By their fruits

A few weeks back, I scored a major find at a local library. It was, and, yes, this does show what a geek I am, a 24 part lecture series on Transcendentalism and I was totally jazzed. I was all over it and regretted when it came to an end.

I'm not sure still what to make of Transcendentalism, that name for a diverse and fractious movement of writers, poets, dreamers, cranks and crazies that came spinning out of New England in the mid 1800s. And what a mixed lot they were, ranging from brilliant to batty.

But still, for all the amorphous verbosity, this was a movement or a trend in American thought that spread far beyond this continent and it had a largely beneficial influence, as its ripples were felt in the anti-slavery movement, support for the Union cause and abolition in the Civil War, the early women's movement, environmentalism, the utopian community movement,spiritual egalitarianism and other social reforms.

You could make a good case that one of these guys (Thoreau) accidentally laid the foundations for the theory of nonviolent action, which did great things during the Civil Rights movement and in many other circumstances..

People like Emerson and Thoreau were also among the earliest cultural bridges, promoting respect for other religions. No history of Buddhism's migration to the West or of the dawning appreciation in this country of such Indian classics as the Bhagavad Gita would be complete without a nod to this movement.

Jesus said "by their fruits shall you know them" and I try to make it a point to avoid sharp disagreements with him. By that standard, as loopy as some of the Transcendentalists were, they did pretty good.

Much more on Ralphie to come.

LATEST RANT. Here's my call for WV Governor Tomblin to expand Medicaid coverage to working West Virginians.

HUMAN EVOLUTION. Game on.

IT HAS BEEN WAY TOO LONG since I ran something about zombies.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WHO'S IN THE SADDLE?

You know who, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme this week at Goat Rope is the economy and how we think about it. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts. There are also links and comments about current events.

One irony about the economy is that while people make it, we often act like it made us and rules over us. As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in the 1800s when America's market revolution was in full swing, "things are in the saddle and ride mankind." Henry David Thoreau made similar observations in Walden.

Marx called this "the fetishism of commodities" in Das Kapital. He believed it was pervasive when goods are produced primarily for exchange rather than use. You don't have to buy his whole package to see his point:

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor...To them their own social action takes the form of the action of things, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.

Picture an auto worker getting her car repossessed because nobody is buying cars because there are too many cars...

The idea of human creations getting away from their creators and doing damage is an image that has haunted the western world since the early days of the industrial revolution. A classic example of this is Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein (search this blog for an earlier series on that), but the theme (meme?) is alive and kicking in the post-modern imagination, as films like Blade-Runner and television series like Battlestar Gallactica show.

Again, it doesn't have to be that way. While command economies have proven to be failures, people do have the ability to make conscious economic decisions at the individual and group level and to set up the groundrules and policies under which markets operate.

OIL EATING FOOD. This is a good summary of the problem with biofuels and how these impact poor people around the world.

CREATIVITY. Here are some suggestions for boosting yours.

ARE YOU A MIND READER? The answer is probably yes, with no psychic abilities needed. The trouble is, we're not very good at it.

THE SCIENCE OF SARCASM explained here.

GREAT NEWS! Red wine may slow aging. That being the case, El Cabrero needs to come up with a plan for the next 100 or so years.

NEED MORE COWBELL? You got it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED