Readings (23 June 2014)

Culture and Colossus, by Grant Morrison. A comparison of two visions of technology and the future, O. B. Hardison’s optimistic one and Neil Postman’s pessimistic ones. Hardison was a prominent Shakespeare scholar, and

it is Hardison’s voice to which we should pay closer attention. . . . Hardison’s is the voice not of the technocrat but of the man of culture who has mastered a wide array of traditional learning, and has turned his gaze away from it to dream of a world of emerging machine consciousness, a world he believes, with splendid equanimity, is likely to turn human beings into the equivalent of cockroaches.

Thanks to God and the Machine for the link.

Lacan on the triumph of religion, taken from Matthew Milliner’s Tumblr. Lacan said in an interview in 1974:

If science works at it, the real will expand and religion will thereby have still more reasons to soothe people’s hearts. Science is new and it will introduce all kinds of distressing things into each person’s life. Religion, above all the true religion [Christianity], is resourceful in ways we cannot even begin to suspect. One need but see for the time being how the place is crawling with it. It’s absolutely fabulous.

What a delight to meet the Thatcherite big beasts, by Tim Stanley from his Daily Telegraph weblog. He and Jonah Goldberg agreed that “the Right on both sides of the Atlantic is in a paradoxical situation”:

It won all the political and economic battles of the 1980s and 1990s: no one disagrees that there is no alternative to capitalism. But in the late 2000s, the Credit Crunch challenged the narrative. Free markets were supposed to enrich everyone; here was an example of them almost destroying the middle class. Suddenly popular capitalism wasn’t so popular. We know it’s here to stay, but conservatives also understand that it’s got to make the case for itself all over again.

The solution in parts of the American Right has been to attack “cronyism”, that is big, inhuman corporations that dominate the market, treat their workers badly, keep prices high, etc. The conference on Liberty hinted that the alternative is to promote “smallness”: to attack monopolies. They believe that this will restore some of the morality to capitalism, because smaller businesses are more aware of the realities of moral hazard, are nicer to their customers, are less in hoc to the soulless, corporate state that encourages bad behaviour. A return, if you like, to Napoleon’s ideal of Britain as a nation of shopkeepers.