(Less is more.)
Emmanuel Levinas said (among other things, some of which seem to me
not to fit here...) that the essence of religion [whatever one wants
to call G-d, etc.] is human relations.
Hermann Broch, in _The Sleepwalkers_, diagnosed a serious problem
with Western civilization as the totalization of partial
value systems, e.g., economics uber alles.
And business-motivational consultant Jim Collins (_Good to Great..._)
actually won some respect in my judgment when he said that
the reason an organization succeeds is committment to a single
value --> but that value need not be anything you or I
would find admirable.
I am currentlky reading Pierre Hadot's _Philosophy as a Way of Life_
(following reading a review in last Sunday's 18Aug02 NYT Book
Review
http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/hadot.html
Finally, I can't remember who it was at the 1989 UC Berkeley
"Applied Heidegger" conference who said (~) that if philosophy
does not do what needs doing, it is not worth anything.
Of course "it's only money" is what is psychoanalytically
called "splitting".
I am not sure that capitalists are necessarily angels of
death in the sense of being a kind of economic caricature
of Hegel's owl of Minerve that flies at dusk. Certainly
that does not seem to explain why "The West" "took off"
whereas Islam and China did not. Joseph Needham,
at the end of a very long lifetime studying Chinese
"science and civilization" to try to answer this question --
Needham who was a humanistic socialist, sadly
concluded that the answer was: capitalism.
Where is all thise getting to? Where were you getting to, Ray?
Well, here's where I might get to: If the genuine ultimate
concern is our relationships with other persons, and if we
do not think splitting is a good thing, then we need to
try to figure out how to build more "I and thou" relations
into our social world: we need to develop dialogical
social interactions in opposition to hierarchical
social interactions. We need to start seeing the
elephant in the middle of the room:
Representative democracy is not democracy
(except for the representatives).
Liberal arts education thru grades and tests
has nothing to do with the life of the liberal
arts, but rather uses "the liberal arts"
as more food for powder (OK -- preparation
for living in a social world of command and obedience).
Work does not only produce products for consumers
but also produces the workers' form of life, and
that's a "poroduct" that needs attention too.
Science and technology are human activities which
cannot be understood solely in terms of their theoies
in the one case and their inventions in the other.
We are not scientific until we understand the
living practice of doing science, including, e.g.,
the way lab techs are treated throughout their
working days.
What point do we want to make, precisely?
\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)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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