American language, in the discussion of non-economic realms, has been infiltrated by economic metaphors and economic terms. And that means that those metaphors and terms are infiltrating other fields...You get, overall, a sense that the world can be understood in terms of costs and benefits, inputs and outputs. And this deprives us, Wieseltier argues, of a more nuanced and humanistic—you might even say spiritual—understanding of the world and our place within it. There isnt the cultural answer to an economic problem, he said, and there isnt an economic answer to a cultural problem. Things are more complicated than that. Theyre more messy than that. And though of course theres some validity to the economic approaches—what is culture, after all, but a series of interactions?—they are also, Wieseltier believes, limited in their descriptive capacities. The categories and the vocabulary of the market are being used in realms where they do not belong, Wieseltier said. And one of the things we have to learn how to do is to distinguish between the realms.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 22:22:27 +0000