blutto said:
...while your post neatly lists some of the things that define our particular cultural take on greed, I think that the issue is something that is present in all cultures ( the debate then becomes what form it takes and the the extent to which it informs the culture )...so putting the blame on our culture as you seem to have done is a bit wrong-headed...the problem is always there and it is in all of us...its part of our genetic coding...
...the key thing here ( so we don't wander down the road taken by TFF several pages ago, wherein he declared that greed is everywhere, it infuses everything ,so run for the hills because we are doomed...ok that is a little over the top interpretation of what he said but you get the gist ) is that it is only one part of our genetic coding...there are other parts of it that in the right circumstances place the impulses that usually yield negative results such as greed into a position that allows for more productive applications/results...Innis, the writer mentioned earlier has some interesting ideas that address how structures can be identified that can place man into position where he is more likely to profit from his genetic gifts than not..
...unfortunately the potential solutions for dealing with greed are way beyond the scope of something like this form and certainly beyond the meagre brainpower of a lummox like blutto...that being said, social structures that have mitigated the effects of greed have existed and we are not necessarily doomed...though if the present circumstances continue unabated we most certainly are...
Cheers
blutto
The problem, as I perceive it, is in establishing a just relationship between our use of technology and conservation of the natural environment.
My point above, which is also Gray's, was that in our civilization (that's come to predominate over the planet), Early Modern humanistic Christian Platonism that taught the "centrality" and "special" status of humans over so called lower creation, was subsequently merged to the Age of Reason philosophies that said that progress exclusively meant man's prepotency over nature, through rationalism and his ability to invent more and more complex technologies. The development of this world view has been unique to the Western tradition and, through colonialization and globalization, diseminated throughout the earth.
But isn't it absurd, at the anthropological level, that our species (the most "evolved") is also unique in its capacity for destrying its own habitat? There are many who believe that such behavior is well worth the risks, that it's possible to destroy the earth and exploit it to the point of sacrificing it, in exchange for all that "stuff" considered (or perhaps has become?) by now indespensible.
Unlike the animal kingdom, for which each species lives in a habitat genetically and instinctually predetermined (a lion can't live in the arctic, just as a polar bear can't live in the savana), humans in order to survive have always relied upon technical help from using the first stick to knock down a piece of fruit. Such that it can be practically said that technology is the essence of man, because without it the species wouldn't have survived. At the same time it's equally true that without nature, man's technologies become obsolete, just as his extinction is thereby assured.
So it's back to the problem of proportion and measure in terms of how human technology is used, while safegaurding the environment. And the global market culture that the West invented more than any other society, has gone well beyond the limits of excessivness in this regard. In fact due to the effect of the exponential expansion of the technological dimension since industrialization, the delicate equilibrium between humans and nature has been smashed. That is, we have broken that which Marx defined as "the organic relationship between man and nature," to the point at which, as Hans Jonas reminds us, the cities of men, at one time enclaves of nature, have today usurped nature's place reducing it to an encalve of our cities. The artifical world has suplanted the natural one.
This has also determined a profound modification of our perception of nature, for which, as Heidegger reminds us, the sun and the wind are viewed fundamentally as energy resources, the topsoil is merely the cover of what's contained beneath, the mountains are just giant rock quarries, the forests as lumber reserves, the rivers sources of energy for the production of electricity, etc.; such that nature, even before being put to use, has already been perceived within a utilitarian construction. This is profoundly different from the classical world, when pagan sacerdotes made sacrifices to the gods and consulted them before making any intervention to nature, being terrified that whatsoever human disruption of the natural order could be potentially perilous to the community. And was it not for this reason that the shamans of various Eastern peoples were considered so important thanks to their believed capacity to communicate with these forces?
Try and imagine what a poet sees before a forest and what a carpenter does. Well in our consumer culture, we have all become carpenters. I get the sensation that modern man, his civilization and technologies, has regressed dramatically, distracted by the course of progress, which has eliminated the millennial dialectical relationship between humans and the natural forces that surround us.
Grey has made some cogent points about how the Western humanistic (essentially Platonism and other Greek philosophies melded with Roman civic values and synchronized with Christian theology and Biblicism) and rationalist traditions, have contributed significantly to the course of modernity and a concept of progress, which has ultimately legitimized the ideologically driven market system that rules over the species today. This doesn't mean that other cultures can't, under certain conditions (take China and India for example), make an expedient of greed to subjugate nature to the forces of human desire to the extent our tradition has; however, our civilization certainly has developed this art earliest and the furthest. And if globalization today has become dominated by such market ideology, it is most certainly due to the cultural forces we disseminated throughout the planet beginning in the first colonial period.
Progressively substituting the natural processes, rather than favoring them (as once upon a time), today technology has brought about the de-naturalization of nature, which, being also the dimension of man, has also caused a de-humanization of the species.
). When the crash came, it became apparent that many of these previous profits had been imaginary, but the bonuses had already been paid. This is inequity and not inequality and this is a major driving force behind the protests.
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