Kant was sweet with his categorical imperative and his structures in general. You got to do something, can't just do nothing - was his version of Parmenides' own wisdom which offered "whatever it is, it must be, it cannot not be."
Kant was a trinity thinker, he'd followed the classic vandalism standards of the later Bronze Ages, he'd straightened his curve with a three in one to keep us people from ever experiencing bliss, which in my view was unenlightened of him but you know, better than releasing the Kraken by not telling other people to think like Calvin and allowing Stoics to morph into limp wristed Libertarians as the Western Beatnik alternative to being a born again Christian.
To make sense of this rabble of words, you have to start with the Renaissance, which went on a bit through the 1300's into the 1600's and the early 1700's. The Renaissance was a peculiar reawakening, in my view led by Thomas Aquinas' attempts to broaden the horizons of the Catholic Belief System by reintroducing the church to an idea that science, while often the practice of heretical covens is also God's precious gift.
If we go back to the ancient Stoics, and here I reference the Greek Epictetus, who was born a slave, and the Roman Seneca, who advised Nero the fiddle player, but not Marcus Aurelius, a Roman born in Austria who became a Roman Emperor, who might have done better with a personal witch doctor, a god or a psychiatrist rather than attempting to commodify a set of beautiful understandings with his imperial seal.
These originals of Stoicism, arose during times of massive imperial decay and autocratic rule. A central maxim was to divide the world into what is in our control - such as our opinions, desires, and character - and into what is outside our control - such as the market, the Emperor, sickness, supply and demand, death and for Sartre and Schopenhauer other people.
But, and I think this an important grasp for the dignity of cocktail hour Stoics, the ancient Stoics while they had an ethic of internal sovereignty, they were not "atomized individualists." They believed in a universal human brotherhood which they expressed through civic duty and an understanding of a cosmopolis, a world city that included all men, both free and enslaved, but probably not girls. The Ancient Stoics, the true blue pre-Roman Emperor from Austria Stoics, were not remotely Libertarian in their thinking!
Libertarians, or atomized individualists or crude modern day sociopaths, are a mutation of the early Stoics - mutations of the Aurelius castle building cul-de-sac, rather than Epictetus or the practical ethics of the Stoic Seneca the Younger, a poet, playwright and a philosopher.
Libertarianism took the Stoic emphasis on "internal control" and converted it into property rights and hyper-individualism. "I control my inner soul, I own my body and my capital, and no collective has the right to touch either." And it goes on into an economic coldness, the shameful frigidity of, "If you are poor or struggling, that is your individual responsibility to overcome through discipline; do not ask society for a safety net. Die silently please."
Yes indeed, by straightening human life into a pure line of Contract and Market Exchange, Libertarianism creates a new aristocracy, much like Calvinism did. The "elect" aren't those predestined by God, but the "self-made" individual who successfully navigates the market without "complaining."
We are constantly told by Libertarians, market dogmatists assure us that "supply and demand" is a law of nature, like gravity or photosynthesis.
It is not.
"Supply and demand" under modern capitalism is a human-constructed set of rules that measures purchasing power, not human need and has no clue what a free market is. Those Axioms that emerge from the thinking patterns of Adam Smith and Ricardo are now jaded, old, unenlightened and illiberal.
If a community has 1,000 hungry children and zero money, the market registers "zero demand" for food in that town. If a billionaire wants a third yacht, the market registers "high demand" for luxury shipyards. (Remember the Bush Doctrine)
The great moral scandal of our gluttonous era is that we live in a world of manufactured scarcity inside a reality of potential abundance. When we let "market forces" dictate resource distribution, we aren't submitting to a natural law of the universe; we are surrendering human agency, morality, and reason to an unthinking accounting mechanism which defines the future as ever expanding.
No comments:
Post a Comment