July 05, 2012

Ordinary daily practices create law and progress

Tweets Savitri Era Party @SavitriEraParty Sri Aurobindo doesn't recommend renunciation and is far from saffron. Today's work is the locus of progress and his mantra is Transformation 03:55 AM - 05 Jul 12 via Twitter for iPhone - 1h - @krishnarjun108 His socio-political analysis penetrates into the future, encompasses the whole planet and abhors narrow Hindu ghettoisation  View conversation - 1h - @krishnarjun108 Honest and open debate with Sri Aurobindo as the point of departure will go a long way in sensitizing the present generation  View conversation

In a free society, law isn't simply, or even chiefly, a set of explicit commands handed down from a sovereign (be it a monarch or a democratically elected legislature). A great deal of law - indeed, most law - emerges undesigned from the daily practices of ordinary people interacting with, and sometimes bumping into, each other. People on their own often find ways to minimize these conflicts, and these ways become embedded in people's expectations. These expectations, in turn, become unwritten law - law that good judges find and enforce impartially. 10:33 AM

In Rousseau’s footsteps: David Graeber and the anthropology of unequal society from The Memory Bank by keith - A review of David Graeber Debt: The first 5,000 years (Melville House, New York, 2011, 534 pages)
Graeber and Rousseau both detested the mainstream institutions of the world they live in and devoted their intellectual efforts to building revolutionary alternatives. This means not being satisfied with reporting how the world is, but rather exploring the dialectic linking the actual to the possible. This in turn implies being willing to mix established genres of research and writing and to develop new ones. Both are prolific writers with an accessible prose style aimed at reaching a mass audience. Both achieved unusual fame for an intellectual and their political practice got them into trouble. Both suffered intimidation, neglect and exile for their beliefs. Both attract admiration and loathing in equal measure. Their originality is incontestable, yet each can at times be silly. There is no point in considering their relative significance. The personal parallels that I point to here reinforce my claim that Graeber’s Debt book should be seen as a specific continuation of that “anthropology of unequal society” begun by Rousseau two and a half centuries ago. […]
David Graeber’a anarchist politics inform his economic analysis; and he has always taken an anti-statist and anti-capitalist position, with markets and money usually being subsumed under the concept of capitalism. That is, he sees the future as being based on the opposite of our capitalist states. The core of his politics is “direct action” which he has practised and written about as an ethnographer (Graeber 2009a).
In The Human Economy, we argued that people everywhere rely on a wide range of organizations in their economic lives: markets, nation-states, corporations, cities, voluntary associations, families, virtual networks, informal economies, crime. We should be looking for a more progressive mix of these things. We can’t afford to turn our backs on institutions that have helped humanity make the transition to modern world society. Large-scale bureaucracies co-exist with varieties of popular self-organization and we have to make them work together rather than at cross-purposes, as they often do now.
Graeber also believes, as we have seen, that economic life everywhere is based on a plural combination of moral principles which take on a different complexion when organized by dominant forms. Thus, helping each other as equals is essential to capitalist societies, but capitalism distorts and marginalizes this human propensity. Yet he appears to expect a radical rupture with capitalist states fairly soon and this is reflected in a stages theory of history, with categories to match. 

yesterday and today in Bonn from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman) HERE. Žižek responded in particular to the following statement:
“He never discusses poverty, inequality, war, finance, childcare, intolerance, crime, education, famine, nationalism, medicine, climate change, or the production of goods and services, yet he takes himself to be grappling with the most pressing social issues of our time. He is happy to leave the world to burn while he plays his games of philosophical toy soldiers.”
Žižek began by asking, with delicious sarcasm: “How dare I write a book about Hegel without discussing childcare?”

Cern scientists reporting from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have claimed the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson. The particle has been the subject of a 45-year hunt to explain how matter attains its mass. 

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