Looking Around

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

• Rainer Maria Rilke

I have never been patient about unanswered questions, and I need to remember this advice as well as the kind of questions that I might live my way into. So I’ve started this blog in the hopes that others may love the same questions — or at least find them interesting.

I’ll begin with one that seems relevant today — with the issue of capitalism and its resulting inequality.

Defenders of this system convey that this inequality is in some way “natural.” Under capitalism, according to the Protestant work ethic, people who end up with more money are closer to eternal salvation. For Social Darwinists they are inherently more “fit.”  For Objectivists they are the “prime movers.”

But our species evolved at least 150,000 years ago, and we had all been foragers until about 10,000 years ago.  Anthropologists have established that in such communities, people live on basically equal terms

But what if the appearance of  inequality’s “naturalness” is just a way for those in power to maintain their hold? Power can certainly establish religions and fund supporting philosophies (the ones given above are the most obvious examples) and even influence the development of language itself.

A book put out by Cambridge University Press, Voices ofModernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality, by Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs, analyzes some examples of this process. It starts by investigating the work of John Locke.  For instance, the authors assert that he

… rendered language a perfect vehicle for constructing and naturalizing social inequality.  Since linguistic forms were (in theory) stripped of all ties to material and social worlds, how individuals spoke seemed to spring from deep within the self, to depend solely on the way they had disciplined their minds, not on the wealth they possessed; language could thus perfectly embody the liberal ideology that purportedly judges individuals on the basis of their own individual actions.

So how natural is this inequality? Just asking…