“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, June 5, 2011

Who's Minding the Store?


I find it less than amusing that at the very moment at which we need to be figuring out new ways of relating to one another and to nonhumans, a significant percentage of humanists are off celebrating the imminent collapse of the humanities, or the human, or whatever. (Scott Wilson link.)

I mean seriously, what the heck sort of an alternative is just eliminative materialism? Has is really found any answers to any pressing political and ethical questions? I can't even describe how consciousness works, the very thing it sets out to achieve. Because the Chuchlands so say so, I should stop reading Shakespeare and meditating?

So fangs, but no fangs. I'm going to pass on the apocaylptic partaying, which seems wholly in line with austerity measures and conservatism in general.

1 comment:

Bill Benzon said...

"Has it really found any answers to any pressing political and ethical questions?"

You wanna' repeat this several times, Tim? & you might also want to note that the question is both rhetorical and not at all rhetorical.