On Sunday, November 1, 2020 at 2:25:34 AM UTC+1 Brent wrote:
> > > On 10/31/2020 4:21 PM, Lawrence Crowell wrote: > > > > For this reason I do not become particularly angry if someone tells me > they accept global warming as real science, but think we really do not need > to do anything about it. At least that is an opinion honestly expressed. If > on the other hand people try to say it is fake-science and all a hoax and > so forth, that gets my anger level up. The reason is because it is a lie, > and this lie is being expressed to convince other people of it. My general > sense of opinions of this form is based on what I see according to empathy > and a sense of my connectedness to others. For that reason I have liberal > proclivities. For those who dismiss these things and think everything > should be economic, well that is an opinion and I can accept that. > > The reason it is difficult to dismiss global warming is the assumption that science, our descriptions of nature in particular, and culture can be neatly separated. Popular, scientific, specialist, and political discourses are entangled to such a degree that such separations appear artificial and unsuccessful. If you can point towards literature and/or bodies of thought that accomplish such a feat, say in some sociological or political approach, please share. > > But purely transactional, economic relations are inconsistent with the > fact that humans are social animals and live and die by social organization. > > Brent > "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the > continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe > is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy > friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am > involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell > tolls; it tolls for thee." > --- John Donne, 1623 Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris > The individual in the Hobbesian view relates that one individual wants what another has, with both in a territorial dispute over the same things, justifying the competition to pursue their selfish ends to establish rights to property, nature, and social dominance. With Rousseau, the state of nature is a powerful fiction that arises out of what Marx called "political economy". Jean Starobinski on Rousseau posits one individual in this scene: the self-sufficient, without dependency, saturated in self-love yet without any need for another. Marx attacked this part of the state of nature hypothesis that establishes the individual as primary; in *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 *he employs Robinson Crusoe irony of placing ourselves in a "fictive primordial state like a political economist trying to clarify things... We proceed from a present fact of political economy". Conceptions of the individual can be fruitfully questioned as to what can or cannot be imagined. The subject would make a nice book; particularly trying to compare and contrast these conceptions from antique to present with the conceptions that authoritarians imply, and weighing the evidence that such conceptions are a mere inconsistent propagandistic-opportunistic prop, or whether something more stable is emerging in the world of information age discourse in the wake of our most recent streak of electing supposedly strong men. PGC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/45ae50b3-5f9b-4054-9b9c-c94750dddbf0n%40googlegroups.com.
