Way-out, Saturday party-time, plist-type open-ended question....grounded in Puritanism maybe?

[Paul Mackin]

On 6/25/2012 5:33 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
> Isn't this too simple? That is, the argument that its all down to Big
> Business profits and damn Everything and Everybody elese? Sure it is.
> There are thousands of other considerations and ignoring these is
> rather foolish. We cannot accept the benefits of Big Business
> technologies without accepting the moral imperatives and the aesthetic
> forms that come with them. Sure. And puritan themes are not
> scientific.
>
> But, here are two fairly obvious things to consider. So, the Big
> Business soap, the washing machine, made life easier for those who
> were condemned to do the laundrey (the powerless and poor, most of
> them women). The major changes that Big Business technologies have
> produced are most evident most in the social distinctions they tend to
> eliminate. Because Big Business place emphasis on standardization,
> because its immediate objective is effective work, it makes of a
> culture, standardization and puts great emphasis on the generic. Like
> the Army, it seeks to make us uniform. So equlity, while not its goal,
> is its result. The invisivle hand of Smith was made a Visible Hand, as
> Chandler explain. Or, if you prefer a modern phrase that omits much of
> the moral tones of Smith, the world is flat because Big Business
> technolgies are, again, not bu design, but by nature, deomcratic.
>
> Second, the goal is more leisure time or the freedom of other human
> capacities. So, if one is not scrubbing a rich man's drawn down by the
> river side, well, one might be making up a blues tune for the ages.
  Big Business (and other technologies): love them and hate them in 
equal measure. Life is absurd.

P


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