Michael Gurstein wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Bob Wallace <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2000 3:55 PM
> Subject: Giving vs Economics
>
> from: In These Times, August 21, 2000
>
> Give It Away
> By David Graeber
[snip]
> Mauss conclusions were startling. First of all, almost everything
> that economic science" had to say on the subject of economic history
> turned out to be entirely untrue. The universal assumption of free
> market enthusiasts, then as now, was that what essentially drives
> human beings is a desire to maximize their pleasures, comforts and
> material possessions (their "utility"), and that all significant human
> interactions can thus be analyzed in market terms. In the beginning,
> goes the official version, there was barter. People were forced to get
> what they wanted by directly trading one thing for another, Since this
> was inconvenient, they eventually invented money as a universal medium
> of exchange. The invention of further technologies of exchange
> (credit, banking, stock exchanges) was simply a logical extension.
>
> The problem was, as Mauss was quick to note, there is no reason to
> believe a society based on barter has ever existed. Instead, what
> anthropologists were discovering were societies where economic life
> was based on utterly different principles, and most objects moved back
> and forth as gifts-and almost everything we would call "economic"
> behavior was based on a pretense of pure generosity and a refusal to
> calculate exactly who had given what to whom.
[snip]
This reminds me of some of Suzanne Langer's speculations on the
origin of human language, in her very readable and
important book (which has by no means
yet become "dated", 50 years after its publication): _Philosophy
in a New Key_.
Langer, probably following up on Wolfgang Kohler's studies of
(as the title of one of his books, from ca. 1920, which also
is still of lively interest:) _The Mentality of Apes_,
proposes that the origin of human language was *not* in
pragmatic signaling behavior (e.g., one proto-homo economicus
barking to another the coordinates of an animal that might
constitute their next meal...). Instead, she sees the origin of
language in the altogether useless rhythmic dances in which
apes spontaneously engage in the wild. Language, Langer argues,
more likely began as *poetry* than as Morse (I mean -- Darwinean...)
code.
As Gregory Bateson emphasized: It is a very bad mistake to
conceive of persons as less than they might become, since one
human potentiality is to become more like one thinks one
is -- i.e., thinking of persons as less will likely influence them
to *become* less [I am thinking here of what one might call
"litho-centric" fallacies, such as that persons are computers (AI),
or that if we knew where all the atoms
(the lumpen-materialiat?) in the universe
were going, we could predict what people were going to do in
future (Laplace).
As Jacob Bronowski asked in his BBC TV series "The
Ascent of Man" (albeit from the perspective of
high European culture, not the perspective of the many whom
Bertolt Brecht described as "the many who live in darkness"):
What *use* is a baby?
+\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
-------------------------------------------------------
<![%THINK;[XML]]> Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
