[Sorry -- I clicked the send instead of the quote button on the
preceding empty post.]
Louis Proyect wrote:
> >Either that or people actually *liked* having their teeth fall out...
> >
> >Brad DeLong
>
> I don't think the discussion is about dental hygeine. It is about the right
> of a Vietnamese in the 60s or a Colombian peasant today to not have napalm
> dropped on them because they believe that the development theories of Walt
> Rostow are inappropriate to their society.
This seems correct -- but it also seems to indicate the irrelevance or
even obscurantist nature of long arguments about whether some other
people are/were happier in Situation A rather than Situation B. The
latter kind of argument seems always to tend either toward some
mechanical assertion of Progress with an uppercase P or towards
some sort of nostalgia for the simple life. We need to understand
prior states of society as deeply and in as much detail as possible --
but really important political arguments should never be made to
hang on a particular description of some such prior state. Empirical
knowledge of the past is always subject to constant change, partly
in response to new or newly emphasized information or in response
to shifted perspectives on available information.
Carrol
