...several bits of reading have led me to some questions concerning the 20th Century ... i am resisting strong answers because i want to ponder them and share thoughts with others ...
listening to David Harvey and reading reviews of his work
{see:
http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/...is-capitalism/
http://davidharvey.org/
the Berkeley Lecture on his site is well worth persevering with]
... led me to the idea that the 20th C ended on 15/9/2008 with the collapse of Lehman and the dawning realisation that the contradictions of capitalism could no longer be avoided and we have little to put in its place since the state systems were so truly awful ...
http://www.thenation.com/article/154...isis?page=full
i do not think it ended on 9/11 - the response and mind set was pure 20th c a war on terror and as terrifyingly dumb as many 20C ideas ....
reading Doidge's brilliant book on neural plasticity reminds me of just how many taboo ideas there were; the brain could not be plastic in adults; animals did not resemble humans or rather one should not anthropomorhphise coupled with a highly restrictive reductionism [behaviorism, operant conditioning ala B F Skinner [apt initials] and simplistic genetic determinism ..restrictive deeply pessimistic ideologies
the voices arguing for complexity, emergence, were there in 20C, but loners [check the treatment of Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis] ...
some of this restraint of thought was down to commercial interests eg Big Pharma has not helped us to truly understand what actually might be happening and causative in disease processes, some of it was power/ideological the hot and cold wars against totalitarian states but some of it was sui generis, plasticity and anthropomorphism for example ...
despite all the radical critiques and 'theory' the 20C seems a very repressed psyche to me [forgive the metaphor] ...
i would be very interested in any thoughts you have ...let me say that i am not referring to politics here, rather to our mindsets, what was though OK to think and what was not ... the intellectual character of the century ...
listening to David Harvey and reading reviews of his work
{see:
http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/...is-capitalism/
http://davidharvey.org/
the Berkeley Lecture on his site is well worth persevering with]
... led me to the idea that the 20th C ended on 15/9/2008 with the collapse of Lehman and the dawning realisation that the contradictions of capitalism could no longer be avoided and we have little to put in its place since the state systems were so truly awful ...
http://www.thenation.com/article/154...isis?page=full
i do not think it ended on 9/11 - the response and mind set was pure 20th c a war on terror and as terrifyingly dumb as many 20C ideas ....
reading Doidge's brilliant book on neural plasticity reminds me of just how many taboo ideas there were; the brain could not be plastic in adults; animals did not resemble humans or rather one should not anthropomorhphise coupled with a highly restrictive reductionism [behaviorism, operant conditioning ala B F Skinner [apt initials] and simplistic genetic determinism ..restrictive deeply pessimistic ideologies
the voices arguing for complexity, emergence, were there in 20C, but loners [check the treatment of Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis] ...
some of this restraint of thought was down to commercial interests eg Big Pharma has not helped us to truly understand what actually might be happening and causative in disease processes, some of it was power/ideological the hot and cold wars against totalitarian states but some of it was sui generis, plasticity and anthropomorphism for example ...
despite all the radical critiques and 'theory' the 20C seems a very repressed psyche to me [forgive the metaphor] ...
i would be very interested in any thoughts you have ...let me say that i am not referring to politics here, rather to our mindsets, what was though OK to think and what was not ... the intellectual character of the century ...
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