Oliver Bullough's book, The Last Man in Russia, looks very interesting. Does Eastern Europe even exist any more? And Russia?
Was in the uncomfortable position yesterday of defending capitalism. Thought the other panelist would be a hard-core religious right-winger who would attack capitalism and its corrosive effect on tradition, values, family life, etc., etc. Turns out he was just a hard-core right winger, the kind that peddles all that baloney about property rights, contracts, etc., etc.
What I managed to say was that market societies come in various shapes (from social democracies to stricter and sometimes authoritarian states). Also: varieties of capitalism. The flaws with the system are legion: growing inequalities within countries, the decline in social capital, the diminishing of a public spirit ethos, and the inability to deal with the problem of climate change. But I wanted to steer away from the silly categorization of market societies full of roguish, selfish, and materialist individuals. What seems obvious to me is that market societies-at least the good ones-are pretty open places to live in and that they eventually work against the fixed identities of religion, race, gender and maybe even social class mattering that much. Of course, much of that is down to social democracy.
But Charles Taylor is perhaps right to suggest that the market is part of our social imaginary, part of the picture we have of ourselves and of our relations to other people-which we think of as being well-ordered, peaceable, and productive. Voluntary transactions between people does go some way-for good and ill-of undermining some overarching notion of 'the good' as defined by the state, family, religion, or tradition. Freedom to choose one's own lifestyle is-the obvious point- valuable in itself. The additional point, made by Sen, is that market economies can also extend people's opportunity freedoms and not just their process freedoms (op. freedoms being the things we have reason to value, the things we can do and be). And this, too, strikes me as important: in terms of the range of fiction, art, music, films, and education now available one can hardly be that critical (range in the sense of the number of good things as well as in terms of the number of people who have access to them). Again, it's not just that market economies make such things possible...Perhaps there's a deeper connection. Is there a proper love of the world, then? Why do you find it so difficult to say: Yes!
~~~
And yet, and yet, your heart sinks ever so slightly when it is so optimistic (this is the black sun, after all!), when it forgets red. And it does feel like something of a betrayal not to be more critical. Is this lack of alienation just a sign of middle age? Is age just a way of accommodating oneself to the world? Or is it some trace of a religious instinct that says: this isn't all there can be, that the Robinson Crusoe theory of how individuals interact does, indeed, represent, or filter through to, parts of society?
All this whizzing about, the 'instant communication' malarkey, facebook and having 2,000 'friends', 10,000 books on your kindle, even more thousand mp3s; all the marketing of classical music as 'cool', 'relaxing', the 'trinkets and baubles' (Smith) floating our way via the South Pacific, the pharmaceutical companies, the oil companies and the nexus with the war machine...you can't look at this with a blind eye. Is there alienation, angst, then? No, I doubt there is. We've gone through that. What there is is the boredom of Sundays, the need for some kind of excess (what does the word 'excess' mean in late capitalism'?), exotica and erotica, and a kind of superficiality that comes about with being surrounded by material goods, the life of the Eloi.
Brando: Have you ever considered any real freedoms? Or better still, Augustine (in Ignatieff's Needs of Strangers): does a commercial society lead to a lonely freedom?
Red is a connection. Something that is lost. Soemthing you can't name.
Was in the uncomfortable position yesterday of defending capitalism. Thought the other panelist would be a hard-core religious right-winger who would attack capitalism and its corrosive effect on tradition, values, family life, etc., etc. Turns out he was just a hard-core right winger, the kind that peddles all that baloney about property rights, contracts, etc., etc.
What I managed to say was that market societies come in various shapes (from social democracies to stricter and sometimes authoritarian states). Also: varieties of capitalism. The flaws with the system are legion: growing inequalities within countries, the decline in social capital, the diminishing of a public spirit ethos, and the inability to deal with the problem of climate change. But I wanted to steer away from the silly categorization of market societies full of roguish, selfish, and materialist individuals. What seems obvious to me is that market societies-at least the good ones-are pretty open places to live in and that they eventually work against the fixed identities of religion, race, gender and maybe even social class mattering that much. Of course, much of that is down to social democracy.
But Charles Taylor is perhaps right to suggest that the market is part of our social imaginary, part of the picture we have of ourselves and of our relations to other people-which we think of as being well-ordered, peaceable, and productive. Voluntary transactions between people does go some way-for good and ill-of undermining some overarching notion of 'the good' as defined by the state, family, religion, or tradition. Freedom to choose one's own lifestyle is-the obvious point- valuable in itself. The additional point, made by Sen, is that market economies can also extend people's opportunity freedoms and not just their process freedoms (op. freedoms being the things we have reason to value, the things we can do and be). And this, too, strikes me as important: in terms of the range of fiction, art, music, films, and education now available one can hardly be that critical (range in the sense of the number of good things as well as in terms of the number of people who have access to them). Again, it's not just that market economies make such things possible...Perhaps there's a deeper connection. Is there a proper love of the world, then? Why do you find it so difficult to say: Yes!
~~~
And yet, and yet, your heart sinks ever so slightly when it is so optimistic (this is the black sun, after all!), when it forgets red. And it does feel like something of a betrayal not to be more critical. Is this lack of alienation just a sign of middle age? Is age just a way of accommodating oneself to the world? Or is it some trace of a religious instinct that says: this isn't all there can be, that the Robinson Crusoe theory of how individuals interact does, indeed, represent, or filter through to, parts of society?
All this whizzing about, the 'instant communication' malarkey, facebook and having 2,000 'friends', 10,000 books on your kindle, even more thousand mp3s; all the marketing of classical music as 'cool', 'relaxing', the 'trinkets and baubles' (Smith) floating our way via the South Pacific, the pharmaceutical companies, the oil companies and the nexus with the war machine...you can't look at this with a blind eye. Is there alienation, angst, then? No, I doubt there is. We've gone through that. What there is is the boredom of Sundays, the need for some kind of excess (what does the word 'excess' mean in late capitalism'?), exotica and erotica, and a kind of superficiality that comes about with being surrounded by material goods, the life of the Eloi.
Brando: Have you ever considered any real freedoms? Or better still, Augustine (in Ignatieff's Needs of Strangers): does a commercial society lead to a lonely freedom?
Red is a connection. Something that is lost. Soemthing you can't name.
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