On Monday, January 13, 2003 at 15:47:38 (-0500) Doug Henwood writes: >Bill Lear wrote: > >>Another truckload of crap. We have created princes and when they >>bestow us with a trickle of benefactions, our knees weaken in their >>divine presence. It would be more accurate to say "God damn the rich. >>How much richer we would all be without them". > >"How can I accept a doctrine which sets up as its bibleŠan obsolete >economic textbook which I know to be not only scientifically >erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world? >How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts >the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia >who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry >the seeds of all human advancement? Even if we need a religion how >can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the Red bookshops? It is hard >for an educated, decent, intelligent son of western Europe to find >his ideals here, unless he has first suffered some strange and horrid >process of conversion which has changed all his values."
Apparently simple democracy which seeks to elevate --- rather than "exalt" --- the proletariat was too complicated for dear John Maynard. Why should not every human being be raised to the "quality in life" that Keynes thinks he sees in "the bourgeois and intelligentsia" --- the former responsible for unspeakable crimes and the latter for slanting them as if they were acts of angels? His own evaluation of the social scene is an indication of his own corrupted "quality" of observation, and of the narrowness of his conception of the phrase "human advancement". Bill
