The Decline of Pleasure continued: REH
Mill, who occupies a middle position in the development of nineteenth-century British thought, was the son of an earnest and single-minded utilitarian philosopher. His father, James, [Scot 1773-1836] was not only an ardent defender of the century's fresh line of thought but also a close friend and colleague of the man who had formulated it, Jeremy Bentham. [London, 1748-1832] pg. 52 Bentham had begun by erecting a bold new system on which "the standard of right and wrong" might be based and through which "the chain of causes and effects" might be understood. It may be one of the monumental ironies of history that Ben-tham should have founded his system on the principle of pleasure. Pleasure, he said, was the sole motivating force that drove men into all of their activities. The pursuit of pleasure and, what is the same thing, the avoidance of pain "govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think." A moral act is one which gives us, or someone else, pleasure; an immoral act is one which gives us, or someone else, pain. Clear enough. But how are we to know whether we are giving or receiving pleasure? How can we be sure that we are leading upright lives? Bentham had a quick, unequivocal answer. The amount of pleasure any action or object possesses may be reckoned by its utility, by its usefulness, and by no other norm. Utility, in Bentham's definition, is "that principle which ap-proves or disapproves of every action whatsoever" in propor-tion as it seems to "augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question" (italics mine). Or if it is a desirable object rather than a desirable action we are consider-ing, then utility is that property in the object "whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all this in the present case comes to the same thing)." Bentham later added the words profit, convenience, and emolument to his list of synonyms for the word pleasure, so that pleasure and profit come to mean one and the same thing. This identification of happiness with utility, of pleasure with profit, is absolute. "Systems which attempt to question it," Bentham wrote, "deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in dark-ness instead of light." From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2012 5:33 PM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal | The Guardian I wonder what kind of status the drug companies get from knowing that their drugs can cause suicidal thoughts in children? I think the argument that Keith and Mike are in, is an argument between two strains of Jewish though about English economic motivation. von Hayek's Austrian spiritual descendant was Alfred Adler who said that motivation was the struggle for power while the English ancestor (J.S. Mill) of the Austrian Jewish Freud listed it in the Pleasure Principle. It's interesting that the English Utilitarian's started with Utility being about pleasure (Mill) and ended up with pleasure only being that which accrues property and has use as its result in the accrual of property (Locke). (the English trinity is complete with Jevons) Neither Locke, Mill, nor Jevons were Jewish but I would guess their British forms of Protestantism, (Unitarian/Anglican/Atheist) tied in with more than a little Swiss Calvinism. It's interesting to note that on the internet Jevons is sometimes listed as English from Liverpoole while I have books that list him as a Scot. Consider the following by a man of the theater from the last century. It is a part of a masterful book on economics that faces Keith's and Mike's issues more honestly than any book that I know. Here's a part: CHAPTER 2: FROM THE DECLINE OF PLEASURE BY WALTER KERR. 1966 A Philosophy and Its Aftermath John Stuart Mill, By a mighty effort of will, Overcame his natural bonhomie And wrote 'Principles of Political Economy.' -Edmund Clerihew Bentley It may seem as though I have been basing my rather sweep-ing statements about an entire society on a handful of people I happen to know. My lot, you may think, has thrown me among an odd assortment of suburban malcontents and high-strung professionals who are driven to their occasional hard drinking and incessant hard labor by ambition, by a financial treadmill they have foolishly got themselves on, or simply by those rhythmic metropolitan pressures that stem, psychologi-cally, from what a novelist has symbolically called "The Big Clock." I was asking myself if this mightn't be the case when I picked up a copy of The New York Times and noticed a casual report tucked low on the page: "Emotional stress, usually associated with job responsibility, is the chief cause for heart disease in young adults, Dr. Henry I. Russek of Staten Island, N.Y., contends. "But leisure-time activities are also nerve-racking, the phy-sician noted in an article to be published here tomorrow in The Journal of the American Medical Association. . . ." pg. 46 "The young executive class has no monopoly on tension-induced heart disease, Dr. Russek indicated. "He said that his findings, based on the study of zoo persons, had shown that the malady occurred in 'all socio-economic strata.' "He said that the most characteristic trait of the young coronary patient was restlessness during leisure hours and a sense of guilt during periods when he should have been relaxed." I am not alone, then, in feeling guilty when I read a book I don't have to read. My friends in one socio-economic stratum seem to have friends in other socio-economic strata who feel just as jumpy and just as dissatisfied the moment the harness is removed from their backs. "Guilt" is a strange word to have become associated with the experience of pleasure. It suggests, to begin with, that we have a deep conviction of time wasted, of life wasted, of worth-while opportunities missed, whenever we indulge ourselves in a mild flirtation with leisure. There are valuable things we might be doing if we were not goldbricking just now; those valuable things might prove enormously useful to society, to our families, to our own souls; in goldbricking itself there is no value. We are either laborers in the vineyard or we are slackers in the shade. The conviction goes deeper. When we turn down the chance to turn an idle hour to profit, we are not merely failing in a social obligation but are also failing in a moral one. What we are doing is not only boorish and uncooperative. It is wrong. An ancient Puritanism returned to haunt us? Hardly. All of the other tensions engendered by Puritanism have long since been sprung, deliberately and with some abandon; why should the fear of pleasure alone have lasted? An even older distrust, older than the adage "An idle mind is the devil's workshop," old enough to remember medieval injunctions against the snares mid delights of this world and to remember and share that faint distaste that has always attached, in the public mind, to the ( Greco-Roman ) philosophy known as Epicureanism? pg. 47 Not likely, either. One after another historical release has come along to dissipate the force of these earlier pressures: the Renaissance, the Restoration, the giddy 1920s, if you wish. Though every restraint that makes its mark upon history leaves a residue, that residue is rarely vigorous enough to hold an entire society in its grip. This is something new, and it is something universal. It is a philosophy, an article of faith, and one to which we have given assent at a fairly recent date. It cannot be so casual a thing as a nervous reflex, a sudden jump in the blood pressure of the body politic due to the temporary and unexpected speed-ing-up of our lives. Unforeseen circumstances do affect so-cieties; they have affected our own. The machines we meant to drive, drive us. The automatic elevators that were meant to make things so much easier for us in our sleek new office build-ings make things harder; we are always fearful that the doors are going to close before we get in or out, we are terrified that we are going to be trapped without human companionship between floors, we miss the old operator because it was com-forting to think that the old operator would know how to take care of us. Airplanes get us to Europe long before we want to be in Europe, assembly lines threaten to leave us miles behind and frantic (Chaplin touched both our funny bones and a sore spot when the mindless belt raced on alone in Modern Times), and intercom systems can startle us half to death everywhere but in the privacy of our bathrooms. We are pushed. But while being pushed does breed in us a habit of walking faster, it should not in the normal course of things lead us to like being pushed. If we were wholly sane, and had a spark of manliness left in us, we should resent being pushed, rebel against being pushed; and if rebellion were not really possible during working hours in the mechanized twentieth century, then we should, at the very least, leap to our leisure with a wild cry of relief, with singing and dancing and shouting in the streets, with the exhilaration of escape from everything intolerable. pg. 48 We should certainly not beg to be pushed again after hours or spend our afterhours pushing ourselves for the exercise. If we were granted a holiday from detestable pressures, however brief that holiday might be, we should feel entitled to it, grateful for it-not guilty about it. Pangs of guilt imply patterns of belief. No one feels furtive and shamefaced because he is being unfairly hounded; he feels furtive and shamefaced because he has himself, in his deepest being, violated a law he holds to be true. The law that the twentieth century holds to be true may be stated this way: Only useful activity is valuable, meaningful, moral. Activity that is not clearly, concretely useful to oneself or to others is worthless, meaningless, immoral. This is a plain code, easy to understand, easy to apply. It has a strong ring of virtue about it. It leads to solid citizenship, to responsible family life, to personal dignity. It is, in its way, quite Spartan. But how has so Spartan a notion managed to fasten itself so fiercely upon an age that really hoped to make machines do all the useful work while man enjoyed his free-dom? Where did the surprising, contrary, rigid notion come from? REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arthur Cordell Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2012 11:05 AM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: [Futurework] The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal | The Guardian From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Kurtz Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2012 6:21 AM Subject: [Ottawadissenters] The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal | The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/21/drugs-industry-scandal-ben-go ldacre __._,_.___ http://geo.yahoo.com/serv?s=97476590/grpId=15209059/grpspId=1705083512/msgId =20342/stime=1348395679 Your email settings: Individual Email|Traditional Change settings via the Web <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Ottawadissenters/join;_ylc=X3oDMTJnZmwydmhhBF 9TAzk3NDc2NTkwBGdycElkAzE1MjA5MDU5BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTA4MzUxMgRzZWMDZnRyBHNsaw NzdG5ncwRzdGltZQMxMzQ4Mzk1Njc5> (Yahoo! 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