Beneath medical science is a first major premise of value that all assume, but that the global market system is not regulated by-- the premise that health is preferable to disease. Peoples of all places and in all social orders prefer to be alive, and they perform countless functions and avoidances to ensure they continue that way. There is no cultural relativism about whether unpolluted water to drink, or freedom from hunger, or having a place to sleep is of value or disvalue. The universal values and disvalues of bonding all human beings, and indeed all that lives, are quite undeniable once recognized. But in the strange loss of bearings of our time, these values are not recognized in the social sciences and humanities of the academy. Universal values are denied by post-modernism, needs are relativized by nearly all, shared grounds of value are lost. The disorientation reflects the deeper disorder by which we are afflicted in which disorientation is a known symptom. Only what is not alive, what is priced or generated a profit, still stands as uncontested value in our reproduction at the macro-level of societies. -John McMurtry
Posted on: Sun, 19 Jan 2014 18:35:02 +0000
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