful about nature vs.
nurture and steer away from these simplistic, essentialist claims about the
species, though; or at least consider that a great degree of what seems
natural and hardwired may be cultural or a combination of hardwiring and
culture. Not all pre-democratic societies were necessarily quasi-fascist
regimes, though we may think it complimentary to think so of all "savages"
who preceded our "civilization", and it certainly makes our reductive,
essentialist, dismissive, and simplistic arguments much easier to make.
>A corporation has a short planing horizon - *quarterly* profit
>- even shorter than an individual, and individuals are selfish enough
>(Look at all those SUVs)! otoh we are too greedy for socialism to work
>either!
If we are too greedy for socialism to work, we are too srupid and gullible
for capitalism to work. The worst version of each system would destroy our
species, the best of each could push us to great things, and likely we'll
get neither of the best or worst. But blithe dismissals on simplified and
naturalized essentials of human nature get us nowhere.
>Capitalism needs SOME restraints on it due to the afoirementioned greeed
>instinct running amok! Many of the environmental gains made in recent
>decades would not have happened without regulation, and much of that
>regulation is being dismantled at the behest of wealthy and corporate
>interests because it interferes with their profit.
But regulation is only a mother-country issue: abroad, regulation is
actually avoided and subverted as a matter of course, because it makes it
harder to profit easily. We don't let companies piss in our drinking water,
so they go piss in someone else's, and if someone else makes a law about
it, the close up and push off to someone else else's, where production is
cheaper. And this is what capitalism is all about.
Gord
