The Century of the Self

I don't have access to youtube so I'm posting this link instead here

(You have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to watch it or just find it on youtube if that's easier).

Not quite as good as his ' Century of the Self' but good stuff nevertheless. Also, guest appearances by Nash and Hayek. Revealing.

So, here's the dark story...

At some time point in time we were seduced by the idea that what we are, at some fundamental level, is no more than self-serving creatures. Altruism, sympathy, commitment, friendship and even love were really just veiled forms of self-interest. We are nothing but calculating machines, weighing up pleasures and the costs of attaining them..a lonely robot with a lonely kind of freedom (negative liberty: freedom from...).

This was held to be normal, nay, rational, even. You'd be a fool not to cheat, for example, if you could get away with it, if the benefits outweighed the costs, that is. There are variations on this theme, some stressing the "selfish gene", others how a system of interaction between self-interested individuals brings about order, stability, tangible freedoms, and ultimately progress. None of the old hierarchies and "prejudices". Wheel in science; wheel out ethics, which was only really a cloak that we can now discard in our more mature understanding of life.   

When did it begin? That's not the question.Obviously not with Nash (see Albert Hirschman). The real question, I guess, is why such a view would resonate with so many people and for so long that it is now firmly entrenched as one of the dominating ideas of our times. Why should it come to be seen as perfectly normal to think, for example, that if it's in a country's interest to commit acts of violence then that's okay?  Or that we can only trust someone if we can monitor them or, alternatively, if the law is a strong enough deterrent? Trust is something else...what the late Annette Baier called 'accepted vulnerability' (and what the Muslims would call 'tawakuul' or the Red Man might call 'radical hope').

~~~

After the tragedy at Newtown what can one say? Not a lot, obviously. There is evil in the world.

But Monbiot does point out something worth saying (though the timing is awful and insensitive)...why isn't Obama's "heart broken" when American drones -one has to assume unintentionally-kill so many innocent Pakistani children? What is it about human beings that we can only comprehend the suffering of "our own"?

Yesterday you watched CNN and cracked up. Some army dudes had come back from Afghanistan and Iraq -"where they were fighting for freedom"-and on their day off (how sweet!) had decided to visit Newtown and pay their condolences. One of them said, without even the barest hints of irony, it's quite upsetting coming back and seeing the same kind of thing you saw in Afghanistan. You have to laugh (or cry).  One day people are going to put two and two together. Why is America so addicted to violence?

Then there was this line from someone reported in the papers. The man was going to one of the local Churches to pray for the dead. He is reported to have said: I don't belong to this church, why, I'm not even Catholic..I'm a Muslim.