A line from Skidelsky:
“Economists have to start innocent of all distracting ideas.
They have to have minds sufficiently empty to construct or accept those
axiomatic models of human behaviour…”
Now, that’s an interesting idea! Without a moral compass,
some idea of history (the history of ideas, or more narrowly, of the
discipline), or a sense of place is one prone or more susceptible to
over-emphasizing the importance of abstraction? Does the hypertrophy of the
scientific mind, the predominance of a scientific outlook, lead to a
one-sidedness (Kierkegaard) so that people can be technically very clever but
lack a kind of integral intelligence?
What, specifically, kind of intelligence do we value or appreciate? Is there a kind of cleverness that is less broadly human in its sensibilities and tone?
The purity of thought, the life of the mind, the lack of entanglement with values, real human beings, time itself...is there not something quite odd in all that? And is there a kind of hidden affinity with the wahbais' receptivity to all the superficial aspects of modernity, their disdain for complexity?
In the desert of the real...
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