TL;DR Once we have answered all questions of science there is still the matter of how to live life. -- L. Wittgenstein - - - or... - - - In an age in which the concept of certainty smacks of the tyrant and technocrat, a certain agnosticism becomes a virtue. Indeterminacy and undecidability are accounted goods in themselves. Conviction suggests a consistency of self that does not sit easily with the volatile, adaptive subject of advanced capitalism. Besides, too much doctrine is bad for consumption. Beliefs are potentially contentious affairs, which is good neither for business nor for political stability. They are also commercially superfluous. The fervent ideological rhetoric needed to found the system thus fades as it unfolds. As long as its citizens roll into work, pay their taxes, and refrain from assaulting police officers, they can believe pretty much what they like. The faithlessness of advanced capitalism is built into its routine practices. It is not primarily a question of the piety or skepticism of its citizens. The marketplace would continue to behave atheistically even if every one of its actors was a born-again Evangelical. Yet God has of course by no means vanished. Consumer capitalism may have scant use for him in practice, but it is still mortgaged to some extent to its own metaphysical heritage. By and large, advanced capitalism remains caught in the state of denial that -Nietzsche denounces. The economy may be a rank atheist, but the state that stands guard over it still feels the need to be a true believer. Not, to be sure, necessarily a religious believer, but to subscribe to certain imperishable moral and political truths that cannot simply be derived from the size of the deficit or the unemployment statistics.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 08:14:45 +0000
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