Peter Rudd
Scientism / athiesm / homo economicus is the unassailable three person godhead of our time. Even if things in general are going very badly, and the scientists, atheist and MBA/ economists have all of the power and are making all of the decisions, we still can’t and won’t blame the godhead. Tyson, Nye, Dawkins, Maher, Greenspan are the robed flunkies who design and administer the sacraments in the temple of techno materialist positivism. We follow in lock step.
It is breathtaking that STEM – science, technology engineering and mathematics – our education policy du jour, leaves out the humanities, the very antecedent of freedom. The fundamentalisms of markets, analysis, reason and tech, have replaced and erased history and the arts.
In the seventeenth century we suffocated under the yoke of religion and yearned for reason; today our god is technology and we pine for mystery.
It is hard now to recreate a sense of the almost complete impossibility of not being a religious believer in seventeenth-century England. But as I enter the Apple Store, symmetrically laid out with its central entrance door and an attractively illuminated high table at the far end, a parallel comes to mind. Digital technology seems to fill a large part of the mental space we reserve for faith. (Art, which is often put up as a candidate, is the opium only of a minority.) We depend on technology for the smooth running of our daily lives, if not for our salvation. We make obeisance to it, we feel obliged to buy into the whole package, rather than selecting and rejecting individual technologies. There is the familiar choice between minutely differentiated sects (Apple or Microsoft), but all must share the same basic creed. Upgrades are like revisions of dogma in which we have no say, but which we are bound to go along with anyway. To reject the technological is to declare oneself a heretic, a position as inconceivable now as declaring oneself an atheist in the 1600s.
Richard Dawkins’ moralizing atheism: Science, self-righteousness and militant belief — and disbelief
I agree with Dawkins more often than I do with the church. So why do I find Dawkins the more annoying?
Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Filed under: chronotopes, unseen world | Tags: Art Spiegelman, children's lit, Francoise Mouly, Neil Gaiman
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Hannah Arendt, Henry Giroux, The Plague of American Authoritarianism
Hannah A. saw a possible future for totalitarianism: constant fear, corporate power over state, media and civil society, destruction of all things public, darwinianism, militarization, sexism, anti labour, fetishization of security, rejection of human rights, ascendant police power, racism, anti intellectualism, anti democratic.
Hannah Arendt, the great theorist of totalitarianism, believed that the protean elements of totalitarianism are still with us and that they would crystalize in different forms. Far from being a thing of the past, she believed that totalitarianism “heralds as a possible model for the future.” Arendt was keenly aware that the culture of traditionalism, an ever present culture of fear, the corporatization of civil society, the capture of state power by corporations, the destruction of public goods, the corporate control of the media, the rise of a survival-of-the-fittest ethos, the dismantling of civil and political rights, the ongoing militarization of society, the “religionization of politics,” a rampant sexism, an attack on labor, an obsession with national security, human rights abuses, the emergence of a police state, a deeply rooted racism, and the attempts by demagogues to undermine critical education as a foundation for producing critical citizenry were all at work in American society. For Arendt, these anti-democratic elements in American society constituted what she called the “sand storm,” a metaphor for totalitarianism.
The Plague of American Authoritarianism, Posted on Aug 24, 2015, By Henry A. Giroux, CounterPunch
coromandal 