I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Are you sure that this sort of behavior is *caused* by capitalism?
ReplyDeleteI said modern capitalism panders to it. I didn't say it caused it.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I'd throw my hat emphatically in the "caused it" ring, but it's not entirely absurd to think that baser consumerisms are actually fostered and cultivated in market economies.
ReplyDeleteThat's not an argument against capitalism, of course. Other systems cultivate even baser motives. In the grand scheme of things acting like a dumbass over a waffle maker is still probably better than raping and pillaging.