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The Enlightenment produced a society which identified pleasure as its most fundamental social value. As Locke says, individuals are hardwired to pursue pleasure
by fecklessyouth 12y ago
The Enlightenment produced a society which identified pleasure as its most fundamental social value. As Locke says, individuals are hardwired to pursue pleasure. And as Smith says, capitalism is the economic system best able to produce the most total pleasure. Thus, if you can produce lots of pleasure for people, if you are useful, if you can make money appear out of the stock market, you are rewarded. The jobs most rewarded by society are those that are most pleasurable to others, like CEOs who can turn profits for board members. The group who's pleasure is the deciding pleasure is the dominant social group, who has the most of whatever currency matters to society. (Status, property, now cash)
Whether someone is virtuous, or caring, or helps others, is irrelevant in ascertaining their value, and thus how they should be paid. A teacher might produce pleasure in a student, but that student is in no capacity to makes its pleasure the deciding one. The moral good of a job is, at best, a footnote, and only valuable insofar as far as the dominant groups are pleased by them. The market doesn't care about your moral good.
The mistake of writers like this one is supposing that such a system can be fixed within the confines of modern capitalism. It cannot. People will conduct their campaigns, and go on strike, and create new movements, and perhaps pay teachers more out of social duty and pity, but they will ultimately butt heads with the philosophical underpinnings of modernity. If this writer is serious, the solution is not to turn to mere Marxist-inspired theories of labor, but to Aristotle and Aquinas.
For what Aristotle, Aquinas, and essentially the entire stock of pre-modern philosophy, approached differently was the question of, "what should our fundamental social value be?" Their answer was not, "pleasure." For Aristotle, it was the good produced by a life trained in socially-imparted virtues--which ultimately allowed one to contemplate the divine. For Aquinas, it was more explicitly religious: loving God, which entailed doing and believing all the things He wants us to do. And as was the case with the Enlightenment, the cultures that both these thinkers embodied were constructed around such answers, from the top down. In either system, the moral worth of work is not irrelevant, it's the only thing relevant (with differences in how moral is defined).
In-depth rebuttals should be directed to Alasdair MacIntyre, a Scottish philosopher whose book "Whose Justice, Which Rationality," I just paraphrased in part. (But seriously...)
- jmcmichael 12y agoThe interviewee, Davide Graeber, is considered to be one of the leading figures of the Occupy movement so probably does not believe that a solution to this problem lies with the confines of modern capitalism. He identifies himself as an anarchist. There's more detail on his political/economic views in his book, 'Debt: The First 5000 Years': http://p2pfoundation.net/First_Five_Thousand_Years_of_Debt http://p2pfoundation.net/First_Five_Thousand_Years_of_Debt
- contingencies 12y agoI'm just going to re-iterate the recommendation to read this book. Although it's periodically mentioned on HN, anyone who hasn't read it, you won't regret it. I would describe it as nothing less than the most eloquent and reasoned summary of the devastatingly unfortunate wholesale misapplication of human endeavor in modern times... bar none... which incidentally lies at close to the root of many of the world's problems. In short: we've been flying with blinkers: Graeber explains precisely how and why.
- fecklessyouth 12y agoThanks. My point is, activists like Graeber are bound by philosophical systems they don't recognize, which have been in place for hundreds of years and which form the foundation of our entire modes of thought. He may dislike modern capitalism, but he probably accepts the core tenets of modernism which allow it, like the assumption that the good of man is to be achieved by man pursuing whatever his interests happen to be. He might be radical, but I'm guessing he's not a radical as to reject Hume. (the source for the aforementioned tenet).
- jmcmichael 12y agoGraeber probably spends more time analyzing the effects of various philosophical/political/economic systems on individual and social behavior than most people. I'm not familiar enough with the totality of his work to directly address what he does and does not accept about modernism, but from reading 'Debt', he rejects many of the core tenet of modern economics. Another of his books is titled, 'Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams'. Its summary on Amazon begins: "This innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism." So I rather doubt from the title and the summary that we'd discover that he blithely accepts the core tenets of modernism. It appears to me that he probably would reject quite a bit of the core tenets of modernism and those that he accepts he probably does so understanding their roots and implications. Again, I can't be sure b/c I haven't read it but the guy assumes an outsider, iconoclastic stance in almost everything I have read.