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

[Paul Mackin]

On 6/26/2012 6:06 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
> It is far too easy to pile the problems of the world on business and
> on men and women in grey suits. And, doing so ignores the issue that
> the "cleanliness is next to godliness" phrase begs us to explore. This
> phrase, from Acts, has to do with what is sacred and what profane.
> And, this distinction is quite germane to our present crisis, how to
> engage the Other, the outsider, the foreigner, the person who shares a
> new globalized and digitized world with us, perhaps a currency, but
> lives over the boarder. First, the forging of the industrial and
> mechanical, and now digital way of life, was not done in Big Business
> factories. Moreover, the motive for this way of life was not money or
> greed, nor was it something technical, nor was it an ideology of
> efficiency or some other Big Business Visible Hand value. It was
> something sacred. It was a holiness, a Virgin made Dynamo. And, as
> your example of a producta that kills those who use it and the world
> they live in, suggests, it was about the Control of the Other. So, the
> cigarettes of RJR and Phil-Mo were merely a product of the Keeping the
> Faith in the machine-cult. The Dynamo was elevated above all else.
> And, though Gradgrinds and Spenglers and Mumfords and so on, all
> warned that what Adams had identified was a Cult, a religion that
> would ignore with Blind Faith, Life and Earth, and though after the
> second Great War and several lesser ones after, the Faithful pushed
> themselves up off their knees, it was only a matter of time before the
> tolling of the Bell called them to service again. And here we are. And
> it is not Business we worship. And it is not Businessmen in grey suits
> who preach and save us from our wickedness, but the Faith We Keep.



Seems reasonable to say that the "advancement of learning" as Bacon 
would have it or the Dynamo in Adams' terminology was/is an irresistible 
moral force.

And that the result we see today--most notably Big Business--is in at 
least one sense Unmotivated.

But this in itself isn't going to keeping us from blaming Big Business 
for our ills.

Alice needs to develop her thesis further.

I suggest she include in her argument my own devoutly held view that Big 
Business isn't something  separate from Us--if fact, Big Business IS 
us.  Not saying we wanted it that way.  Again unmotivated.  But when did 
motivation have anything to do with it?

P

P

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