Economics Day
It may be that day 5 is economics day
Economics
Economics was not alway the important issue it was. The great philosophers of the Western Canon such as Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, etc did not write treatises on economics but more on political systems and social relations. When Marx writes connects class division with economic division he also includes economics within social and political thought.
Today though everyone talks about economics. During covid, the questions are what is going to happen to the ECONOMY, not ‘is the American experiment going to continue’? Although some people ask this question as well.
Economics is now primary. Why is this the case? I am not sure. It does fit in well with our society’s desire to quantify everything. It is easier to quantify and optimize a bank account or a cashflow or a network of economic exchange than a kinship relationship. But there does seem to a convergence of certain structures, of money, political power, and social power.
Money Lenders 1800s V&A museum
The Moneylender and His Wife, by Quinten Messijs(1514)
Technopaganism
Increasingly, money it is not even a physical object like a coin or a bill, but numbers in a bank account. We give these numbers special qualities that allow us to exchange them for goods and services. For some reason I was inspired in this rewrite edition by this blog post from ribbonfarm. There is a great graphic in the middle of the page (ribbonfarm has great graphics in general), outlining the fourfold of SV culture, the vertical tension between development (technology) and preservation (environment) and the horizontal tension between libertarianism (freedom) and progressivism (equality).
The rewrite is about the vertical tension between development and preservation.
Spirituality and economics are connected… and not just the old notion of accounting and sin. There is something that both systems are trying to encapsulate… exchange, not just communication, with non human entities. If we are trying to learn how to exchange with machines, then it does not surprise me that it takes on a pagan or spiritual flavor.
Desire
I want to play with fonts and formatting. This may be difficult since I don’t think substack supports different fonts. I wonder if it will make the newsletter more difficult to read.
XO
Meredith