For almost three decades (if not more), millions of people watched Michael Jackson perform, on stage, in video. They also saw him alight from planes, from cars, and from there, walk into hotels and stadiums, living the life of a peripatetic, performing celebrity. On almost all of these occasions he was accompanied by his ‘sexualContinue reading “Leaving Neverland Is Not An Indictment; It Is a Plea For Safety”
Tag Archives: capitalism
Commodified Relationships And Friendship
When relationships are commodified, can friendship survive? This old, plaintive question has not lost any of its urgency. Once we meet and greet our fellow humans our interactions are quickly transformed into the transactional because that is the context within which they function. To be with our friends, to spend time with them, to engageContinue reading “Commodified Relationships And Friendship”
Of Children’s Pencil Boxes And Ersatz Smartphones
It’s a simple enough object: a pencil box that looks like a smartphone. The box’s lid looks like a smartphone screen decked out with app icons, the ones that all of us smartphone users are used to: the phone, the messages, the various entertainments, the calculator, and so on. Pencil boxes have been decorated andContinue reading “Of Children’s Pencil Boxes And Ersatz Smartphones”
Nietzsche’s ‘Supreme Principle of Education’
Nietzsche claims that the “supreme principle of education” is that “one should only offer food to him who hungers for it.” That is, roughly, teaching should be guided not by the requirements of an abstract, generalized curriculum, but by the expressed needs of the learner. In keeping with Nietzsche’s generalized aristocratic and hierarchical sensibilities, educationContinue reading “Nietzsche’s ‘Supreme Principle of Education’”
Max Weber’s ‘Iron Cage’: Who Will Bend Its Bars?
Yesterday morning, as the students in my Social Philosophy class and I discussed an excerpt from Max Weber‘s The Protestant Ethic And The Spirit of Capitalism, we ran out of time. As my students got up and started to head out for their next commitment (work or the next class), I began reading out loudContinue reading “Max Weber’s ‘Iron Cage’: Who Will Bend Its Bars?”
CP Snow On ‘The Rich And The Poor’
In 1959, while delivering his soon-to-be-infamous Rede Lectures on ‘The Two Cultures‘ at Cambridge University, C. P. Snow–in the third section, titled ‘The Rich and the Poor’–said, [T]he people in the industrialised countries are getting richer, and those in the non-industrialised countries are at best standing still: so that the gap between the industrialised countriesContinue reading “CP Snow On ‘The Rich And The Poor’”
Snowpiercer: The Train As Capitalist Society And The Universe
Post-apocalyptic art–whether literature or movies–is provided, sometimes all too easily, ample opportunity for flirting with the grand, for making sweeping statements about human nature and the meaning and purpose of life. After all, it’s the (often violent) end of the world. Time to speculate about the new, phoenix-like world that may rise from the ashesContinue reading “Snowpiercer: The Train As Capitalist Society And The Universe”
Why You Hate Work (And Will Continue To)
Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath tell us why we hate work. (“Why You Hate Work“, New York Times, May 30, 2014; the “You” in their title article is less inclusive than it appears, for the primary focus of their study is white-collar workers. Still, perhaps there are lessons here to be learned by all.) TheirContinue reading “Why You Hate Work (And Will Continue To)”
Dostoyevsky’s Gambler on the French and the Russians
Dostoyevsky‘s The Gambler, contains, like some of his other works, sweeping portraits of character types; in this quasi-autobiographical work, among others, those of a particular nationality. First, then, the gambler, Alexey Ivanovitch, on the French: De Grieux was like all Frenchmen; that is, gay and polite when necessary and profitable to be so, and insufferably tediousContinue reading “Dostoyevsky’s Gambler on the French and the Russians”
The ‘Adversarial’ Nature of Unions
One of the strangest objections to the presence of unions in the workplace is that unions make the workplace adversarial, that they introduce conflict into the relationship between the worker and the manager (or between the two classes), that rather than letting workers and management concentrate on maximizing output (or throughput) and enterprise profit, whichContinue reading “The ‘Adversarial’ Nature of Unions”
Samir Chopra 