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  • A recommendation and a reminder

    By G. Rendell May 26, 2009 8:06 pm

    Although it's only tangentially related to the topic of sustainability (and even that only if your mind runs in the same twisted circles (Moebius strips?) that mine does), I want to start by recommending to all and sundry the best TV series you (probably) never heard of. Slings & Arrows was produced for Canadian television, and tells of three seasons/productions at a disfunctional Shakespearean theater (theatre) company. Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and the offstage action is also well-written. Available in a boxed set or (one disk at a time -- there are six, total) at your friendly neighbo(u)rhood Netflix.

    Additionally, for those who came in after the opening credits, a reminder (or, perhaps, a reintroduction). The assumptions of some readers aside, I'm not an academic by trade or by training. I work for a university, it's true, but I'm no stranger to the business world. Before I joined the staff (not faculty) at Greenback, I worked in the private sector for years, during many of which I was entirely and profitably self-employed. Perhaps the reason I don't sound much like a prototypical businessman is that I've also operated in the hands-on agricultural sector, the non-profit world, and (yes) higher education (both for-profit and non-).

    My quarrel then -- to the extent that I have one -- is less with the profit motive per se than with the profit motive uber alles. The culture in which we live, and which we've been extending to the rest of the world for the last century or so, is too narrow in what it values, rewards, and tolerates. It's not money that's killing us, it's the love of money and the implicit sacrifice of all other values.

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  • RECOMMENDATION & REMINDER
  • Posted by retired , anthropology on May 27, 2009 at 10:15am EDT

  • You wrote: "It's not money that's killing us, it's the love of money and the implicit sacrifice of all other values."

    Sometimes comparisons bring quicker insight. Take China, for ex. From NPR's morning edition report, "Author Yu Hua says that for his 40-something generation in China, life can be divided into two periods. So perhaps it is not surprising that his bestselling novel _Brothers_ was published in two volumes. The first laid bare the political excesses of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and '70s; the second was dedicated to the capitalist excesses of the past 30 years. ..."If you're rich, you've succeeded. Otherwise, you've failed. There's no other criterion. Honest people are obsolete in today's China. Chinese critics say I shouldn't write like this, I should write from a positive, healthy perspective, conducting an autopsy on our sick society. But I say in this society, there are no doctors — we are all sick," he says.

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