Here's a comment responding to Jim Hightower's article about what led to Flint's toxic drinking water that I thought interesting:
"The values of one set of values over another cannot be proven. Normative claims are not amenable to material tests. So what a society holds as valuable is reached by consensus, historically a consensus among elites that is then passed down the ladder not as what it is, but as the Will of God. Protestantism created such a funhouse of conflicting values that you needed Economics to eventually come along and claim that it had a set of values that were “scientific” and therefore de facto obligatory for all rational people to follow (you can also see Absolutism in politics as a response to the ideological confusion that arose from the time of Luther). These values became in its neoclassical form competition, profit maximization, and a certain kind of efficiency (inputs to outputs). For well over a century America was informed by an unstable synthesized highbred of bland, generalized Christian values fused to capitalist economics. Since the old moral system broke down for good in the 1960s, the only set of values with any clout left standing were neoclassical economic values (and, ironically and not among the elites, Evangelical Protestantism). And thus we got neoliberalism as the reigning morality of our elites and our age. Hightower is trying to buck that trend, as is Sanders. But they are faced with an incredible challenges, for they cannot make the same claim of universality and infallibility for their values that the neoliberals make for theirs."
"The values of one set of values over another cannot be proven. Normative claims are not amenable to material tests. So what a society holds as valuable is reached by consensus, historically a consensus among elites that is then passed down the ladder not as what it is, but as the Will of God. Protestantism created such a funhouse of conflicting values that you needed Economics to eventually come along and claim that it had a set of values that were “scientific” and therefore de facto obligatory for all rational people to follow (you can also see Absolutism in politics as a response to the ideological confusion that arose from the time of Luther). These values became in its neoclassical form competition, profit maximization, and a certain kind of efficiency (inputs to outputs). For well over a century America was informed by an unstable synthesized highbred of bland, generalized Christian values fused to capitalist economics. Since the old moral system broke down for good in the 1960s, the only set of values with any clout left standing were neoclassical economic values (and, ironically and not among the elites, Evangelical Protestantism). And thus we got neoliberalism as the reigning morality of our elites and our age. Hightower is trying to buck that trend, as is Sanders. But they are faced with an incredible challenges, for they cannot make the same claim of universality and infallibility for their values that the neoliberals make for theirs."
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