Monday, June 11, 2012

Creepy is as creepy does

We suspect that Professor Deirdre (née Donald) McCloskey regrets the editor's choice of subtitle for her recent TNR article;

Happyism
The creepy new economics of pleasure.
Not that there aren't many valid points there, that bear repeating, such as;
...if seen through history rather than through Hellenistic pastoralism or German Romanticism, the gemeinschaft of olden times looks not so nice. The murder rate in villages in thirteenth-century England was higher than the worst police districts now. Medieval English peasants were in fact mobile geographically, “fragmenting” their lives. The imagined extended family of “traditional” life never existed in England. The Russian mir was not egalitarian, and its ancientness was a figment of the German Romantic imagination. The once-idealized Vietnamese peasants of the ’60s did not live in tranquil, closed corporate communities. The sweet American family of “I Remember Mama” or “Father Knows Best” must have occurred from time to time. But most were more like Long Day’s Journey Into Night or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  

No comments:

Post a Comment